BOOK OF THE DAY: Star: The Life and Wild Times of Warren BeattyBy Peter Biskind Simon Schuster 627pp, £17.99
THE PUBLISHING new year opened with a delightful spat between Warren Beatty’s attorney, Bertram Fields, and his client’s latest biographer. The crux of the argument seems to be whether or not Star, The Life and Wild Times of Warren Beatty is an authorised biography (which it doesn’t claim to be). It is also Biskind’s salacious account of Beatty’s sexual activities, however, that has caused trouble. Fields has labelled the book “tedious and boring”, a literary judgment that is unlikely to impede its now almost assured rise to the heights of the bestseller list.
Over the decades, the rebel-hero of Bonnie and Clyde, producer and star of Shampoo and Heaven Can Wait, has shunned would-be biographers. In his Introduction to Star, Biskind (author of Easy Riders, Raging Bullsand Down and Dirty Pictures) claims that Beatty did eventually consent to be interviewed for this book.
Oddly, Biskind seems to have decided to ignore, or at best only hint at, a troubled family background, while barely touching on the relationship between his subject and his famous older sister, Shirley MacLaine. Instead, he has gone for a gung-ho account of Beatty’s career, interlaced with spicy tales from his sex life.
The career details are an expansion of what will already be familiar to readers of Easy Riders(and, to be fair to Fields, they are somewhat tedious), but it is the libido that is the throbbing pulse of the narrative. In the opening chapter, Biskind tells us that Beatty made love to Joan Collins relentlessly, accepting calls while inside her; that he was not prey to premature ejaculation and that he would give women multiple orgasms before thinking of himself.
Fuelled with vitamins as well as being something of an amateur medic and psychiatrist, Beatty was, Biskind continues, a possessive sexual partner as his many lovers, including Leslie Caron, Julie Christie, Michelle Phillips (of the Mamas and Papas) and Diane Keaton were to find out. Only with Madonna, who starred with him in 1990’s Dick Tracy did he meet his match. She ran rings around her fifty-ish lover, taunting him about his age and refusing to succumb to his lust for control.
Beatty’s approach to film-making, it seems, reflected his bedroom manners. He insisted on take after take in the pursuit of some elusive screen moment; he fought with his co-stars, his production team and financiers; occasionally he was responsible for a work of genius. He also saw himself as a political mover, disastrously backing firstly George McGovern and then Gary Hart. In 1999, the proposal, emanating from conservative-turned-Democrat, Arianna Huffington that Beatty run for president was apparently given serious consideration. But the reasons as to why Beatty was more effective in the backroom than on screen won out over the Democrats’ enchantment with glamour – he was too cool, too self-contained, too arrogant. Even his presidential satire, 1998’s Bulworth, was too wide of the mark to score any serious points.
In the end, Beatty saw out recent years cold-shouldered by Hollywood and best known for his new-found domesticity in the arms of Annette Bening and their four children. Poetic justice, some might say.
Ruth Barton is a lecturer in film studies at Trinity College Dublin. Her latest edited collection, Screening Irish-America, was published in 2009 by Irish Academic Press.