Interview: Warren Beatty
There are nights I dream of him, and it is still horrible. We are sitting there, and he says nothing. He begins to say something, and then he stops. He pauses that pause of his: the Pause! Like eternity is the Pause. I feel my hair fall out in clumps. I feel my teeth rot. At once I have aged — what? — forty, fifty years. Waiting for him to finish. To say something. But what can he say? We have both forgotten the question. He tries to respond, anyway. Blinking at me, smiling, shrugging, ageless in hesitation. There is no sound, nothing, just him, knowing what he knows and keeping it to himself. Somewhere a clock ticks as the Pause expands….
Then I awaken and remember that it was all true — it really happened! — except for the hair-and-teeth part, that is. I remember those Pauses the way other men remember mortar fire. And yet, because survival has a way of breeding nostalgia, I often find myself missing the Reticent One.
Warren Beatty is the Reticent One. It is art, the way he withholds! To this day, I remember everything he never told me. Many people read our published conversations and summarily proclaimed Warren Beatty to be the ultimate Impossible Interview. I pity those people. They missed everything. They were ill equipped to marvel at his wry ellipses. They could not grasp the eloquence of his vast silences. After all, it is not what Warren Beatty says but how he doesn’t say it.
This was Warren’s first serious print interview in twelve years, and he had stored up a wealth of topics not to speak about. He had last spoken somewhat in Time in 1978, and before that he had publicly said not much of anything after having said too much to Rex Reed in a famous 1967 Esquire piece called “Will the Real Warren Beatty Please Shut Up?” (He obeyed, forcing journalists to thereafter pay for the sins of Rex Reed, which as you can imagine is an indignity of no small proportion.) In 1982, Warren appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone as the subject of a memorable profile by Aaron Latham, to whom Warren never spoke. That piece, executed in the witness style of the just-released film Reds (which Warren triumphantly produced, directed, co-wrote and starred in), deftly interwove the voices of many people who knew Warren well enough to have heard him say things. For eight years after Reds, however, Warren all but disappeared from public view, except for costarring with Dustin Hoffman in the legendary bomb Ishtar. During that period, he was quoted as saying, “I’d rather ride down the street on a camel nude… in a snowstorm…backwards than give what is sometimes called an in-depth interview.” But this was to change in the spring of 1990. Perhaps fearing that a new generation of filmgoers had no idea who he was, Warren agreed to end his silence as best he could. He would sit for interviews on behalf of his forthcoming auteur project, Dick Tracy, in which he was to star opposite his new love, Madonna.
As is customary, a tremendous fight erupted over which magazine would get Warren’s first definitive interview. I am told that many people lost their lives in that battle, and certain publicists were forced to enter witness-relocation programs. But what matters is that Warren chose Rolling Stone to be his forum, a decision that may have forever altered the course of his life.
NOW LET ME SAY THIS: ACTORS ARE FOR the most part not terribly interesting. They are paid to not be themselves, which would limit any of us, if you think about it. But most actors are not Warren Beatty. Warren has seen everything and done everything, especially with actresses. More than just a fabled Lothario, he is a Movie Star in a time when there are no more Movie Stars. He is a repository of Hollywood history, an icon who knew the icons that came before him. (He played cards with Marilyn Monroe the night before she died.) His knowledge of women, all by itself, must be encyclopedic. He would seem to be a fellow who could tell you a thing or two. Someone who could bend your ear and give you something to think about.
To Warren, however, such matters are trifling, and of course, he is right. More impressive than any knowledge are his skills as a brilliant diplomat, and I would eventually learn that few things equal the sheer entertainment value of listening to a diplomat circumvent truth. Our sessions, therefore, fairly rollicked with clever deflections and escapes. To ensure that none of his nuance would be misrepresented in print, Warren always had a tape recorder of his own running next to mine. While this could be construed as a sign of paranoia — Jerry Lewis has, after all, long made it his practice — I now believe Warren did it because he cared. He assured me: “It’s for your safety.” I returned this gesture of friendship by often letting him “borrow” my extra blank tapes. Sometimes we would both run out of tape simultaneously, and those, I think, were some of our best times together.
Interview: Warren Beatty, Page 1 of 2