Rex Reed, the master of the celebrity profile, was born in 1938 in Fort Worth, Texas, and spent much of his childhood in the South, moving from one town to another because of his father’s job as an oil company supervisor. He created his first of many firestorms when he wrote a blistering editorial about racism for the campus newspaper at Louisiana State University. As a senior he won a short story contest judged by Eudora Welty who urged him to become a writer.
According to Reed, he has been “a jazz singer, a performer on a weekly Louisiana TV show…a pancake cook…an actor in the summer stock company in the Anaconda Copper Mine in Butte, Montana, and the editor of a college literary magazine started by Robert Penn Warren.”
While still in his twenties Reed got a coveted position as film critic and columnist for The New York Observer, a job he has held for decades. Until the success of the Ebert & Siskel television programs, Reed was without question the most famous American film critic, familiar to anyone who watched “The Tonight Show” or saw his campy performances as a panelist on “The Gong Show.” His featured role in the film version of Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckenridge made almost as many headlines as his denunciations of the film after its release.
A second career as a master of the celebrity profile began in 1965 after he submitted an interview with Buster Keaton to The New York Times. In an irony not lost on his readers, it was Keaton’s final interview and his last words to Reed: “Hell, the way I feel, I just might live forever.” Thus became Reed’s signature as a literary profilist: finding the indelible, telling detail and letting the subject paint his or her own portrait, whether they were aware of what the end result would be or not. Writer Tom Wolfe has said about Reed: “Rex Reed…raised the celebrity interview to a new level through his frankness and his eye for social detail. He has also been a master at capturing a story line in the interview situation itself…Reed is excellent at recording and using dialogue.”
Along with Truman Capote, Kenneth Tynan, Tom Wolfe, and Harry Crews, Rex Reed achieved a literary reputation for a genre, the celebrity profile, once relegated to gossip journalists who as often as not wrote studio-approved fantasies of the lives of the stars.
In his first collection of profiles, Do You Sleep In the Nude?, Reed caught the comet tails of rising stars just tasting the fruits of superstardom, such as Barbra Streisand as she prepared for her pivotal television special Color Me Barbra and an elusive will-o’-the-wisp known as Warren Beatty as he was finishing Bonnie and Clyde. Reed also was brilliant at capturing the stars whose careers had eclipsed—for instance, a classic and much-anthologized piece on Ava Gardner. On occasion when the mood suited him, Reed could stray beyond Hollywood and the entertainment arts as he did with his stunning and revelatory up-close look at Lester Maddox, the Bible-verse-spewing segregationist governor of Georgia.
Devault-Graves Digital Editions has reissued Rex Reed’s quartet of best-selling profile anthologies in the ebook format: Do You Sleep In the Nude?, Conversations in the Raw, Valentines & Vitriol, and People Are Crazy Here. Virtually anyone who was anyone during the 1960s, ’70s, and early ’80s in the movie and theater world is captured for the ages in these books. When asked why he no longer writes celebrity profiles, Mr. Reed answered simply: “The movie stars of today are no longer interesting.”
But when they were, Rex Reed was there to file them away for history. It is to the reader’s pleasure to rediscover them.
OTHER DEVAULT-GRAVES DIGITAL EDITIONS
EBOOKS YOU MIGHT ENJOY
Big Sur by Jack Kerouac
Tristessa by Jack Kerouac
Maggie Cassidy by Jack Kerouac
Conversations in the Raw by Rex Reed
People Are Crazy Here by Rex Reed
Valentines & Vitriol by Rex Reed
Weegee: The Autobiography
Yiddish for Goyim: The Power Shmoozer’s
Guide to Hollywood by Noe Gold
Crossroads: The Life and Afterlife of Blues
Legend Robert Johnson by Tom Graves
For more information on Devault-Graves Digital Editions
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www.devault-gravesagency.com.
IF THERE IS ANYTHING MORE EXCRUCIATING than sitting through a Michelangelo Antonioni film, it’s sitting through a Michelangelo Antonioni interview. Like a scene from one of his movies, the experience is a symphony of tedium. The setting is a room at the Regency, the color design is drab: beige ceiling, beige walls, beige floor, beige suit, beige trousers, beige face. The one splash of color is Antonioni’s bright purple tie, which he occasionally fingers with no particular fondness. An interpreter from the Italian Cultural Institute who never takes off her beige raincoat sits in profile in an uncomfortable-looking beige chair facing him, like Whistler’s Mother. People speak, but do not communicate. They talk, but never touch.
There is no beginning to the interview, just as there is no real beginning to an Antonioni film. It is 10:30 a.m., but he has been up since six and seems irritated that the press could not start arriving then. He speaks when he feels like it, without animation, not always in response to a question. He is tall and dignified, like the gray-templed counts in Italian vampire movies, with a kind of screening- room pallor only the very rich or very famous can get away with without being called unhealthy. He insists he is neither rich nor famous, but “very unhealthy.” Everything about him twitches. His lips twitch, his eyes blink, his head ticks. He looks at his watch occasionally and yawns a great deal. Sometimes he makes a sudden undefinable noise, like a yelp. As one observer points out, it is like being in the same room with an old dog that is having a bad dream.
“I hate my films, and I do not wish to talk about them,” he begins, then proceeds to talk about them anyway. “Since I just finished Blow-Up it is still too early to tell about that one. All of the other films I did with my stomach, this one I did with my brain.”
Why is Blow-Up different from previous Antonioni films?
“Because before I am questioning the relationships between men and men and this one is about the relation between men and reality.”
Does this indicate a new trend?
He fingers his cigarette. There are no treetops in the room to focus on, so he angles in for a close-up on the ashtray. Then he gazes out of the window behind the interpreter. Everyone waits breathlessly for the answer. A few minutes pass. “Wait until the next film and see.”
Why were you attracted to the idea of making a film in English?
“I wasn’t.” He yawns. The interpreter smiles. It beats a hard day behind the desk at the Italian Cultural Institute.
Why did you pick London?
“Simple. Vitti was there making Modesty Blaise and I go there to see her often. She suffered very much making that film. You cannot make a film about a myth and then destroy the myth. I hated that film. Joseph Losey makes better films with men than with women. I think he hates women. Me, I love them. They are the most important invention in the world for me.”
American women included?
He thinks. Close-up of Antonioni thinking. “I don’t know any.”
If you like women so much, why is there so little happiness in your films? So little love?
His lips twitch nervously and he cracks his knuckles. A look of physical pain brushes across his face like a sudden wind. “Because …” Another long pause between the “because” and the rest of it, but it finally comes. “Because I don’t think there is any love in the world. Nobody is in love. This is good, because there is less jealousy that way. Also, there is no feeling for family. No religion. Most people of the new generation are dreamers. LSD and mescaline are better for them than love. This is especially true in London. Another reason why I make Blow-Up there.”
Is this why your films never have conventionally happy endings?
A startled look. “All of them have happy endings. The people never come together, but they like it that way.” Oh.
It is rumored that the Italians do not appreciate your films as foreigners do. Will you continue to base your work in Rome?
“I hate Rome.”
Do you plan to make more films in London, then?
“No. I nearly went crazy there.”
Will you continue to work in color?
“Yes, I like the color in Blow-Up, although I nearly had a nervous breakdown without my own art directors and my own cameramen. Only about seventy percent of it worked out. The English thought me mad, but I thought them mad, with all their unions and rules. I wanted the photographer to see things in a colorful way. Now everyone talks of the wonderful grass and the wonderful trees but I painted the grass with green paint and I painted the streets and the buildings with white paint. I even painted the tree trunks. Everything. Since this is not a novel, but a short story, I wanted a subdued unity of tone. I got effects you cannot get in laboratories. Also, the light in London makes everything look metallic and white so the colors are filtered through the air the way the human eye sees them.”
Would you like to direct for the theater?
“I hate the theater.”
You are reported to treat your actors roughly, at times even refusing to let them read the script. How important are the actors to your films?
The question produces a neuralgic effect better left undescribed. “Actors are only a small element. Not very important. I could use amateurs and get the same results. I only use professionals to get certain shadings. My films are visual. This is the language of film. I speak through cameras, not actors.”
Besides Vitti, do you like any of the actors you’ve worked with?
“Some.”
Jeanne Moreau?
“Interesting woman.”
Richard Harris?
A castor-oil grimace.
Mastroianni?
A shrug.
Vanessa Redgrave?
“Wonderful!”
Many people wonder why such well-known actors as Vanessa Redgrave and Sarah Miles chose to appear in such tiny roles in Blow-Up. Is it because they desired the experience of working with you?
“Who knows?”
Do you think most actors are really unaware of whether a scene is working or not?
“I don’t want actors to direct themselves. I am their judge. Their opinions are too limited for me. Mine is the only complete vision. American actors think too much. Actors should not think. The worst actor I ever worked with and the worst trouble I had with an actor was with Steve Cochran in Il Grido. The only other American I ever worked with was Betsy Blair. She was no trouble. Actors are like cows, you have to lead them through the fence.”
Do you think American actors are overpaid? Elizabeth Taylor now gets one million dollars per film.
“Ridiculous. No actor is worth so much. Zefferelli now directs her. I guess he needs the money. This, too, is ridiculous. He is not as well known as I, and he should not make as much money as I. Still, I would never direct a film as a showcase for an actress who was making more money than me. That is insulting.”
Were there any films in your youth which enhanced your desire to become a filmmaker?
“Eisenstein.”
Any American films?
“No.”
What films have you admired recently?
“Only Pierrot le Fou and 8 1/2. No American films. I go today to see Andy Warhol’s film. I am told we make movies alike. I also think Scorpio Rising is lovely.”
Would you consider working in Hollywood?
“If I control completely everything from the script to the lipstick on the actresses. If not, no. Two years ago I almost made a western here but I learned the script had already been prepared, and the actors already hired, so I lost interest. I don’t care about money. I have no money. I own an Alfa Romeo and a few paintings. Those are the only things I own.”
Do you read the critics?
“Never. They are idiots. What upsets me most is that when they praise and flatter me it is always for the wrong reasons. In Italy, they are bribed by the producers, who can easily corrupt them. Give them some money, they will like anything. Also, they write so much about me, I forget what they say. I pay no attention. I don’t try for anything. There is no such thing as an Antonioni camera angle. If there is any one thing I do often it is to focus on inanimate objects instead of people to reduce things to an abstraction and demonstrate the lack of feeling in people. Other than that, you don’t need critics to tell you how to understand my films.”
What do you think of film festivals?
“I hate them. If you win, it’s o.k. If you lose, disaster. I also hate premieres. I despised the New York premiere of Blow-Up. The audience was insulting. Also, they did not pay to get in.”
What will your next film be about?
“It will be very violent. I cannot make a horror film, because nothing scares me. I cannot make a comedy, because nothing amuses me except sex. I mostly make films about unhappiness.”
Are you unhappy?
The question is followed by about two minutes of silent inertia. Then he gets up and leaves the room. When he returns, his eyes blink and his hands shake. “Happiness is complex and only an occasional thing. I am better since I get my marriage annulled.”
Isn’t that difficult to get in Italy?
“Yes, but it is also difficult to do films in Italy. I do both. I am Antonioni.”
The question of the annulment left only one more subject to be—hopefully—explored. In America, we have seen many photos of the Rome apartment you share with Monica Vitti. Does your new marital freedom indicate a future plan to make her the next Mrs. Antonioni?
He pauses, makes a stuttering sound, closes his eyes, and for a moment it’s an even guess as to whether he’ll ever speak again. “Come to Rome and find out,” he grins wryly.
There is no ending. He blows a smoke ring. The interviewer blows a smoke ring. And somewhere, up near the beige ceiling, the smoke rings almost meet. Long, lingering, interminable fade-out of the two smoke rings almost touching, then dissolving into nothingness. That is how you know an Antonioni interview—like an Antonioni film—is over.
ONE THING ABOUT BARBRA STREISAND: to know her is not necessarily to love her.
Barbra is always late. She hates being interviewed, distrusts all photographers, and is as nervous about publicity as she is about her own performances. Reporters covering her second CBS-TV special, Color Me Barbra, even had running bets on just how late she would be for each appointment. The answer, from this corner: very.
The damp, gray hotel room in Philadelphia is charged with tension. The date was for one o’clock; it is nearly three. Somewhere, in a suite high above, Barbra is pasting sequins on her eyes. She wanted Pablo of Elizabeth Arden, but he takes five hours. Barbra hates to sit still that long. In the corner, a kindly CBS press agent pours Scotch from a bottle sent up by room service. People come and go, telephones ring mysteriously. Everyone smiles nervously. The taping is scheduled to begin at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in two hours. “Barbra is very unpredictable; to tape songs for the show, we rented a studio from seven to ten last night; I got home at 4 a.m.,” says the press agent wearily.
People drop by to give opinions. “She’s changed,” says her personal publicity girl, a pretty blonde with pierced ears dressed in a green-chenille (like the bedspreads) blouse, pants, and paratrooper boots. “She used to sing her guts out; at the end of ‘Happy Days’ she sounded like she was screaming. She’d never do that now. When she was in I Can Get It for You Wholesale she used to beg the press agent to get her interviews so she could get a free meal. Reporters used to stare in horror at the table piling up with hors d’oeuvres, three appetizers, two soups, celery tonic, tomato juice, a main course, and four selections from the dessert tray. Now everything’s going so smoothly she only worries about details, refinements. She knew her work so well in Funny Girl she never worried about the singing, but about the dust on the plastic flowers or why the blue light failed on Cue eighty-two. Closing night she was still giving notes to the orchestra on what they were doing wrong.”
Word comes, from on high, that the superstar is ready for her audience. Three and a half hours late, she plods into the room, plotzes into a chair with her legs spread out, tears open a basket of fruit, bites into a green banana, and says, “Okay, ya got twenty minutes, whaddya wanna know?”
What’s the new show like? “Like the old one. They’re like book ends. The first one was great, ya know? So this one’s gonna be close as it can be. Whadda I know from TV? I hire the best people in the business, then I let them do everything for me. I don’t take chances. I’m payin’ the bill, it’s my problem, right? I coulda got Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin to clown around just like everybody else does on their specials, but who needs it? I got complete creative control here, so I do it my way, right?”
How will the show differ from last year? “Instead of Bergdorf’s, the first part’s in a museum,” she says, munching on a bunch of grapes. “I move around in front of the paintings and sometimes I turn into the paintings, get it? The costumes are mostly designed by me, borrowed, rented, or remade from my old hock-shop wardrobes. The second part’s in a circus, and I sing to all the animals. The last part’s the concert. Just like last year. Different songs, same feeling.”
Eight people have moved into the room. All of them check their watches and make her very nervous. Some of them answer her questions for her. “Barbra does not like the image that comes with being a glamorous star,” volunteers one. “She doesn’t like parties; she’s afraid people ask her because she’s a celebrity, not because they like her.”
“Yeah. Like whatchmacallit—”
“Joshua Logan.”
“Yeah him. He threw this party for Princess Margaret, ya know? Elliott even wore a tuxedo. We were so miserable we cut out for a Ninth Avenue delicatessen, my favorite restaurant, where they still got great greasy french fries and the best rice puddin’ in town. No raisins, ya know what I mean?
“Listen, all my life I wanted to be famous. I knew from nothing about music. I never had a Victrola till I was eighteen. I used to buy clothes in thrift shops. Now I don’t go there no more ’cause people bother me. Besides, they’ve gone up. I always dreamed of a penthouse, right? So now I’m a big star I got one and it’s not much fun. I used to dream about terraces, now I gotta spend five hundred dollars just to convert mine from summer to winter. Let me tell you, it’s just as dirty with soot up there on the twenty-second floor as it is down there on the bottom.”
At 5 p.m. the museum closes and the cameras are ready. An armada of armed guards line the doors with name tags for everyone official. Disgruntled reporters and unhappy photographers line up in a Renaissance hallway for clearance. “Barbra gets very upset if anyone who isn’t official watches her,” says a cameraman. Outside, the Philly branch of her fan club peers through the beaded glass windows carrying a sign that reads, “Welcome Barb.” “Barbra has a fan club in prison,” offers the pretty press agent.
At 7:30, Barbra emerges looking like a banana-split nightmare in a floor-length, op-art gown of hand-sewn sequins in twenty colors and six-inch triangle earrings with bolts of lightning through them like Superman emblems. Mondrian eyes sharpened with mascara and boyish hairdo slicked back behind her ears, she looks more like a male hairdresser than a girl, but she is ready for the first number. A twenty-five-man production crew, a registered nurse, her personal staff, and a few favored members of the press watch as bongo drums blare from portable speakers and Barbra shimmies past walls filled with Cezanne watercolors and Matisse still-lifes shaking on their brackets. The number is repeated a dozen times before choreographer Joe Layton bounces through in white tennis shoes and white turtleneck sweater crying, “It’s awful. It needs work.”
Rest time. Barbra sits in a deck chair in front of the color receiver and eats salted nuts and Life Savers from a rumpled paper bag. There is no camaraderie, no teddy-bear playfulness with her crew, no exchanges of bon mots or even dirty jokes common to most sound stages. She speaks only when spoken to, trusts only those close to her, and ignores everyone else. Mostly she just eats and stares at the gorillas peering out from a Rousseau jungle on the wall. When the nuts are gone, she brings out a half-eaten bag of potato chips. A maid occasionally fortifies her with Kleenex to wipe her hands. A guard stops her from leaning against Renoir’s “The Bather.” “Cheez,” she retorts, “just like New York. Pardon me for breathin’.”
By 9:30 the test pattern is adjusted and the color cameras are ready for the fourth tape of the first song. A cameraman crushes out a forbidden cigarette on a valuable piece of a hundred-year-old Romanian oak while a guard isn’t looking. “Let’s go, Barb!” “I gotta get up?” cries the star. Hard looks from Joe Layton. Barbra gets up, pulling up her panties through her skirt.
“She’s no dumb broad,” says a CBS official. “She heads two corporations—one packages her specials, pays for everything, then the profit she makes is the difference between her expenses and what CBS pays her. This includes her salary. It’s a one-woman show, so it would be very weird if she was not the boss.”
By 11:15 she comes out in a floor-length black-satin maid’s outfit with white over-apron, which she designed herself. Elliott Gould, her husband, arrives to hold her hand, wearing an official label so the guards will let him in. Barbra runs past twelve pillars and up thirty-five stone stairs singing “Yesterdays.” Then she collapses in a corner eating hot pastrami, sour green tomatoes, kosher pickles, and stuffed derma from paper containers. “My gums hurt,” she cries, sticking her fingers into her mouth. The crew throws color cables over the balcony of the museum’s Great Hall, missing by inches a valuable Alexander Calder mobile and a priceless seventeenth-century Flemish tapestry. A museum official screams. Two guards rush forward. Barbra bites into a fish stick and adjusts her false eyelashes.
Barbra’s manager, Marty Erlichman, comes over. Marty is a friendly, bearlike fellow who discovered her in the kitchen of the Bon Soir fresh out of Erasmus High School, a skinny, big-nosed girl with pimples who had a ninety-three average and a medal in Spanish. When he met Barbra he was a small-time talent agent working out of phone booths on Broadway. Now he heads his own company. “For nine months I tried to get her a job. Every record company in the business turned her down. ‘Change the clothes, change the nose, stop singing the cockamamy songs.’ Now it’ll start all over when she hits Hollywood to make Funny Girl. They’ll want to make her into Doris Day. But she sells the public Barbra, nothing else. She’s never been bastardized or exploited. The main thing she’s gotta learn is not to trust too much. The public is very fickle. Ten million people love you when you’re an underdog on the way up, but nine and a half million of them hate you when you hit the top.”
At 2 a.m. a group of teen-agers appeared at the museum with a kettle of hot chicken soup. “Just give it to her,” they yell through locked doors. “Could she just wave?” Barbra is busily chewing sour green-apple gum (her current favorite) in a lavender-and-silver Marie Antoinette costume with lavender wig and purple ostrich plumes. “Get rid of the creeps. These jerks follow me everywhere. Sometimes they get my autograph three or four times in one night. Whatta ya think they do with all them autographs?”
The action continues through the next day, with no sleep. Barbra playing a guillotine scene in the French Revolution. Barbra doing “something based on Nefertiti” in the Egyptian Room. Electricians and reporters curl up on tabletops and behind potted palms, catnapping. “If the star gives up, everybody gives up, I gotta keep smilin’,” says Barbra, swallowing an aspirin.
Back in New York, part two was achieved through sheer terror. Barbra danced out onto a pomegranate-and-pistachio-colored three-ring-circus set. A baby elephant named Champagne roared so loud at the sight that a baby llama nearby did a somersault. Barbra sang “Funny Face” in an orange ringmaster’s costume. The horse reared. The penguins got sick under the hot lights and had to be carted off to a refrigerated area behind the set. The leopard refused to pose. Barbra fed grapes to the baboon, which lunged at her. Barbra tripped and forgot her words. “Print it,” yelled Joe Layton, “if nothing else we got the tiger’s face in.”
To make matters worse, the show was half-live, half-prerecorded. Barbra had to worry not only about being trampled to death, but when to come in on cue. Contempt hung in the air like moss. The show was behind schedule and the overtime was costing the star money. Four electricians chased a pig across the set and damaged part of the backdrop. The lion broke out of its cage and had to be replaced. As uncontrollable as their temperaments were the animals’ nature habits, for which several takes were loused up by the broom-and-shovel detail. Barbra hated the animals and the animals were frightened to death of her. The only friendly moment came when she sang to an anteater named Izzy. “He must be Jewish,” she said, as they touched noses.
More than thirty hours were spent on the circus segment, which runs only a few minutes on screen. Barbra’s temper exploded. “Too many people not connected with the show. Too many people staring at me.” The press was removed to the control room.
By week’s end, there was nothing left but the concert. She came out in a pale creamy gown with pearl-drop earrings and pale-mauve lipstick, standing on a white spiral staircase under blue-turning-lavender lights, switching on the charm to the teased hair girls, the screaming teen-age fans—clowning, joking, kvetching with her little dog Sadie (“a hooked rug that barks”). For the first time in the week of temper tantrums, torment, uncertainty, and bleary-eyed exhaustion, she turned on her juices, and the talent showed. The Brooklyn accent was gone, the magic shone through. Barbra the terrible—rude, arrogant, anything but a lady—was Barbra the public figure—charming, almost appealing.
By midnight, 400 hours of hard work were over. The grips packed up, the set was struck. “Great show! She’ll make millions on the reruns,” said a control-room engineer. “Give me Julie Andrews any day,” said an electrician, wiping his forehead. In her dressing room the star of the show was told she could finally go home to bed and, for the first time that week, Barbra Streisand was on time.
I WAS STANDING ON THE U.C.L.A. CAMPUS, under a sailboat sky, not far from a psychedelicatessen which sells everything from avocado hand cream to Ravi Shankar records, asking college students what they thought of Warren Beatty. Nearby a stunning girl in a leopard-skin balaclava helmet was intensely involved in watching the ritual of a campus maintenance man scrubbing the side of a building on which someone had written JESUS WASN’T DRAFTED with green paint. “What do you think of Warren Beatty?” I asked. “Who’s that? I never heard of him,” she said crisply and walked away so fast her spray net crackled in the sunlight.
Next, came a young man with a large button on his car coat proclaiming ORGASMS FOR SALE OR TRADE. “Oh, yeah. Isn’t he the one who used to run around with Natalie Wood? Naw, naw, I never saw any of his movies, but I sure wouldn’t mind getting together with Natalie Wood …”
And so on. “That slug,” said an Indian girl carrying a small telescope. “Warren Beatty! G’wan, you’re putting me on,” said a geology student with a slide rule hanging from his belt. “What are you—some nut from Candid Camera?” On the fifth try, a Tuesday Weld-type in a Rudi Gernreich mini-coat scratched the knee of her Bonnie Doon panty stockings, applied a fresh coat of pomegranate lipstick, and replied: “Sure, isn’t he the one—let’s see—who got arrested not long ago for beating his dog?” “That was Tab Hunter.” “Well, I mean, same difference.”
And that’s what happens when you ask the public. Back in New York, I had skipped the public and asked Those Who Know, and from them I heard that Warren was a draft-dodger, a Communist, that he had two illegitimate children living in London, that he had been arrested three times by the Los Angeles vice squad, that he was a sadist who loved to invite ten girls to his hotel room at one time and not show up, that he wore black leather pants and carried a whip when he was not working, and that “at least fifty women were seduced by him,” as one man swore. Above all I learned that Those Who Know knew everything but the truth.
The Truth—as I came to find out—is that nobody knows very much at all about Warren Beatty, including Warren himself. Other than the fact that he had never appeared able to make complete sentences, his old interviews—during the period when he was the hottest thing since Dr. Pepper—turned up nothing.
How would you describe yourself, Warren?
“Sloppy. That’s how I’d describe myself. Sloppy.”
What do you look for in a role?
“For instance, if I started working … And some of the questions I don’t have answers to … Something hits me, it hits me … I read something and I say, Oh I know that moment. You never know what it is you really look for … it’s like … but … you a … dum … generally speaking (he spits something out of his mouth) … I would think …”
LIKE THAT. Another look at his films—eight of them in seven years—proved that he was not untalented. Three, in fact—Splendor in the Grass, All Fall Down and Mickey One—showed that he just might be one of the few young actors in films who have more on the ball than a forty-six-inch chest. Still, Warren’s relatively brief fling at trampling out the vintage where all those Hollywood grapes of wrath are stored has earned him a reputation for being the most enfant of the enfants terribles since Baby LeRoy hit W.C. Fields over the head with a bottle. The women in his life—perhaps the only people to know him well—refuse to talk. Once, in a New Orleans hotel room, I asked Natalie Wood about him and she walked out of the room. His directors? Except for Arthur Penn, no director has worked with him twice.
And yet … and yet. Warren’s every waking hour is spent trying to convince people he is a responsible guy. His major interest in life today is to change that old image. He has just produced a film in Texas called Bonnie and Clyde, about Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, who conducted a crime spree through the Southwest in the Thirties. Warren financed the project, with aid from Warner Brothers, and press releases out of Hollywood these days proclaim “Warren’s grown up.”
“Denise Minnelli threw a party at the Bistro last month and Warren didn’t even go! He’s really changed!” That, from a friend. And from Warren: “Now that I am in my late twenties, I find there are other things in life than just having a ball.”
Estelle Parsons, an actress in Bonnie and Clyde, says, “He had a great respect for the other actors, he ran everything himself, made all the decisions, contributed very important comments, and we all got paid on time. It’s a game out there in Hollywood. The people who make the crazy demands and do the bizarre things are the ones who don’t get kicked around. Maybe that’s what Warren had to do in the beginning to get ahead.” Diana Michaelis, who works for V.I.S.T.A.—a volunteer arm of the War Against Poverty—phoned from Washington to tell me she thinks so much of Warren she has asked him to make a recruiting pitch to the young people of America to stir up interest in national welfare. “He went out and talked to our volunteers on the edge of the Watts area and we found him to be a very genuine person sensitive to the problems of the times. Besides, in America people are much more likely to listen to a celebrity.”
At the King Cole Bar I talked to Robert Benton and David Newman, two men good and true, who wrote the script for Bonnie and Clyde. “You won’t get Warren’s story in an interview. It’s all movement, motion, girls. He drives up and down the Sunset Strip with one hand on the wheel, waving at everybody. He’s very now, with his own vocabulary, his own way of doing things. He was a terrific producer. We went into a meeting at Warner’s and Warren said, ‘This is what they’re gonna ask, this is what we’re gonna say,’ and he was right. He’s a great wheeler-dealer. Get him in a car. One time we were looking over locations in some little town in Texas—they all look alike—and some girl spotted him. ‘Hey, mister, you Warren Beatty?’ she said, backing up four times in an old Buick. Warren did ten minutes of shtick.”
Then they described a scene, typical of the kind of thing that happens every day to Warren the Hipster:
They are stopped for a red light. Warren is hanging out of the window. “Hey, man,” says a man in the next car.
“Hey, man,” says Warren.
“What’s happenin’?”
“Nothin’ much happenin’.”
“Hey, my place, man. Eight o’clock. A freaky scene.”
“What kinda freaky scene?”
“A few girls, man. Real freaky.
“Well, it wouldn’t be much fun without at least eight girls, man.”
“Oh. Okay. Later, man.”
“Later.”
“Who was that character,” asks Newman.
“I never saw him before in my life,” says Warren, giggling and stepping on the gas.
The best evaluation came from a famous actress who appeared with Warren in a film. Over cheeseburgers at The Ginger Man she whispered confidentially: “Warren is really two people. You see him on the screen and that’s one thing. He’s no actor and never has been. His working habits are unorthodox and difficult to understand, but that’s mainly because he doesn’t know what he’s doing. He has always gotten by on the screen by faking it. It’s almost as though the moon has to be in just the right quarter and the winds have to blow just the right number of miles per hour from the East before he can even function. The other side of Warren is more interesting. He can be youthful, charming, debonair. Every eye at the table is on him. He is musical—plays wonderful piano—and he’s very interesting when he isn’t hung up acting. But of course this is the side he has never shown to any writer to my knowledge. He is always too busy playing roles. That seems to be necessary to his own kind of survival. So I think it would be impossible to write about him, because you will never see what he’s really like. You will only see all the roles he wants you to see him play.”
THE HOLLYWOOD SUN rose like a big pink seedless grapefruit over the date palm trees out by the Beverly Wilshire pool. I was up early, waiting for a call from Guy McElwaine, Warren’s Hollywood press agent, who had promised to phone at 10 a.m. I sat around the hotel, sharpened my pencil, and got my questions ready for Warren.
At eleven, McElwaine phoned. “Meet me for lunch at the Brown Derby in one hour,” he said briskly. The beginning. Will the real Warren Beatty stand up and sign in, please. “Will Warren be there?” I asked. “Your parrrty is disssconnnected,” purred the operator.
Two hours and several Bloody Marys later, McElwaine sauntered elegantly into the Beverly Hills Brown Derby, called “the Veda Ann Borg of restaurants” by people who know it well. McElwaine settles into the booth and orders a chopped sirloin steak. “No French fries,” he says, fondling a waistline that is threatening to get out of hand. “You don’t look so tough,” he says, peering over his wraparound sunglasses.
Guy McElwaine sounds like the inscription on a tombstone in the King of Cornwall’s graveyard at Tintagel. Actually he is a boyish, thirty-one-year-old ex-ballplayer who has been blasted by almost every writer in Hollywood for protecting his clients from exposure to the indignity of the printed page. (Mention almost any writer of any reputation and he’ll sneer, “Yeah, he took a swipe at me in print.”) A swinger. Checked tweeds, striped pink shirts, paisley ties, a regular face at The Daisy. It is clear almost instantly (and from the way he later nudges up to Warren) that he is quite confused about his own relation to the stars he handles. As one of his acquaintances says, “He wants so badly to be a celebrity himself that he goes around drenched in cologne, wearing loud clothes and living in the spotlights of his clients. He has a pretty tough ego to feed.” There are two kinds of press agents—the no-nonsense guys who expose their clients to the proper media because that is what they get paid for, and the professional hand-holders. McElwaine fits into the second category. Warren needs him. Like most of the young successes in show business, Warren is smart enough and rich enough to get anything he wants, but he’s not stable enough yet to provide his own built-in reassurance.
McElwaine talks a lot about his current wife, Pamela Austin, and loves to tell how she made $100,000 last year for a few days’ work. She’s the petunia-eyed blonde who nearly drove the World Series off the air by announcing repeatedly, at disturbingly regular intervals, “The Dodge Rebellion wants yeeewww!”
There is still no sign of Warren. Will he show up for lunch? McElwaine’s conversation avoids any pinning down of exact times and dates, but there is a casual mention of, “Well, I guess we’d better try to get some kind of schedule going between you and Warren.” Mostly it’s just peppered and salted with exclamations like, “Who needs writers? All they want to do is make movie stars look like asses!” And “Richard Warren Lewis can’t get a job in Hollywood because of all those vicious pieces he writes for TV Guide.” And “Joe Hyams is another writer who has nothing but contempt for Hollywood press agents.” And “Bill Davidson used to be very good, but he can’t get people to see him anymore.” Etc. Putting on the scare. But never quite making it, because with each new horror story about each new big-name writer he doesn’t like, it becomes increasingly more obvious that what he’s really afraid of is a hatchet job on Warren Beatty.
“I have the names of a group of people here who told me not to let you do this story at all,” he said suddenly in his best Edward G. Robinson imitation, pulling out of his vest pocket a crumpled piece of memo paper. “Whaddya think of that?” I told him I didn’t think much about his list and when could I see Warren?
“I wouldn’t blame you if you went back to New York and sued us for a million dollars and you’d probably win the case,” he said. I told him I didn’t come three thousand miles to sue anybody and when could I see Warren?
He started to grin, realizing the corniness of the situation. “There’s nothing you could write about him anyway that could harm him professionally. He could walk down the street naked and it wouldn’t hurt him. Did you know he’s the Number-one film star in Cambodia? In Iran they released three of his films in one week—a regular Warren Beatty film festival.” I asked if it would be possible to maybe follow Warren around for a few days, see him in action. McElwaine blanched. “Probably not. That’s up to Warren. You have to win his confidence first.” I asked him what he could tell me about Warren. What time does he wake up? “Whenever I call him. Sometime in the afternoon, usually. Listen, I know there are a lot of people in this business who don’t like Warren, but that’s because a lot of people want to be like him. They’re jealous. Hell, he’s good-looking, he’s successful, he could have just about any woman he wants in the whole world. He knows everybody. All the foreign directors like him. Truffaut. Karel Reisz wants to do a film with him. He’s very intelligent. He has total recall. He can remember every phone number of mine for years. And women! He can look at a girl and say, ‘Her number is Oleander - - - and she used to have a London exchange that was GROsvenor - - - -’ Fantastic! Let’s go see Nancy Sinatra.”
We’re heading out Santa Monica Boulevard in McElwaine’s ’67 chocolate-colored Mercedes-Benz convertible toward PJ’s where Nancy Sinatra (another client) is rehearsing a rock-and-roll act to take to Vietnam and I’m wondering what Nancy Sinatra has to do with Warren Beatty, and McElwaine is answering: “Why don’t you do a story on Nancy?” He plunges through the traffic, pushing his sunglasses up on his nose, telling wild inside stories about Hollywood, all prefaced with, “This is not for publication, but …”
PJ’s swarmed with rock-and-rollers. McElwaine hugged Nancy Sinatra. Nancy hugged McElwaine. They both wore dark glasses. He produced the cover of her new album, which showed her in a pale bikini photographed, in a Roger Vadim effect, by a camera that looked like it had Vaseline smeared across the lens. “I hear we sold twenty-thousand copies already on the cover alone.” Nancy blushed and went on with her song … (“Shh-Shh-Shhugar Town …”) And that’s how we frittered away the afternoon, consumed in a roar of over-amplified dissonance. The beat. Gets ya where ya live. The in-crowd. “Is Warren coming here?” I asked over the noise. “Warren’s meeting us for drinks later,” was the reply. “Why don’t you do a story on Nancy?”
Back in the safety of pink sunlight, bouncing off the windshields of all the Hollywood sports cars like sequins, we headed for McElwaine’s office. “That’s Nancy’s fiancé,” said McElwaine, driving past a photographer pulling into the parking lot at PJ’s. “Does her father ever say anything about her life?” I asked. “Only when he’s asked, otherwise Frank stays out of it. Listen, this is no kid. She’s been married and divorced once. She’s a grown woman!” It still didn’t seem like a very good reason to do a story.
Back at McElwaine’s office (pink everything, with teeny-boppers to answer the phone and plastic plants and a super-intercom system which allows everyone in the office to listen in on calls whenever he flips a switch), he handed me a book by Roddy McDowall. “Why don’t you do a story on Roddy?” Finally, after leafing through six magazines, all featuring stories on his clients, I was told Warren was on the phone. “Yes, Warren, he’s here now.” Cupping his hand over the receiver: “Warren wants to know if everything’s okay. He has lots of contacts at the hotel and he can get you anything you need.”
“Ask him when I can see him,” I said.
“Yes, sure, everything’s fine. I’ll talk to you later,” he said, hanging up. “Well, I gotta get some work done.”
He promised to phone me at five o’clock for cocktails with the star. One of the teeny-boppers drove me back to the hotel, with a running narrative on her life and a complete rundown on her qualifications for pictures. At 8 p.m. I dialed McElwaine. “Oh,” he said, “I was just going to call you. Warren can’t make it; he’s tied up at the studio. I’ll phone you first thing in the morning.”
At 3 p.m. on my third day in California, the call came through, like a voice singing hosannas from on high: “Warren will see you now.”
AN ORANGE SUN was collapsing under the weight of a sky full of smog as the car pulled through the gates at Warner Brothers. The studio in late afternoon looked like an old deserted air base I lived near as a small child; the hangars had long since been closed down, the aircraft dismantled and hauled away for scrap, and all that was left were memories for the calendar to smirk at. Production was crawling. The sound stages—where Bette Davis went blind in the flower beds, where Bogart fired at endless hoodlums in Chicago alleys, where Doris Day pinched S.Z. Sakall’s cheeks into colorless hamburger and Joan Crawford had once slapped the faces of countless admirers on her way to the governor’s mansion—were inactive and closed to the public. Warehouses filled with Busby Berkeley tap shoes and Cary Grant drawing rooms—padlocked. In one of the labs Bonnie and Clyde was in the editing stage, and somewhere, behind those massive bolted doors down one of those concrete alleys, Camelot was shooting. Otherwise, a fine pink dust settled crazily over the lot and the ear was assaulted by the sound of silence.
Warren was in his office—a tiny pink room at the end of an empty corridor in a tiny pink stucco building that looked like a temporary wartime army hut for training-center personnel. He was sitting on top of his desk, talking animatedly on the phone to a music publisher about the score for Bonnie and Clyde. “Let’s go with a hillbilly sound. No, I do not want bossa nova.” He was playing the role of busy executive, with McElwaine beaming nearby, but there was something wrong with the scene: he was wearing a wrinkled white shirt with two buttons missing, so that his navel showed, and across his face was a cut, where he had slashed himself shaving.
Up close, without the makeup and the lights, he looks like the well-bred right guard on some winning high-school football team; one of the guys from the right side of town hanging around with the moths on a lightning bug-sticky small-town evening in summer: sea-spray eyes, slanted like pecans, constantly squinting because he is nearsighted and too vain to wear his glasses when he first meets strangers, footsteps shuffling and slightly unsure, hair healthy and unruly, hands trim, fingers long—not masculine-accepted stubby, but rather delicate and sensitive, like a pianist’s (which he once was). When he looks he stares and when he talks he does so in a voice which is not immaculately precise, like most movie stars who dabble a bit in phonetics, but rather slow and cumbersome, wrapping his vowels around his tongue like bacon around a fork. Warren, in fact, does not look or sound like a star. It is not until later, when you have known him, that you begin to notice the desperation to be liked, approved of, the fear (the greatest terror of his life, to be exact) of being considered unintelligent. At least four or five times during our talks, he would turn to me defiantly and say, as if in self-assurance, “I am intelligent; I know I am intelligent.”
He led the way, past crumbling, vine-colored tennis courts once used by Al Jolson and Ruby Keeler, now sorry reminders of the past, with cracks in their floors, down palm-lined walks where Judy Garland had cavorted as Mrs. Norman Maine in A Star Is Born, across parking spaces marked “Reserved—for Richard Harris” or “Reserved—for Jack Warner,” to his dressing room. He slammed the door. “Now-uh, let’s see,” he stammered, trying to be polite, still not trusting me. “There is, far as I can see, no reason to do a story on me. Most of what I have to say you couldn’t print anyway. Most movie stars are not interesting, so to sell papers and magazines in the fading publications field a writer has to end up writing his ass off to make somebody look more interesting than he really is, right? What it all boils down to is publicity because somebody’s got some movie to sell, right? What do I need with publicity? You want to see me driving up and down the Sunset Strip in my car picking up girls, right? Well, you don’t think I’d be stupid enough to let you see that side of me, do you?”
“Gay Talese came out here and got hot under the collar because it took him three weeks to see Frank Sinatra,” McElwaine echoed. “Hell, Mia Farrow doesn’t even see Sinatra until the lights go out.”
“You’ve got a reputation for being an enfant terrible,” snarled Warren. “Let me give you some advice. If you’re gonna knock the Establishment, don’t make any mistakes. I know, because I used to be an enfant terrible myself. You write a story mentioning Natalie Wood’s hairdresser and it turns out he was really her makeup man. People don’t like that sort of thing.”
These boys play a pretty mean game of war, I told myself. Three days under the coconut trees and I was already getting my third lecture—in fractured French—and I hadn’t even done the interview. I listened to about an hour of diatribes against various “goddam writers,” including a juicy description of one who should have his “ass filled with buckshot” for writing a story which made Joshua Logan sound effete, and another particularly boring attack on the old standbys—the McGuire Sisters of journalism—