HE’S STILL GOT IT (AT 80)
Janice Turner talks to Warren Beatty about women, film-making and why he decided against becoming a politician
Janice Turner talks to Warren Beatty about women, film-making and why he decided against becoming a politician
Warren Beatty is running late. He has already been plugging his movie in a Claridge’s hotel suite for five hours, enervating for anyone, let alone an 80-yearold. As the previous journalist finally emerges from his sanctum — pink-cheeked, secret smile, a swish in her stride — I expect my allotted time to be cut short. Instead, the PR says, “Warren likes to talk. You have as long as you want.” This never happens, ever.
But no other actor sees every encounter as a seduction. I don’t mean necessarily in a sexual sense (though, of course, Beatty is now better known for his thousands of conquests — Madonna, Diane Keaton, Isabelle Adjani, Julie Christie, Elle Macpherson, Brigitte Bardot, et al —
than his modest movie output, notably Bonnie
and Clyde, Shampoo, Heaven Can Wait and Reds). I mean in how he applies his full armoury — charm, looks, fame, intelligence, powers of manipulation — to get precisely want he wants, however long it takes.
“We must stop meeting like this,” he says, grasping my hand firmly for a long time. He is still the big, lean Wasp with the high-school football star frame, stiff-limbed, a little deaf but surgically unenhanced (I’d wager) in a leather jacket, turtleneck and jeans.
We talk for three hours in the end. Half on the record, Beatty drifting towards the tramlines of familiar anecdotes or, particularly on politics, into monosyllables with wild-eyed looks and horselike expulsions of air that suggest, “I have lots to say, but not on tape.” Half off the record, when, maddeningly, he tells stories involving talent agent “Swifty” Lazar, Clifford Odets, Jean Renoir, Jane Russell, Henry Kissinger (with impersonation), JFK, and gives an insider’s dissection of the US political scene.
The nakedness of his modus operandi doesn’t make it less effective. There are hints of further access to his life, plus juicier stories, once I’ve proved I can be trusted. Rare among A-listers (especially Hollywood actors), Beatty asks questions back. And, uniquely, he has researched me (or rather, his assistant has presented him with a dossier). It is odd to be praised for a column you wrote about Brexit by the man who won an Oscar for Reds. But Beatty knows what he’s doing. “Never underestimate the narcissism of a writer,” he says later. “It exceeds fashion models, actors.” The reason for this charm war is Rules Don’t
Apply, Beatty’s first film for 15 years. It concerns billionaire aviator and industrialist Howard Hughes (played by Beatty) in his reclusive and paranoid dotage, as seen through the prism of two puritanical young rubes — Marla (Lily Collins), a starlet contracted to Hughes’ RKO studios, and Frank (Alden Ehrenreich), her driver — who arrive in Hollywood in 1958, the same year as Beatty himself.
He’s been talking about making a Hughes movie since 1973. Peter Biskind, in his 2010 biography Star, noted Beatty wanted it to be his crowning work, his Birth of a Nation, encapsulating America’s obsessions with money, power and fame. Biskind says he’d tell friends Hughes had cracked the “three F’s” — film-making, flying and f***ing.
During their short affair, Madonna bought Beatty a portrait of a World War I flying ace, a lone adventurer like Hughes, because it reminded her of him.
His great friend Jack Nicholson once remarked “all movies are either literally or symbolically autobiographical”. And especially since Beatty makes so few — and generally directs, writes and stars in them — it is impossible not see parallels. His interest in Hughes began when romancing an actress at the Beverly Hills Hotel and discovering Hughes always booked eight suites and five bungalows so no one could find him or know who he was sleeping with. It is easy to imagine Beatty, lush-haired, gorgeous and legendarily virile then, amused and awed by this ultimate sexual player.
“The unnecessary mystery that he wanted to create about himself is often done by people in movies to attract attention to themselves,” says Beatty. “It’s a form of narcissism. I sometimes thought that Howard Hughes, deep down, maybe wanted to be a movie actor.”
But equally, does he not share Hughes’ desire for secrecy? In the documentary Madonna: Truth
or Dare, Beatty remarked wryly that she didn’t want to live a second of her life off-camera. Whereas he is happy to be invisible for years at a time.
“I don’t think I’m secret,” he says. “I’m not hiding. Hughes was hiding.” But you have an ambivalent relationship with fame? “I don’t dislike being famous. There’s something like 16 books written about me. I’ve never read one. I’ve read maybe 10 pages of a number of them but abandoned it as a masochistic exercise. But I like being known.”
Yet unlike most stars, he’s not curated his fame, never felt paranoid when his face wasn’t on a billboard. During the long gestation periods of his own movies, he very rarely acts in other people’s, despite offers from Paul Thomas Anderson, Ron Howard and Oliver Stone. Did you never think it might be fun, say, to do a movie with Jack Nicholson? “But it’s just as much fun to go over to Jack’s house. No, excuse me, it is much more fun. There is life itself. So to be escaping life and into the life of a movie continually, I think that is kind of sad.” Making a movie is like vomiting, he says: you never do it voluntarily, only when it is essential, to make you feel better.
“I was always something of a control freak,” he says, an epic understatement. Even as a 20-something starlet, he was always offering suggestions on lighting, costume, script. Although
Shampoo was nominally directed by Hal Ashby, it was Beatty running the set. In his best movies,
Heaven Can Wait and Reds, he was writer, director, producer and star. Indeed, he is the only person ever to get four Oscar nominations for a single film, twice. But he is also famous for wearying his cast with endless, pointless takes, busting budgets (as notoriously on the mega-turkey
Ishtar) and picking a script to death, as with his last film, the 2001 sex comedy flop Town & Country.
BY THE time we meet, Rules Don’t Apply has been badly reviewed in the US as a rambling vanity project and Beatty’s uneasy sex scene voted “most egregious age difference between the leading man and love interest” by the Alliance of Women Film Journalists. Now, confusingly, Beatty says this is not a Howard Hughes film at all — “He is a kind of relic of the past” — but is instead about two young people “who come to Hollywood when feminism is emerging. There’s still this sexual puritanism, which is the obstacle to the relationship. You know the poor guy ejaculates [Frank stains his trousers after heavy petting].” Both Frank and Marla are churchgoers from conservative states, like Beatty, a Baptist from Virginia. The prevailing culture of his childhood, although not of his independent-minded teacher parents, was hugely devout and he believed, like Frank, that if you had sex with a girl you were basically married.
So did he feel guilty about his sexual conquests? “Let me put it this way: it’s none of your business.” He chuckles quietly.
Oh, come on! “I did feel that society felt guilty about it.”
But you didn’t? “I was a member of society, a citizen.”
Making a movie is like vomiting. You never do it voluntarily, only when it is essential, to make you feel better. Warren Beatty