Warren Beatty: A Private Man (Random House Large Print) - Hardcover

Finstad, Suzanne

 
9780375434624: Warren Beatty: A Private Man (Random House Large Print)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0375434623 ISBN 13: 9780375434624
Verlag: Random House Large Print, 2005

Inhaltsangabe

Drawing on interviews with friends, family, and colleagues, as well as access to private letters, diaries, and photographs, the acclaimed author of Natasha presents an unprecedented glimpse behind the public persona of the complex, intensely private actor, chronicling Beatty's career, romances, political aspirations, personal relationships, and private life. (Biography)

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Suzanne Finstad received the Frank Wardlaw Prize for her first book, Heir Not Apparent. Her most recent, Natasha: The Biography of Natalie Wood, was a New York Times bestseller and named the best film book of 2001 by the San Francisco Chronicle. Several of her works have been made into films. She lives in California and has a law degree.

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The year 1959 clearly was meant to be Warren Beatty’s moment in time. On the same February day as Beatty’s first screen test with Jane Fonda, the head of production at Warner Brothers in Los Angeles sent a letter to Elia Kazan, who was rehearsing Sweet Bird of Youth on Broadway, promising to “alert the boys here” to look for a boy of nineteen to twenty-one to star in Splendor in the Grass. Kazan wanted to start filming in August, unless he was contractually obligated to Twentieth Century Fox to direct the film Wild River first.

The timing coincided with actress Natalie Wood’s return to Warner Brothers that February after a seven-month suspension. The studio had resolved its dispute with the former child star using the lure that she could play Deanie Loomis, the fragile teenager in Splendor in the Grass whose first love ends in tragedy, a role with painful parallels to Natalie Wood’s own life. Natalie Wood was drawn to Deanie as a moth to the light, just as she was to “Gadge” Kazan, whose psychologically nuanced work she revered.

William Inge, who already had cast Warren Beatty mentally as Deanie’s athlete boyfriend, Bud, was at first “dubious about Natalie,” whose promise in Rebel Without a Cause seemed to flicker after Warner Brothers put her in a pair of shallow movies with Tab Hunter that featured only her beauty. “But Gadge wanted her,” Inge said later, “and he was right.” After meeting privately with Wood, the director discovered she was “disgusted with her image” and had a “desire for excellence” in her work. Kazan preferred to cast actors whose personalities matched the characters they were playing, and he quickly assessed the vulnerable and intelligent Natalie Wood as “true blue with a wanton side held down by social pressure,” similar to the sweetnatured Deanie.

Inge was still rewriting the screenplay, further refining the part of the high school football hero to fit Warren Beatty, who continued to visit the playwright frequently at his apartment on Sutton Place. Jane Fonda, who had become pals with Beatty while they were preparing to costar in Parrish, thought at first that he was Bill Inge’s boyfriend.

After both Beatty and Fonda were famous, she often would be included on the long list of his girlfriends, but their relationship was more like brother and sister. “Warren and I became friends—not lovers, but friends,” said Fonda. Beatty’s intimate circle recognized the distinction. “He did only hang out with Jane,” affirmed Verne O’Hara, who still sometimes shared her husband’s hotel suite with Beatty, and was thus able to observe his bedroom partners firsthand. In O’Hara’s evaluation, “Warren was of the good girl/bad girl school in those days.” Jane Fonda, who had graduated from Emma Willard—similar to the seminaries for young ladies both Tat and Blanche MacLean had attended—was the former. As Tom Laughlin noted, “Jane was not a sex machine. She was a sensitive, beautiful, caring person…what would you look to, Eva Marie Saint? That kind of sensitive, beautiful quality.”

When he went out with Jane Fonda in 1959, Beatty entertained her with tales of his carnal adventures, which seemed to surprise and amaze the essentially Baptist son of Ira and Kathlyn Beaty as much as they did the sheltered Fonda. “We mostly talked about sex,” Fonda recalled, laughing. “I mean, we talked about lots of things—I’m not saying that we didn’t talk about professional things, but…maybe it was because I was just his friend that Warren would talk to me about his lovers, which I found fascinating.”

Beatty described himself then as a “kid in a candy store,” slightly overwhelmed but enormously pleased by his unexpected good fortune. Harry Crossfield, a writer-producer of Captain Kangaroo who became acquainted with Beatty when their mutual friends Mitch May and his wife offered him their Blackstone suite, observed that he had “an insatiable thirst for sex. It was twenty-four hours a day…I mean Warren would stop women in the street. He had a great gift of picking up ladies. He would just put on the charm, and women thought he was just the cutest little thing that ever came around. Not sophisticated, but just a cute boy, with a sweetness.”

It was Beatty who introduced Crossfield to the woman he would marry, Anna Maria Barraque. “I was doing the backer’s audition for Mitch’s musical on Broadway,” explained Crossfield, “and Warren had asked whether he could bring these two Cuban girls. And I said, ‘Do they have any money?’ ‘I don’t know.’ I said, ‘Are they going to invest in this show?’ ‘I don’t know.’ So they came, and that’s how I met my wife.”

According to Crossfield and to Mitch May’s first and second wives, the Blackstone Hotel belonging to May’s Bronxville-based parents was the site of innumerable sexual romps during Beatty’s temporary residency there. “It was an orgy room,” in the description of Crossfield, who stayed there from time to time as a bachelor. “Warren enjoyed orgies…he was game for anything.”

Gita Hall, a Swedish actress who married Mitchell May after he and Verne O’Hara divorced, recalled a second embarrassing incident at the Blackstone involving Beatty, Mitch May, and the inopportune arrival of May’s mother. “Warren had some girl there—I guess they both had a girl, definitely Warren did—and Mitch’s mother walked in and opened the door, and there they were. She was not expected. So she walked in on a sort of compromising situation, and of course Warren and Mitch both blamed each other, and tried to hide. And I guess they were caught with their pants down. I think Mitch’s mother quickly closed the door as I remember—he never did
tell me what punishment she inflicted, but it had to be something severe.”

“It happened all the time,” revealed Crossfield. “One time we even put a tape recorder under the bed when Warren was there and taped him.” Crossfield, similar to Jane Fonda, would recall, “When Warren wasn’t talking sex, or women, I don’t remember what he was talking about…we were all very screwed up in that way. Immature.” In his sixties, Beatty offered a similar rationale for his hypersexual behavior then, analyzing that his Protestant upbringing had constrained him from “acting out” the way he should have in his teenage years, implying he had a delayed adolescence.

Harry Crossfield, who produced a short-lived musical with Mitch May on Broadway in 1959, had an exquisite tenor voice, and, for a lark, performed in piano bars with Beatty—similar to the lounge act Dustin Hoffman and Beatty would parody thirty years later in Ishtar. Beatty and Crossfield even used foreign accents as part of their cocktail-lounge shtick. “Warren really wanted to learn how to sing well,” remembered Crossfield, who toured as an opera singer, “and I took him to one of my voice teachers at the time, a guy named Carmen Galliardi. I don’t know how long that lasted, because Warren didn’t have two nickels to rub together.”

Beatty even entertained the idea of composing music. In addition to studying with Galliardi and the voice coach he employed at Stella Adler’s, Beatty collaborated with composer Rick Besoyan, and sang with an accompanist he referred to girlfriend Jeanne Rejaunier....

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Verlag
Random House Large Print
Erscheinungsdatum
2005
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0375434623
ISBN 13 
9780375434624
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
933
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
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