Book Review: Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America, by Peter Biskind (2010)

Paperback cover of Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America, by Peter Biskind, 2010.

Author Peter Biskind.

Actor. Writer. Producer. Director. Sex symbol. Family man. Warren Beatty is all of these things and more, as Peter Biskind shows in his 2010 biography of Beatty, Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America. Biskind examines the full scope of Beatty’s life and career, and Star features interviews with numerous people who know Beatty or have worked with him. Biskind is obviously an admirer of Beatty’s talent, but he doesn’t turn a blind eye to Beatty’s faults.

Star is not an authorized biography of Beatty, but Biskind was able to interview Beatty for the book. In the introduction Biskind spells out his relationship with Beatty, and one of the ground rules that Biskind set out for himself was that he would not dig into Beatty’s personal life during his marriage to Annette Bening. I can understand Biskind setting this rule, as he knew that he needed to keep his access to Beatty. But it weakens the book, because that’s the part of Beatty’s story that’s missing. How is it that Hollywood’s most famous ladies’ man for thirty years suddenly became a steady and stable family man? That’s a very interesting change, and I wish there was more about it in the book. 

Jeremy Pikser, who wrote the screenplay for Bulworth with Beatty, gave his own theory as to how Beatty went from bachelor to family man: “I don’t think there was a great sea change in Warren, other than it was time. He never gave up the idea of having a family, and being a movie star he was able to delay that much longer than a normal person could. If somebody said to me, ‘You can fuck as many beautiful women you want until the age of fifty, and then you can get a beautiful thirty-year-old woman to marry you, and have children with you’- who’s gonna turn that down? Annette was the perfect person, with a strong family background of her own, who was relatively stable, not a nut job, and a good actress.” (p.463)

If you want dirt on Beatty’s serial womanizing before he met Bening, you’ll get plenty on that in Star. Well known for his many high profile relationships, Beatty dated actresses Joan Collins, Natalie Wood, Leslie Caron, Julie Christie, Diane Keaton, and Isabelle Adjani. He also had relationships with singers Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas, and Madonna. 

Perhaps the most ridiculous paragraph in the book is the one in which Biskind attempts to calculate how many women Warren Beatty has slept with. There’s a quote from Beatty in which he supposedly said he couldn’t go to sleep without having sex. Biskind takes Beatty literally, and so he arrives at the figure of 12,775 women. (p.160) Contrary to what Biskind says in the book, that figure does not account for time that Beatty was in a relationship and having sex with the same woman night after night. Biskind simply took 35 years, from 1956 until Beatty met Annette Bening in 1991, and multiplied 35 times 365 days a year. I find it pretty unlikely that Beatty actually slept with a different woman every single night for 35 years. That would tire out anyone. 

Beatty’s reputation as a ladies’ man, and the attending attention his love life has received from the press, has threatened to overshadow his reputation as an actor and a filmmaker. It’s ironic that Beatty’s private life has drawn such attention, because Beatty actually is a very private man, who only gives interviews with great reluctance, and goes to great lengths to avoid actually saying anything in those interviews. But if Beatty didn’t want so much attention to be focused on his private life, he shouldn’t have dated so many famous actresses. 

One of the best stories in the book comes from Dustin Hoffman, who co-starred with Beatty in the ill-fated 1987 comedy Ishtar. Hoffman and Beatty were on location in Morocco, and Hoffman noticed that Beatty’s attention suddenly drifted to a woman who was walking on a sand dune hundreds of yards away. Hoffman asked Beatty, “Theoretically, is there any woman on the planet that you would not fuck? If you had the chance?”

“That’s an interesting question…Is there any woman that I wouldn’t fuck? No, there isn’t.”

“Theoretically, you would fuck any and every woman…”

“Yes.”

“You’re serious.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because…you never know.”

Hoffman said, “I thought that was the most romantic thing I’d ever heard a man say, because he was talking about spirits uniting.” (p.357-8) It’s a great anecdote that goes a long way towards explaining the mindset of Warren Beatty. Why sleep with another woman when you've slept with so many already? Because you never know, the next one might be the perfect one. Why shoot another take after you've shot 25 or 30 takes? Because you never know, the next one might be the perfect one.

Beatty is well-known for being a perfectionist on the set of his movies, a trait that can drive some people nuts. Buck Henry, who co-directed Heaven Can Wait with Beatty, had this to say about working with him: “Except for actors, everybody {who works with him} ends up so bitter that they have a skewed vision of what actually takes place, and you never can quite piece it together.” (p.234-5) Biskind has interviewed many people who have worked with Beatty on various movies, and they offer valuable insights into Beatty’s working habits and his complicated personality. However, as Buck Henry’s quote above shows, their stories need to be taken with a grain of salt. There are a lot of stories from people who have worked with Beatty who basically say, “He’s a perfectionist, he’s annoying,” and eventually it becomes quite repetitive. 

 Beatty’s chronic indecisiveness and his perfectionism have hampered his ability to finish film projects, and Beatty’s filmography is quite small. Beatty has made just 22 movies since his screen debut in 1961. Fortunately for Beatty, among those 22 movies are some truly great ones, like Bonnie and Clyde, Shampoo, Heaven Can Wait, Reds, and Bugsy. Beatty has long been a favorite at the Academy Awards, and he is the only person to be nominated for four Oscars for a single film more than once, for his films Heaven Can Wait and Reds. Beatty won the Oscar Best Director for Reds in 1981. 

Biskind has a lot of material in his book on Beatty’s successes like Heaven Can Wait and Reds, and also a lot on Beatty’s disasters like Ishtar, Love Affair, and 2001’s Town and Country, which remains Beatty’s most recent movie. (Beatty has apparently finished filming his long-gestating movie about Howard Hughes, but there’s no release date yet.) If you’re looking for stories about Warren Beatty being a perfectionist, there are many of those in this book. 

Star is an excellent book, and it will probably stand as the definitive biography of Warren Beatty, unless a future biographer gains Beatty’s full cooperation and access to his personal archives.

Happy 75th Birthday Warren Beatty!

Today is Warren Beatty’s 75^th birthday. I wanted to write a little post about Beatty, since he’s one of my favorite actors. He’s made some truly great movies, beginning with his first starring role in “Splendor in the Grass,” and on to other classics like “Bonnie and Clyde,” “Shampoo,” “Heaven Can Wait,” “Reds,” “Dick Tracy,” “Bugsy,” and “Bulworth.” Of course, there have been some failures in there too. (“Ishtar,” and “Town & Country,” among others.) Beatty quickly decided he wanted to be a producer as well as a leading man, and his first producing credit was for “Bonnie and Clyde.” From that point on, Beatty has usually been heavily involved in all of his film projects. Very seldom is Beatty just an actor for hire. In fact, Beatty is the only person other than Orson Welles to garner Oscar nominations for Acting, Writing, Producing, and Directing for the same film. Welles achieved this distinction for his classic film “Citizen Kane.” Beatty actually accomplished it twice, for both “Heaven Can Wait” and “Reds.” (Beatty won his only Oscar for “Reds” for Best Director.) Beatty gained fame early in his life for both his talent and for his strikingly handsome good looks. But he proved that he was more than just a pretty face with his great performance in “Bonnie and Clyde.” Beatty is excellent at light comedy, and he’s able to inject even the most serious of roles with some comic moments. For example, the scene in “Bugsy” where Beatty tries to simultaneously throw a birthday party for his child while also conducting business with his Mob associates is sublimely ridiculous. “Heaven Can Wait” is probably my favorite Warren Beatty movie, it’s such a funny, sweet film and Beatty gives a great performance in it. It also has James Mason as an angel, which is pretty awesome.

Warren Beatty the man is something of a contradiction. On the one hand, he’s a very private man who doesn’t talk much about his personal life, but on the other hand, he has also led a very public love life by dating so many famous women. The picture above, taken from the New York Times Book Review, shows Beatty with some of the women he’s been linked with over the years. Another contradiction in Beatty’s personal life is that he was known as a Don Juan during his bachelor days-which lasted until he was 55-but for the last 20 years he’s been known as a model of stability as Annette Bening’s husband.

Beatty has a reputation as a perfectionist, and he’s made very few films. Since starring in “Splendor in the Grass” in 1961, Beatty has made just 22 feature films. In this way, he’s the opposite of Clint Eastwood, who just keeps churning out great movies. Beatty is currently rumored to be at work on a movie about Howard Hughes. I really hope the rumor is true, as I would be very interested to see any movie that Beatty makes. And I also hope it’s true so the dreadful “Town & Country” isn’t Beatty’s last movie. He’s so much more talented than that awful movie. Here’s hoping that over the next few years that Warren Beatty adds some more great movies to his impressive filmography.

"Bugsy" & Warren Beatty

I'm back, dear readers! Where was I? Well, nowhere in particular, just busy with schoolwork and not especially motivated to blog. I've been to some good concerts, like Chris Isaak, Rufus Wainwright, and Nick Lowe, and I would think, "I should write about this," but somehow it just didn't happen.

What topic am I about to tackle now? Well, Warren Beatty and his 1991 movie "Bugsy." (Okay, so Beatty didn't direct it, so it technically isn't "his" movie, but he produced and starred in it, and it sounds like he basically takes over every movie he makes, so I think it's fair enough to call it "his"movie.) Beatty is a fascinating man, he's an actor I've been aware of for a long time, ever since the summer of 1990 when 9-year-old me saw Beatty's movie "Dick Tracy." I was swept up in Tracy fever, and I was thrilled that someone made a movie out of the comic strip. I know that I saw it at least twice in the theater. The movie also got a lot of attention in the Twin Cities because Charlie Korsmo, who played the kid that Tracy adopts, was from the Twin Cities. And of course Beatty's romance with Madonna was big stuff at the time too. One thing I remember about watching the movie was seeing a close up of Beatty's hand and thinking, "That hand looks really old." I didn't really think Beatty was old, because I was 9 and had no concept of adult age. All I knew was that Beatty was older than me but younger than my grandmother. But I thought his hands looked old.

In high school I finally saw Beatty's iconic 70's movies "Shampoo" and "Heaven Can Wait." I was impressed. For whatever reason at that time I never saw "Bonnie and Clyde," I'm not sure why. I remember once it was going to be on a double bill at a revival movie theater with "Badlands," but the print of B&C didn't arrive. And by the time I was in college Beatty was off the movie scene, more often seen escorting Annette Bening to awards shows than making movies of his own. I've followed the Beatty biographies that have come out over the last ten years and I've watched him get awards like the Kennedy Center Honors, and the Golden Globes lifetime achievement award. I've often thought, he made so few films, it would be relatively easy to follow his whole career trajectory, and now I'm finally making the time to see those films.

Benjamin "don't call me 'Bugsy'" Siegel has many similarities with other characters Beatty has played. Like Clyde Barrow, Bugsy is a charming psycho. Like Clyde, Bugsy is an astute judge of people, he is able to size them up quickly and get them on his side. (This is also a trait that Beatty would seem to share as well.) Like John McCabe in "McCabe and Mrs. Miller," Siegel becomes obsessed with building a place of entertainment in a remote location. For McCabe, that means building a brothel in the Old West. For Siegel, that means building a casino, the Flamingo, in 1940's Las Vegas. I watched "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" a week or so before "Bugsy," and I was struck by the parallels between the two movies. Both McCabe and Siegel are visionaries, dreamers who most people consider a bit obsessive. They both anger people who have a great deal of power, and both pay for their independence with their lives. Obsessive might also be a good word to describe Warren Beatty. He is obviously a perfectionist when it comes to making movies, which is one explanation for his relatively small filmography. As Beatty once said about filmmaking:

"It is all detail, detail, detail. When...the person you are working with has to go home and return a call to his press agent, and lunch is being served, and the head of the union says, 'Well, you have to stay out there for another 10 minutes because they have to have coffee,' and then the camera breaks down, and there is noise, a plane flying over, and this wasn't the location you wanted...are you going to have the energy to devote to the detail of saying, 'That license plate is the wrong year'? That's where the stamina, the real fight comes in."

Wow. That's focused. Beatty is well-known for shooting numerous takes of scenes. Buck Henry, Beatty's co-director on 1978's "Heaven Can Wait," once said, "Ideally, Warren would never, ever, ever finish anything, because there's always got to be a better way to do something-the shot, the edit, or the scene, or the line, something." One of the hardest parts in the act of creating is knowing when the act is finished, when to step back from it and say, "It's done." Can something always get better the more time you spend on it, the more takes you shoot? Beatty seems to think so. Billy Scharf, an assistant editor on Beatty's "Reds" had this to say about Beatty's methods:

"A lot of people say Warren overshoots. I know that not to be true. Directors who come back with insufficient material are doing a disservice to the opportunity. They get intimidated by stars. Warren does not. In the movie, when Reed wants to leave Russia and go back to America, Zinoviev tells him, 'You will never be at this place, at this time, again.' Warren felt that way when he shot. He believed that that was the time, and that was the place, and he had to exploit the opportunity to the hilt. He had the resources, and he wanted to use them, because he knew he would never get another chance."

All that Scharf says is true, you really only have one chance to capture what you need for a film. You have to do a certain scene on a certain day, and you have to nail it that day, that's your one chance to get that scene done perfectly. (Of course, you can always re-shoot, which of course Beatty is known to do.) But while you're shooting, no matter how many days or how many takes you do, you have to catch that lightning in a bottle, that magic that makes film such an amazing and powerful medium. It's a big responsibility. And if you're directing a big-budget Hollywood production, every shooting day costs a lot of money. Beatty's reputation as a perfectionist actor/director/producer might also carry over into his personal life. Dustin Hoffman related this story from the set of "Ishtar."

Hoffman asked Beatty, "Theoretically, is there any woman on the planet that you would not make love to? If you had the chance?"
Beatty: "That's an interesting question: Is there any woman on the planet that I wouldn't make love to? Any woman at all?" Beatty pondered the question a moment and finally said, "No, there isn't."
Hoffman asked, "You're serious?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because you never know."

And that, in essence, sums up Warren Beatty. Why shoot another take after you've shot 25 or 30 takes? Because you never know, the next one might be the perfect one. Why sleep with another woman when you've slept with so many already? Because you never know, the next one might be the perfect one.

So this post has turned into more of an exploration of Warren Beatty than the movie "Bugsy," but to return to the movie for a moment, there's another clear parallel between Beatty and Siegel. As Siegel builds the Flamingo in Las Vegas, he keeps going over budget and missing deadlines. Similar in many ways to a Warren Beatty movie. Siegel is a controlling perfectionist, just like the man who plays him on screen. Maybe the best scene in the movie is the one where Siegel, in a chef's hat, alternates between keeping his daughter's birthday party going and selling his mobster friends on his vision of Las Vegas as the new American paradise. The scene is funny, and it presents Beatty's charm at its best.

"Bugsy" is also a very significant movie in Beatty's life, as it was on the set of "Bugsy" that he met his wife, Annette Bening, who gives a great performance as Virginia Hill, Bugsy's girlfriend. It's a great movie, and it's definitely one of Beatty's best performances. So, even though I will never be at this time and place again, I'll end this post now. I'm going to step back and say, "It's done."