BIOGRAPHY Tim Ecott thinks it is easy to forget that Warren
BIOGRAPHY Tim Ecott thinks it is easy to forget that Warren
0 Comments | Sunday Telegraph, The; London (UK), Jan 10, 2010 | by Tim Ecott
Star: The Life and Wild Times of Warren Beatty By Peter Biskind
SIMON & SCHUSTER, pounds 17.99, 554 pp
Warren Beatty is now approaching the age of 73, and he hasn’t made a film for more than a decade. His last role was in an epic flop called Town and Country, which cost the best part of $100 million to make and joined a list of Beatty’s films that are remembered in Hollywood for their ruinous budgets rather than for his acting. His sexual conquests are, in many cases, more memorable than his acting roles. And yet he remains, as this biography shows, a star.
Beatty is famously enigmatic and egotistical, making any biographer’s task a challenge, but Peter Biskind manages to capture the essence of the man with just the right combination of scholarship and salaciousness. He reminds us that Beatty has been nominated for Oscars as an actor, writer, director and producer, a feat matched only by Orson Welles. As the screenwriter Bo Goldman remarked, Beatty might have matched Welles, but never fully realised his potential because: ‘His ego gets in the way. It’s a form of narcissism. It’s always about him.’
It was, as Biskind makes clear, also always about women. Beatty would have needed to sleep in the Great Bed of Ware if he’d wanted to notch up all his conquests on a bedpost – some 12,775 of them is Beatty’s own estimate. Joan Collins, Natalie Wood, Jane Fonda, Cher, Leslie Caron, Goldie Hawn, Carly Simon, Julie Christie, Britt Ekland, Jackie Onassis, Diane Keaton, Mary Tyler Moore, Isabelle Adjani, Madonna, Elle Macpherson and countless women who were neither famous nor beautiful have fallen for Beatty’s charms. When asked why he slept with so many women, Beatty once said that if he didn’t they tended to be disappointed, slighted and even angry. Self- confidence was never in short supply. Paying a visit to Beatty’s new house on Mulholland Drive, the director Glenn Gordon Caron noticed the bare walls and asked: ‘Where’s the art?’ Beatty simply pointed at himself.
Biskind’s biography reveals a man who shot to fame in 1961 with Splendour in the Grass and was quickly compared with Marlon Brando and James Dean for his pretty-boy looks and brooding sensuality. Women liked his sex appeal, which combined beauty with a lack of brute machismo. His later film, Shampoo (1975), drew precisely on those qualities, telling the story of George Roundy, a hairdresser who has his pick of his glamorous clients because he is seen as a non-threat. The achievement of this biography is to underline the reasons why, in spite of a string of unmemorable films, Beatty was one of the most powerful men in Hollywood for the best part of four decades.
His first four films as a producer (Bonnie and Clyde, Shampoo, Heaven Can Wait and Reds) earned 35 Oscar nominations and won seven. Apart from the comedy Heaven Can Wait, the films all say something about their times. American party politics, Vietnam, sexual mores and paranoia about communism are variously thrown, with subtlety, under the microscope.
Beatty emerges as an extremely intelligent and politically astute man who was hampered by an overweening need to control every aspect of the films in which he appeared. Jeremy Pikser, who
‘co-wrote’ the political satire Bulworth (1998) with Beatty, said afterwards: ‘It was always about what he wanted
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