Hollywood Hellraisers (26 page)

Then salvation arrived in the shapely figure of actress Daria Halprin, who’d been Antonioni’s leading lady in
Zabriskie Point
. There was instant attraction and she and Dennis married in 1972. Soon Daria gave birth to a daughter and came to accept that motherhood and marriage had more or less put an end to her acting career; her place was by his side at all times. If she was to act again it would be in one of Dennis’s movies, whatever and whenever that might be. But decent work — any work, really — was not forthcoming, even though Dennis had filled his Taos home with state-of-the-art editing facilities. ‘They should be bringing me movies,’ he ranted to one reporter. ‘I mean, I’m, you know, a genius.’

Wild, too, and reports of Dennis’s eccentric behaviour filtered back to Hollywood. Even Daria didn’t quite know what to make of him sometimes, particularly his mood swings and his fascination with guns. He’d go out and shoot a pig with his pistol, just for the hell of it.

Face it, they know we’re always trying to nail ’em and they don’t like it.

Shampoo
(1975) started life back in 1968, the height of the sexual revolution, as a cautionary tale for people like Warren Beatty who slept around too much. ‘I wanted to explore contemporary sexuality through the medium of a Don Juan,’ he said. According to Warren, a Don Juan doesn’t get that way because he’s a misogynist, impotent, or has a desire to degrade women; neither is he a latent homosexual who seduces so many women to conceal the fact that he really wants to seduce men. No, said Warren, ‘He just wants to fuck because he likes to fuck.’

Screenwriter Robert Towne was hired to work on a story about a randy hairdresser who discovers porking everyone under the hairdryer is actually rather an unsatisfying way to approach middle age — a sort of
Alfie
with curlers, then. Warren revealed that
Shampoo
was his attempt to ‘close out the promiscuous phase’ in his life. It didn’t work. He was shamelessly on his way to becoming the world’s oldest adolescent, the only man alive Hugh Hefner envied.

Beatty liked Towne’s finished script but suggested the female characters needed bolstering. Towne didn’t agree and it got nasty. ‘Although I don’t know anybody who’s a bigger prick,’ said Towne about Warren, ‘there’s no one I love and admire more.’ The relationship between Warren and Towne was one of the closest and most interesting in Hollywood. When producer Gerald Ayres decided to live an openly gay lifestyle it was Towne who warned him that his reputation might suffer. Ayres was furious, knowing how intimate he and Warren were, ‘twisted together like a knot’. He told Towne, ‘Listen, you and Warren squabble on the phone every day like a couple of lovers, go all over the world fucking the same women in the same room. If you two guys aren’t lovers, you’re the next thing to it.’ Towne refused to speak to Ayres for years.

They ran hot and cold, Warren’s feelings for Towne, and vice versa. After the impasse over the
Shampoo
script the atmosphere was definitely chilly and resulted in the project’s cancellation and both men not speaking for a few years. But a thaw eventually set in and Towne returned to have another bash at it.
Shampoo
gradually came back to life. Warren, who’d installed himself as producer, pumped a million dollars of his own money into pre-production, assembling a top-notch cast including a couple of ex-girlfriends in Julie Christie and Goldie Hawn. The autobiographical nature of the project was now unavoidable. Warren said he ‘didn’t mind the suggestion of parallels too much’. He also hired the then unknown seventeen-year-old Carrie Fisher to play a wild Beverly Hills brat, not a huge stretch at the time, providing her with some of the film’s choicest lines, such as ‘Wanna fuck?’ Years later Carrie admitted to
Rolling Stone
that Beatty unsuccessfully propositioned her.

Because of the personal nature of the story, Warren thought
Shampoo
was the perfect vehicle to launch his directorial career, but in the end lacked the confidence so hired Hal Ashby instead. For a week Warren, Ashby and Towne shut themselves away to get the script finished, working from nine in the morning till eleven at night. Creative differences still remained, however, between Warren and Towne. The writer always envisaged
Shampoo
as a Bergman-type film about relationships while Warren was keen to weave a political subtext into the narrative, a statement about the times. Towne was vehemently opposed to Warren’s vision. ‘He told me to do this and that,’ said the writer, ‘and we usually fought about it, and sometimes he really fucked things up.’ Their ‘discussions’ became more and more fierce. ‘You cunt!’ Towne was sometimes obliged to say to Warren. ‘You’re just being a cunt. That’s more cunt stuff.’

When filming began, hostilities broke out between Warren and Ashby. There was only ever going to be one winner: as producer Warren had hired his cronies in key positions and they’d tell Ashby what to do. According to cinematographer Haskell Wexler, a visitor to the set, ‘Warren chewed Hal up and spit him out. He was like an office boy on that set.’ Warren was able to seize creative control because Ashby hated confrontation of any kind, preferring to brood in a corner, anger and frustration squirming inside him. ‘I can’t take it any more,’ he told production designer Richard Sylbert. Well, he obviously could, because he finished the film, but it was a steep learning curve, and Ashby never lost control on one of his sets again, telling colleagues who stepped out of line, ‘Fuck you, this is what I’m gonna do; if you don’t like it, stick it in your ear.’

Warren also put Julie through the mincer on at least one occasion, keeping her waiting until the middle of the night to shoot and then making her endure thirty-eight takes. They do share one memorable scene. At a fundraising event she is seated between Warren and a fat-cat Republican. ‘I can get you anything you’d like,’ says the oily politico. Julie ponders the offer. ‘Well, first of all,’ she says, looking at Warren. ‘I’d like to suck his cock.’ It was the most brazenly sexual line ever heard in mainstream American cinema and caused quite a stir. When the studio saw it they were so shocked they demanded it be removed. Warren refused.

According to friends, Julie was weighing up the pros and cons of maybe getting back with Warren. During filming they stayed at the Beverly Wilshire, but on different floors. Warren seemed more interested in getting into the sack with current Miss World, twenty-year-old American Marjorie Wallace. One colleague said this of Warren: ‘He was afraid of commitment. This is a man who can only have an intimate relationship in a horizontal position. He thinks a hard-on makes for personal growth. He just wasn’t ready for Julie.’

On
Shampoo
Warren was working himself into the ground, as producer taking all the decisions, working round the clock, sleeping sometimes in his dressing room. But far from the pressure eating away at him, he thrived on it. Friend Buck Henry thought him, ‘psychotic’ about the possibility of overlooking anything, adding, ‘His attention to detail is maniacal. Easygoing is not a quality he has.’

Tony Bill, a former actor, now producer (with
The Sting
to his credit), was on the film for some five weeks and found Warren to be an extremely collaborative filmmaker. ‘He was a total professional, always talking with the director or the cameraman or the writer; Robert Towne was on the set a lot. So it was very collaborative. And despite being the star, Warren was very much one of the guys, not at all unapproachable or overly serious.’

Shampoo
turned out to be a huge hit but critics complained that the performance was easy for Warren; after all, he was playing himself, wasn’t he? One magazine writer accused the star of exploiting his super-stud reputation. ‘I sent his wife a letter offering to do her hair,’ said Warren.

At the film’s premiere at the USA Film Festival celebrity journalist Don Aly, who has no hesitation in naming Warren Beatty the ‘stud-horse’ to beat them all, observed the great man in ‘action’ at first hand. Warren was attending a press conference. ‘I watched him sitting on stage, supposedly intently listening to questions. His eyes moved from row to row, but he was not looking at the folks asking questions. He was checking out the broads sitting there in their tempting low-cut frocks and new short skirts.’

The answers he gave were pap, almost rehearsed, then his attention was gripped by a pretty buxom blonde who looked like a young Jayne Mansfield and they got talking. ‘You didn’t have to hear what he said to understand what was happening,’ says Aly. ‘If you spotted Warren tossing his hotel keys in the lap of the girl with the big gorbanzas, then you pretty much understood what was coming down.’

When the press conference closed Aly followed the blonde out into the street, where she hailed a cab for Beatty’s hotel. He asked if he might share the ride and split the fare. ‘She seemed happy to do that, probably a little embarrassed that she was on her way to a little sex session with the great cinema lover!’ Aly knew that Warren was now dating Michelle Phillips and that she’d accompanied him to the festival, but when he hadn’t seen her at the press conference he’d assumed that Warren had left her behind in the hotel, as was his custom. ‘That, of course, left him free to womanise with whomever he wanted and make arrangements for secret meetings later. Frankly, I knew what Beatty had on his mind. And since I wasn’t privy to the exact relationship he had with Michelle, I didn’t know if they played these little ménage-à-trois games frequently or not.’

After the blonde made her way up to Warren’s room Aly decided to wait in the lobby to see what would happen, thinking it might make an amusing aside in his showbiz column. ‘And as it turned out, it did. Just a few minutes later the busty blonde stepped off the elevator and deftly deposited Warren’s key down a mail chute.’ Aly got talking to her again and she explained what had happened in Warren’s room. ‘I don’t know who that girl was up there,’ she said, rather frustrated. ‘I started to leave; I thought I had the wrong room.’ Aly nodded sympathetically, and grinned.

Back home, preparing for the premiere that night of
Shampoo
, Aly called a friend, actress Morgan Fairchild, ‘whom I know Warren put the hustle on on three different occasions. She turned him down each time, making her one of probably few women in Hollywood who had the gumption to say no.’ They’d first met when Morgan, a sixteen-year-old high-school student from Dallas, worked as an extra on
Bonnie and Clyde
. Arriving for her first day on location in Texas, Morgan was looking for the film crew when she noticed this guy shuffling toward her. ‘Is this the way to the set?’ she asked. The guy looked up, ‘Well, uh, yeah, yeah, the uh, it’s down that way,’ he said. ‘And I thought, my God, that’s the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen in my life,’ Morgan recalled. ‘And of course it was Warren. He just glowed.’

Aly told Morgan what happened with the blonde and that he’d also tried to get an interview with Warren but had been brushed off. ‘Why, that skunk!’ she exclaimed. ‘Tell you what we’ll do. I’ll call my sister and invite her to the premiere. When you walk into the theatre lobby with the two of us on your arms, Warren will be all over you in a New York minute. Don’t worry about a thing. We’re gonna have a ball.’

That’s exactly what Aly did, and when Warren saw them he made a beeline across the lobby and sequestered them in a corner. ‘Hey, baby cakes,’ he commented. ‘What’s shaking, baby cakes?’ The three of them just looked at one another and laughed and completely ignored Warren, walking right past him to their reserved seats.

Once the movie was over, Aly spotted Warren heading for the men’s room and followed him in. Standing side by side at the urinals Aly said, ‘Hey, guy, enjoyed the movie. Oh, by the way, I’ll give you Morgan’s phone number if you’ll give me a good quote.’ Warren shot Aly the old evil eye, zipped up his pants and prepared to leave. Then he suddenly stopped and turned round. ‘What’s the number?’ he asked. Aly wrote down the number of an escort service and gave it to him. ‘Warren gave me a quote, but I don’t usually repeat it in print or in mixed company. I never saw Beatty again and I’m glad. I think maybe he got the message. What a jerk.’

Ever since the LA Playboy Club opened on Sunset Strip in the mid-sixties Warren had taken good care to ingratiate himself with Hugh Hefner and his bunnies. More so at Hefner’s LA mansion, which during the seventies became one of
the
celebrity hang-outs. Jack was a regular visitor too, especially on Friday nights, when Hefner threw lavish dinner parties. One day Warren was ambling along with a bunny girl on each arm when he met Hef, who enquired, ‘Have you been robbing the hutch again, Warren?’

He also continued to cruise Sunset Boulevard with Jack, picking up girls.
Time
magazine reported that ‘an occasional recreation of [ Jack Nicholson] and Warren Beatty’s is riding around town, skunk spotting on the street.’ The
New York Times
added that Jack ‘still sophomorically goes on random girl-hunts in a car with his friend Warren Beatty’.

Early on in the relationship between these two movie titans there developed an unofficial competition about who could score with the most voluptuous beauties; it was an ongoing challenge. Some wondered how much of their reputation as cocks men was pure hype. Bruce Dern said, ‘Jack brags about a lot more pussy than he’s ever gotten. I’d say if you cut half of his pussy in half, you’d have it about right, and still he probably gets more than anybody around. He and Beatty have contests about it.’

Warren and Jack were now so inseparable that it seemed only a matter of time before someone put them in a movie together. They were the dream team, but the film they chose turned out to be a complete nightmare. It was called
The Fortune
(1975), a period screwball comedy, and Warren breezed into the boardroom at Columbia and got Jack his first mega-buck deal, $1.5m, the same amount he demanded and received for himself. Shell-shocked, one executive commented, ‘I don’t wish on my worst enemy negotiations with that man.’