November 7, 2003
By D.K. Holm
Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me
Warren Beatty wants to fuck your girlfriend. He wants to fuck your wife. He probably wants to fuck your sister, and all her friends. Hell, he may even want to fuck your mother. — it just depends on how famous she is. But most important, he wants to fuck you.
According to Beatty-biographer Ellis Amburn, it's not enough for Beatty just to seduce a woman. Beatty, according to Amburn's read of the actor's psychology, needs also to take her away from someone else. In that, he seems to resemble the late Elia Kazan, who in his autobiography confessed to a fixation on stealing away other men's women.
Given that he has just written a massive book on him, Amburn doesn't seem to like Beatty much. Oh, he evinces some respect for REDS and BONNIE AND CLYDE, and a few other projects Beatty has worked on. But throughout the bulk of THE SEXIEST MAN ALIVE: A BIOGRAPHY OF WARREN BEATTY (HarperCollins, 411 pages, $29.95, 0-06-018566-x) the author chips away at the stone-strong pasteurized edifice Beatty has made of his reputation as a producer. In fact, Beatty is about to be honored yet again as a producer, by the Producers Guild in January 2004.
It's also one of the most gossip-laden volumes ever published about Hollywood. No squirmy, secret sexual liaison goes unmentioned. No gay Hollywood wheel passes by without a mention of their orientation, whether or not they are in or out of the closet. Kenneth Anger, whose HOLLYWOOD BABYLON books have mined these same caverns of secret desire, must be either shaking his fist at his competitor, or riffling through the book for HOLLYWOOD BABYLON III.
Henry Warren Beaty (he later added the theatrical flourish of an extra "T") is the scion of a Virginia family led by Ira Beaty, a former musician and actor turned realtor, and Kathlyn MacLean, who also suffered from squashed theatrical ambitions. Mom gave up teaching to become a housewife, and dad had a drinking problem. Like other thespian-producing families, such as Marlon Brando's, there is a blend of ambition and self-destruction in the Beaty clan, but also a wide streak of competitiveness. Beatty is apparently very competitive with his sister, whose career began in the mid-'50s.
In grade school, Beatty was a tubby, bookish nerd with glasses whose sister had to go beat up the playground bullies who targeted him for pocket change. In high school he sprouted to over six feet in height, and seems to have solidified naturally into a manly facade, the square jaw, the soft eyes, the full hair, the up-turned ski nose. He seems to have had a conventional '50s style high school career, playing on the football team and dating a few tightly-zipped '50s chicks. Apparently his first full, mature sexual experience (you know, the old in and out) was postponed until his short-lived college career. He was later to parody high school as a character in the TV comedy THE MANY LOVE OF DOBIE GILLIS.
There's always one question that plagues me about actors. Do they go into theater because it's a lifestyle that helps them get laid? Or are they horny guys who realize that that's where like-minded girls can be found? Or do they become rakes and Casanovas only because, unlike in other walks of life, sex is actually there to be had? I haven't spent that much time around actors but the ones I know are a touchy-feely lot, burdened with intellectual pretensions, a knack for storytelling, the affliction of sentimentality, and the sexual habits of alley cats. Beatty appears to have entered acting because his older sister, under her married name of Shirley MacLaine, had already made a success of it. As I mentioned, it's a very competitive family, and Beatty brings the same competitiveness to besting sis, dad, and mom that he does to getting the girl you want and can't have, and brokering the sweet movie deal you can't make.
Beatty has already been the subject of numerous books, from the conventional cut-and-paste-from-a-distance job of WARREN BEATTY: THE LAST GREAT LOVER OF HOLLYWOOD, by John Parker, and the straightforward career survey by Lawrence Quirk, THE FILMS OF WARREN BEATTY, to David Thomson's weird blend of hyper-intellectual penis envy and novelization called WARREN BEATTY & DESERT EYES: A LIFE. But no book dishes the dirt like this one.
Amburn has numerous secrets to tell, which he imparts with a blend of salacious enthusiasm and scolding moralizing. In its way, SEXIEST MAN is as rife with gossip as Peter Biskind's EASY RIDERS AND RAGING BULLS, and more or less covers the same period.
Beatty used to be viewed as a pretty boy type usually cast in dull conventional Hollywood type films that hip kids found boring. That he has now has a rep as a force to reckon with and as a cool dude is due to the fact that he produced and starred in BONNIE AND CLYDE, a rebellious-seeming move that gave him cachet with film buffs, romantics, and power mongers. The movie went against the prevailing style of static, timid, TV-ish Hollywood fare of the time. SHAMPOO later also suggested that Beatty was a hep cat moving in arty circles. But in fact Amburn tries to show that Beatty is very much a creature of Hollywood, like Spielberg, or Robert Evans. Like Spielberg, Beatty is someone who makes friends with key helpful people. Like Evans, he discovered that power came from owning the project, not starring in it. Amburn doesn't uncover a Sidney Korshack-style guardian angel like the one who advised Evans, but he makes it clear that Beatty knows how to seduce older, horny men — at least figuratively — just as easily as he can beguile young actresses and rock stars.
Beatty has his place in history thanks to BONNIE AND CLYDE. And that history is already written. I read it. Not just in Peter Biskind's EASY RIDERS AND RAGING BULLS, but in David Cook's history of the '70s, LOST ILLUSIONS, from the University of California Press. In any case, BONNIE AND CLYDE did more just get on the cover of TIME, start a fashion craze, and make violence fashionable for the young. It changed the way movies were made. It got the fuddy-duddies at the studios to take chances on young talents. And Beatty is the true auteur of the film.
The thing is, though, that Beatty is still kind of a square guy. His politics seem to be boring mainstream Democrat. The only "hipness" he acquires is usually off the flair of the chick he's dating. If it weren't for the hippie movement and BONNIE AND CLYDE, Beatty would be another one of those old actors who suddenly end up in a TV series, like Rock Hudson in DYNASTY, or Marty Engels in LOVE BOAT. Evidence that he is a square can be found in the fact that he dropped out of KILL BILL. Beatty probably resisted the idea that his career as an actor needed resuscitating, like Michael Parks's or Robert Forster's.
Nowadays no one seems to care about AIDS; the masses seem to think that AIDS was something that happened to gays and Africans back in the '80s. But back in the late-'80s AIDS appears to have scared the living shit out of every garden-variety promiscuous Hollywood stud (though obviously not enough to keep them from still fucking). They began to marry themselves off to whatever fellow actress would be less likely to compete with them or be naive about the way Hollywood really works. Amburn goes into a lot of detail about the Beatty-Bening alliance, who, have a long line of Hollywood lovlies, finally managed to nail Beatty to the altar.
Among the steamier revelations are these:
Amburn asserts that it was common knowledge in certain circles that Beatty, in order to get a part in the screen adaptation of SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS slept, or at least flirted with, the playwright William Inge, who, in the pathetic twilight of his life, had a crush on the actor, who was struggling to get out of small parts in bad plays and enter the movies.
The dimensions and structure of Beatty's penis exercises a lot of Amburn's labors, the way President Clinton's and Michael Jackson's have preoccupied other investigative bodies. While Joan Collins asserted that Beatty could go all night, others, such as Julia Phillips, suggested that the star was priapic. Madonna, conversely, indicated that Beatty was a premature ejaculator, and didn't qualify for entrance to her favorite night spot, New York's Club Nine (see page 289), where men are granted admittance only if their member matches or exceeds the measurements advertised in the club's name (apparently they are checked at the door).
The pseudonymous Sarah Porterfield is Amburn's deep throat, and says that Beatty likes trophy brides, and that the Rosebud of his life is his competition with his sister. Amburn, on the other hand, speculates on page 288 with a flourish of faux Freudianism (isn't that a redundancy?) that Beatty delayed marriage so long because no woman could live up to Mom. Beatty wed Bening the year that his mom died. Amburn also adds, on page 301, that Bening snatched up Beatty by getting pregnant, and that she pumps out babies to keep Beatty ensnared.
On page 62, we see more evidence of Beatty's squaredom, because he quickly immersed himself into PLAYBOY magazine culture, and later dallied at the Playboy mansion, once with two bunnies simultaneously. Beatty also hates going to women's apartments, and prefers the Beverly Hillcrest Hotel because there are no cameras there.
On page 64, we learn that Beatty lured a playboy bunny into bed with another woman. Meanwhile, one of his conquests reveals that Beatty "fucks your head" before he fucks your body.
On page 177 Amburn claims that a Florida woman whose husband was overseas in the military gave birth to Beatty progeny, with the husband raising it unknowingly as his own.
On page 189, Amburn describes how Julie Christie stayed at deep throat Porterfield's place during one of their break-ups. Christie thought they would get back together, but learned that Beatty was afraid of commitment.
On page 234 we learn that Diane Keaton used to get mad because he would be on the phone to his other girlfriends in his London hotel room, and she alienated him by not going along with it.
On page 239 we learn that Cher supposedly rejected Beatty, and also that Beatty "did things" to a girl while another woman watched and told him what to do.
Amburn tells us on page 243 that Beatty had a habit of passing yeast infections back and forth.
Porterfield is quoted on page 286 revealing that the Madonna song "Hanky Panky” is about sexual spanking, and Beatty teased the singer about it. The whole Madonna section is pretty interesting, because they were mismatched, but also she was pretty tough on him, telling the political aspirant to shut up with his stupid opinions, and embarrassing Beatty with her sexy dancing.
Other bits of gossip include the revelations about Carrie Fischer's career as a script doctor, and the miserable nominalism of Glenn Gordon Caron as a director on one of Beatty's movies.
But who, after all this, is Ellis Amburn? One of the most fascinating parts of the book is Amburn's afterword. There we learn that, like Dominic Dunne, he seems to have known everyone and gone to every party. Amburn was also an editor at Coward-McCann, where he worked on Jack Kerouac's prose, and later wrote a book about the beat writer. Amburn has also penned volumes on Liz Taylor and Buddy Holly. But why did he write this book? He seems to hate Beatty. And Amburn can be petty in his scavenging for nasty things to say about the star. He even chastises Beatty for having puffy hair and long scarves in the '70s, the era of soft puffiness. I think that Amburn also shows his naivety about how Hollywood works when he chides Beatty for not taking the part in MISERY that went to James Caan. Amburn says that the part was a career resuscitator. That doesn't strike me as a plausible formula, that what spurs one actor's career would have dealt similarly with another's. And in any case, was Caan's career really resuscitated? He's now an indie film godfather more than a superstar (which is a nice thing, by the way). Meanwhile, Beatty keeps passing up truly juicy roles, such as Bill in KILL BILL. A KB with Beatty might have been really interesting. But now we will never know.
NEXT TIME: Robin Wood on RIO BRAVO!
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