Warren Beatty is on the phone. His left hand is on the wheel, guiding his sleek, black Mercedes nonchalantly around the twisting roads above Beverley Hills. His right hand is clutching the receiver. We are gliding along the tarmac contours of fame, past the homes of Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando, past Beatty’s old, white-glass house on Mulholland Drive, which collapsed in the 1992 earthquake, and towards the Mediterranean-style white stucco mansion that is the temporary family home.
‘I’m doing an interview now but what time will you be going to sleep? Okay, I’ll call you later,’ he says. We approach an automatic gate, pull into his drive and go straight to the dinner table, which is decked in white and shimmering in candlelight. The phone rings again. He hesitates briefly then jumps up. A short silence is followed by an already familiar refrain.
‘I’m doing an interview right now, how late can I call? Okay, I’ll call later,’ he says, returns to the table and picks up the conversation where he left it. Within half an hour it would ring again.
Beatty loves the phone. It has jokingly been referred to as his second most legendary appendage. Friends say his head is awash with numbers which he remembers for an extraordinarily long time; Joan Collins, to whom he was briefly engaged in the early sixties, said he would even answer it while they were making love. ‘If you ask, ‘Will Warren phone you five times in a day,’ the answer is yes,’ says Tom Sherak, a Fox executive. Beatty’s telephone voice is a purr of velvet: he gives good ear.
‘The voice means everything to me. I guess I’d rather see people than talk to them on the phone but it’s the next best thing,’ he says. ‘I enjoy it. My profession is devoted to subtext. I respect text, facts and so on but I’m really interested in subtext - nuance and inflection. That’s what you get on the phone. That’s why I’m not too comfortable with e-mails. I have people who will do that for me.’ Beatty is entitled to be fazed by new technology; he is 61 and has earned his stripes. There is an entire generation of cinema-goers who know he is famous but don’t quite know why. Before men went to the moon, apartheid imprisoned Nelson Mandela or British troops went to Northern Ireland, Beatty had tasted fame. He was there before Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffmann or Harvey Keitel. In the beginning there was Beatty, and Hollywood said he was good.
‘I haven’t really dealt with being well-known as if I had an alternative to it. Anybody who becomes a movie star when they’re 22 or whatever I was, is going to be eccentric. It’s an eccentric situation. You become rich and famous out of proportion to that which is anticipated. Quite a candy store there,’ he says.
His friends are famous. If Beatty could get together a dinner party of those he counts among his pals (bringing a few back to life in the process) it would be an illustrious line-up, including Russian poet and writer, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the late writer and essayist James Baldwin, Rainbow coalition leader Jesse Jackson, novelist Tom Wolfe and writer and biographer Alex Haley.
But it is the women who stayed for breakfast who will always attract more interest. For Beatty is not just famous for being talented, or even famous for being famous. He is also famous for having slept with the famous. His past girl friends include Madonna, Diane Keaton, Julie Christie, Brigitte Bardot, Judy Carne, Joan Collins, Isabelle Adjani and Michelle Phillips.
But that was then, when Beatty’s world was funnelled through the vortex of his own ego. Nowadays he does not look his age - he could easily pass for a good-looking 50 - but he does act it. If he enjoys the tittle-tattle of Tinseltown he must be bilingual, for he is equally comfortable talking about American politics, Russian literature and cultural history without pretension.
It is difficult to believe that he could have got as far as he has in the film industry - not to mention his love life - without a degree of vanity. Carly Simon may or may not have had him in mind when she wrote the song You’re So Vain, but Beatty certainly has an acute awareness of his own value.
He also understands the fickleness of fame. In the late sixties, he walked into a restaurant in Moscow with Yevtushenko to a flurry of excitement. ‘I didn’t realise I was that popular in Moscow,’ he said. ‘You’re not. they think you’re me,’ said the poet, whose work was renowned but whose face was unknown to most of his countrymen. ‘They’re saying that must be Yevtushenko.’ He is also a skilled operator in Hollywood politics. Lord Puttnam, then plain David, the producer of Chariots Of Fire, which won several Oscars in the same year that Beatty’s Reds came out, remembers Beatty offering the olive branch after a long-running and well-publicised spat: ‘We were vying for the same people and materials which, I think, started off as a row about costumes. Then Beatty came up to me at a New Year’s Eve party in LA two years ago and said ‘Do you remember what our fight was about?’ I couldn’t and he said he couldn’t either. ‘Look I’ve always liked your work, let’s drop it,’ he said and then he hugged me. I was very touched. It was very generous.’
For the past six years Beatty has been happily married to actress Annette Bening, 40, and is the father of three young children aged between seven and two - Kathlyn, Ben and Isabel. ‘I’ve had more fun than I deserved to have. Now I’m having a different kind of fun,’ he says. ‘But I have a new centre of attention. Before, I was number one in my house and then slowly I’ve gone to number two, then three and then four and each time you go down one you get more and more happy.’ The fact that his life is slowing down does not seem to bother him. What does upset him is the pace at which the rest of the world is speeding up. He complains that political primaries are over within just a few days; gubernatorial campaigns are reduced to 30-second television spots; the internet, which he has never used, is devaluing the currency of information.
‘Before, you had to wait two or three weeks before you could find out what was going on with a film, how it was doing and what the critics thought of it. Now it comes out in 25,000 movie theatres throughout the country on the same day. By the end of the weekend it’s almost over. It doesn’t even matter what the critics say any more.’ Stop the world, Warren Beatty wants to get off.
The fact that Beatty is prepared to talk about his latest film, Bulworth, is significant in itself. For a long time he refused to give interviews even to promote his own movies. ‘I think it’s crazy to take what aspires to be a work of art and loquaciously expand on what you think about it. Ideally you’d like a movie to speak for itself. It’s like giving subtitles to one, two or three years of work. But nowadays it’s such a mass medium you have to. Especially if you make very few films.’ He is ferociously protective, not only of his private life (which is understandable) but of anything he just doesn’t want to tell you. ‘Warren has a theory,’ says James Toback, a friend of 20 years who has collaborated with Beatty on a number of projects. ‘Never disclose to anyone what isn’t absolutely essential to disclose. There’s very little accidental about Warren; if he says something, there’s a reason for it.’ He is also the master of the pregnant pause, sitting there after making a comment, leaving you to believe he is about to say something else but then not delivering a single word.
He likes to research journalists before they see him, getting one of his staff to pull up stories they have done. A few hours into our interview he raised something I had written in a small British left-wing magazine. ‘I check out the author because it gives me something to focus on,’ he says. ‘Otherwise I’m just going to think about myself and that’s just boring. This way I can engage. Newspaper interviews are especially difficult because you give an interview and then you have no control over it at all. At least with TV, people can hear your inflection and make up their own mind. With text, you don’t know where it’s going.’ Journalists have often taken this personally but the fact is, with Beatty, nothing is straightforward. He is a part of the Hollywood establishment yet enjoys taking a sideswipe at the film industry; a Democrat who has become disillusioned by his own party; a millionaire who has a problem with money. Even as he keeps earning it by the shedful he cannot bear how it degrades the two things outside of his family he holds most dear - film and politics.
‘The number one issue in politics is campaign finance, and in movies there is only marketing costs. The quality of communication is going down. You have to know when enough money is enough. It’s a rare quality,’ he says.
And how does someone with as much money as Beatty check its nefarious influence? ‘I don’t know that I do, but I try. I suppose I just try to keep ahead of it.’ It’s a quality that Senator Jay Billington Bulworth, the eponymous central character he plays, stumbled upon almost too late. The film, which Beatty also produced, directed and co-wrote, starts with him sitting in his Capitol Hill office alone, unshaven and unhappy, weeping for his lost idealism as he replays his campaign ad, which calls on white middle-class families to vote for him in order to protect themselves against the spectre of black crime.
So intense is his self-loathing that he takes a contract out on himself and then flies back to Los Angeles where, with nothing to lose, he goes on a truth-telling binge and starts to inform everyone, from Hollywood’s elite to blacks in the South Central district what he thinks of them. The consequences are very funny. In a state of excitable and unpredictable insomnia, he starts rapping a diatribe against the political establishment, falls for Nina, a black woman he meets at a church meeting, and tries to get the contract cancelled so he can pursue his love interest.
It is a comic, bold hybrid of political satire and farce, extraordinary to see on general release from Hollywood, since it has the potential to offend everyone, from big business to Democrats and from Jews to blacks. He thanks some of the senior figures in African-American literature, both past and present, for giving him the confidence to approach humour in this way.
‘Jimmy Baldwin was a great influence on me. He said: ‘Don’t be more respectful of blacks than whites, it won’t work, no-one will believe it.’ I learned a lot from his essay ‘The burden of representation’ where he explains that you just can’t represent everybody. You shouldn’t even try. Likewise Amiri Baraka [formerly Leroi Jones] made me feel great about my own sense of humour.’ The left-wing politics in the film are explicit. At one stage Bulworth even mentions ‘socialism’ - ‘In America that’s like saying cocksucker,’ Beatty says with a chuckle.
Elsewhere, contributors at a Hollywood party ask Bulworth’s views on sex and violence in films. ‘The funny thing is how lousy your stuff is,’ he says, ‘So many smart people workin’ so hard on ‘em and spendin’ all that money on ‘em. It must be the money ... turns everything to crap. Jesus Christ, how much money do you guys really need.’ Why would Beatty bite the hand of Hollywood, which has fed him so well and for so long? ‘Bulworth is not Beatty,’ he says. ‘This is a senator having a breakdown in the film so he’s not going to be at his most sophisticated. He might say, ‘Money is turning everything to crap’. I would say the words ‘median’ and ‘mediocre’ come from the same core and money is the cause for an awful lot of mediocre activity because the median is very lucrative.’
So Beatty is Bulworth with better lines. Beatty has not had a breakdown and never strayed into the median. He is a political purist railing against the centre with an idealism forged in the red heat of the sixties. In 1972 he turned his back on the movies for 18 months and worked full time as the national vice-chairman for fundraising in George McGovern’s presidential campaign and became one of the Colorado senator’s closest advisers. ‘He has the instincts of a man who has spent a lifetime in politics and a political maturity astounding in someone so inexperienced,’ said McGovern.
To listen to Beatty this was a golden age. The fact that McGovern suffered a massive defeat at the hands of Nixon is of little consequence. This at least was a time when being left wing meant something. ‘The McGovern campaign looked like it would change a lot. I know it is part of the beast of a political party that it just has to keep winning elections to keep some people in jobs. Sometimes you have to be willing to lose elections.’ So would it have been better if Dole had beaten Clinton in 1996? ‘I don’t think it is about personalities. I voted for Clinton in 1996. It’s better the Democrats won but the downside is that there is still not a party that is in opposition to big money. Where’s the party of protest? Where’s the party Bobby Kennedy was in? What happens to that party if everything goes to the centre?’
Discussing politics with Beatty you are never quite sure if you are talking to a hard-line Marxist or a soft liberal. Poor blacks and poor whites have more in common with each other than they do with the rich, he says. ‘We have this so-called thriving economy which has missed most people and while the disparity between rich and poor increases we have just one party - the money party, made up of Republicans and Democrats.’ This is the kind of talk that would get you thrown out of the Labour party.
But call Beatty a socialist and he will run a mile: ‘I would call myself a liberal Democrat who is very, very interested in the safety net.’ Wouldn’t socialist be less of a mouthful? ‘I’m interested in a government that looks out for people who need to be looked out for. Ideology seems to be so unfashionable, so why not take advantage of it and not name oneself with a term that has become particularly problematic. I don’t even like the label “liberal Democrat.” If anything sounds archaic then that’s it.’ He is, however, sympathetic to President Clinton’s present predicament, which he believes symbolises a coming of age for the entire country. ‘America is coming face to face with its puritanical roots. Sexual hypocrisy is greater in the US than just about anywhere else. It is interesting that the divorce rate is higher than anywhere else and that might have something to do with the level of sexual hypocrisy. If we had a lower level of sexual hypocrisy maybe it would bring the divorce rate down and that would be better for families. I’m not advocating bad behaviour but it might be useful.’
But the central issue in America is not Clinton’s impeachment trial, he insists, but race. ‘Race is the unavoidable question,’ he says. ‘This was very apparent to me even at the time I became a movie star. ‘ Despite his status as a Hollywood grandee and Baldwin’s wise counsel, he is still very concerned about what African-Americans make of Bulworth. He can reel off the great and good of the black intelligentsia - Henry Louis Gates Jr, Nikki Giovanni and Cornell West, who liked it. ‘With particular people it really matters,’ he says.
It is a concern that took him to the land of gangsta-rap, culturally a long way away from mainstream Hollywood, in order to secure an authenticity for the rapping and portrayals of black life within Bulworth. He met up with most of the big names in hip hop, including Chuck D, Ice-T, Suge Knight and Snoop Doggy Dogg.
For a liberal who learned his politics in the civil-rights era, the encounters left him both inspired and slightly bewildered. ‘There is a strong romantic thread between them and the black power generation. There is also a philosophical thread which is often much more difficult to find. I think I have more in common with people of my generation who are black than with people of my own race who are younger. It’s about cultural style.’ Quite how Beatty came by his cultural style or his radical streak is unclear. He was born in Richmond, Virginia, in 1939, to a solid, southern academic family. His father was a violin teacher and his mother taught drama. Later they moved to the Washington suburb of Arlington.
His great-great-grandfather, from whom Beatty inherited his name, had been a spy for the Confederate army during the civil war, although his great aunts, Maggie and Bertie, always referred to it as the ‘war between the states’. ‘They were from an educated family, not rednecks. They would never admit the war was about slavery. They said it was about states’ rights.’ His parents, both of whom are now dead, raised him and his sister, Shirley MacLaine, to be self-confident. ‘I would say that both of them encouraged a high level of self-esteem in both kids ... Shirley and I didn’t have parents who were engaged in pointing out limitations.’
He remained very close to his mother until her death but never really had an emotional connection with his father, although he does think about him every day. ‘He wrote me a letter on my 30th birthday and a few years ago Shirley found it and framed it in glass so that you can see it on both sides. It’s hanging in my bathroom. And then, while he was ill, he asked me once if I had tried using shaving gel. He said I should give it a go. So now every morning, when I shave I think of him,’ says Beatty, slapping his jowls.
It was his parents’ academic interests that helped shape his political opinions. ‘I grew up around people who had an interest in history and you can’t be interested in history without being interested in government and you can’t know anything about government and go around seriously thinking that government is bad.’ Their liberal Southern gentility left him with a sense of fair play ‘My parents would have been appalled if anyone had accused them of being racist. By the time Brown [the Supreme Court decision to desegregate the schools] came along I was just graduating from school and it all seemed like a pretty good idea to me. But I do remember the signs ‘Colored’ and ‘White’. I went to the largest school south of the Mason-Dixon line but there wasn’t one black kid there. We thought Catholics were odd.’
While he was good at school, and was his high school class president, Beatty excelled at American football - a talent that would earn him 10 scholarship offers to colleges around the country. He chose a liberal arts course at Northwestern University in Evanston, near Chicago, but after a year he dropped out, because the education was not serious enough: ‘I think it was easier for me to drop out of Northwestern than if I had come from a family which had no education. I think my father secretly admired it. He was happy that I would ‘do’ something. My father spent so much of his life thinking, that he would never have encouraged me to stay in school. My parents never even encouraged me to get married.’
Beatty went to New York and took acting lessons at the Stella Adler Studio, stayed in a furnished room on West 68th street for $24 a month, and started doing odd jobs to pay his way; washing dishes, digging the Lincoln Tunnel and occasionally playing cocktail-bar piano. He also looked for acting jobs. It was around this time that he earned himself the reputation as the bratty younger brother of Shirley MacLaine that would stay with him for some time. He reportedly walked out on auditions if he did not like the atmosphere.
In 1959 he was finally discovered by Joshua Logan, director of Picnic, Bus Stop and Sayonara, who wanted to cast him for his new film, Parrish. Logan flew him to LA for a screen test alongside another fresh face - Jane Fonda. But the film was never made.
MGM snapped Beatty up, paying $400, but had no work for him. After a few months he gave them their money back and headed east, to Broadway, where he appeared in William Inge’s A Loss Of Roses. Four months later Elia Kazan cast him alongside Natalie Wood in Splendor In The Grass, a film about the unfulfilled passions between two high-school children in south east Kansas.
The film was a hit. It was 1961; at 23 Beatty was on top of the world. ‘After that movie I was like Leonardo DiCaprio is now. It took me ages to even think of myself as an actor. For years after that I would see ‘actor’ on my passport and think ‘God, this is odd.” He went on to secure his position a few years later by starring in and producing Bonnie and Clyde and then producing, writing and starring in Shampoo, the tale of a hairdresser and gigolo illustrating the immorality of the Nixon years.
His versatility - he has directed four films, produced nine, been involved in writing six - has ensured that his career has remained varied. His ability - nominated for 13 Oscars, won one for best director (Reds); nominated for nine Golden globes, won three - has cemented his role of Hollywood grandee.
But this is all the more remarkable given the few films he has made - just 21 in 38 years. For almost a decade now he has been working on a film about Howard Hughes, although he refuses to say when that might appear. He seems in no rush either to complete it or to have his work assessed. ‘Nobody asks how many copies of Crime and Punishment were sold in the first week or month or even decade,’ he says. ‘You know you’re really cooking when you don’t know what a film is about until 10 or 15 years after it’s come out.’ Since 1981 he has only made five films: Ishtar (a spectacular failure), Dick Tracy, Bugsy, Love Affair and Bulworth.
‘He’s not a great director but he’s a smart director,’ said one critic. ‘He doesn’t make the ordinary Hollywood fodder and most of what he does is very relevant to the time and very brave. If you consider when Reds came out, it was very courageous stuff, as was Shampoo and as is Bulworth in its own way.’ Jeremy Pikser, who shares the Bulworth screenplay credit with Beatty, says he is a ‘great sponge and synthesiser’ of ideas. ‘But with Warren, you have to be ready for a knockdown, drag-out war every day. You’ll go off to capture an idea he’s had, but when he reads what you’ve done, he’ll say, ‘This is awful. What kind of idiot told you to write this?’ And if you say, ‘You did, Warren,’ he’ll say, ‘Do you really think I’m that much of an idiot?” Almost with each film came a highly publicised affair with the leading lady: Natalie Wood, his co-star in Splendor In The Grass; Julie Christie (Shampoo); Diane Keaton (Reds); Madonna (Dick Tracy); and Annette Bening (Bugsy and then Love Affair).
His sexual adventures in the sixties, he says, were a reaction to his puritanical upbringing in the fifties: ‘I went through exactly the same sexual revolution as the country went through. In the fifties when I was a kid, I was walking around in a mode of behaviour that related to centuries of Protestant repression. Every cell and fibre around you was influenced by religious upbringings of the past. It was a very puritanical time and I didn’t act out in the way that I should have. When the sixties came it was different ...’ One friend referred to the transformation in him as a fortuitous awakening: ‘He suddenly realised that he had this gift, to attract women and that was it. He could never resist using it.’ But Warren Beatty doesn’t want to talk about the sex life he lived within the goldfish bowl that is Hollywood - it’s private.
He drives me back to my hotel and on the way he recommends fatherhood - ‘It sounds like you’re ready for it,’ he says in an avuncular tone - and laughs at the commonly held view that the famous are immortal. ‘You get on a plane with other famous people and one of the other passengers will say: ‘Well, this plane isn’t going down. Not with those people on it.’ And you think: ‘Who says it’s not going down?’ Just because you’re famous doesn’t mean the plane’s not going to crash.’ He drops me off with a warm goodbye. ‘If there’s anything else you need, just call me - any time. I don’t mind at all. Remember, I like talking on the phone.’
Beatty’s life at a glance: BORN: March 30, 1937, Richmond, Virginia. Educated: Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois; Stella Adler Theatre School, New York. Married: 1992, Annette Bening, one son, two daughters. Film Career: Splendor In The Grass , The Roman Spring Of Mrs Stone (both 1961), All Fall Down (1962), Lilith (1965), Mickey One (1965), Promise Her Anything, Kaleideoscope (both 1966), Bonnie And Clyde (1967), The Only Game In Town (1969), McCabe And Mrs Miller (1971), Dollars (1972), The Parallax View (1974), Shampoo (1975 - also producer and screenwriter), Heaven Can Wait (1978 - also producer and co-director), Reds (1981 - also producer, director), Ishtar (1987), Dick Tracy (1989), Bugsy (1991), Love Affair (1994). Oscar: 1981 Best director, Reds.