Beatty and three year older sister Shirley Maclean grew up as the children of failed actors, who had traded their dreams for middle class security, so their children knew that they did not want to become failures. While Shirley was a tomboy, Warren was an artistic loner, who was picked on by bullies, and had to be defended by his sister. However, when his body grew during high school the bullies left him alone, although the girls wouldn’t. The two siblings were both overachievers, who competed with each other. Beatty was a football star during high school but he turned down football scholarships to universities because the price of being a jock is a rearranged face. Instead, he studied Speech and Drama at Northwestern University, but dropped out after his freshman year.

Following in his sister’s footsteps, Beatty moved to New York and eked out a living while studying with Stella Adler. He survived on bit roles and playing the piano until he landed a role on the TV show The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. He also acted on the stage during the winter and the summer, which got him noticed by director Joshua Logan, and a trip to LA, which won him a contract with MGM. He became Joan Collins’ lover and shocked even her with his stamina. Being her boy toy made Beatty a minor celebrity, although he still focused on his own career, even making phone calls and love at the same time. His career took off when he convinced William Inge to cast him in Splendor in the Grass (1961), which was thought to be partially due to Inge’s lust for him. When Collins became pregnant she was enough of a realist to know that marriage was not likely, so she had an abortion. They became engaged afterwards, but the relationship fizzled out before the ceremony could be planned. At the same time, he started an affair with Splendor co-star Natalie Wood, which helped end her marriage with Robert Wagner.

Splendor in the Grass made Beatty an overnight sex symbol, and he became so arrogant that he ignored a personal invitation from Jackie Kennedy to come to the White House as part of her efforts to have him portray JFK in PT 109 (1963). Although he had a bit of the rebel persona, he still built up good relations with the powers that be in Hollywood, but his career did not go well because he was more interested in sex than acting, especially after he became friends with Hugh Hefner, Jack Nicolson and Roman Polanski, all dicks with legs, in the mid 1960s. In fact, he was so sex-obsessed that he left Wood at a power Hollywood restaurant after they had been together for a year, literally leaving her with the check, while he shagged the coat check girl for three days straight, which unsurprisingly ended their relationship. By 1964, Beatty was broke, and hated by the majority of the cast and crew of films that he had worked on. However, his pretty face and celebrity status as an amazing lay meant that he was still bankable.

Beatty started an affair with Leslie Caron, an older, more established star, and he lived with her in London as she went through her divorce, which limited the roles he was offered. Unfortunately, he was aware that he was viewed as a lightweight, unable to handle meaty roles. Four commercial and critical failures later, his career was looking like it was over before he was 30. Looking for a project suitable for his talent, he heard about and bought the rights to Bonnie and Clyde (1967), which was originally a Truffaut project. Beatty bought the script for a pittance, $7,500, but paid the writers $75,000 to produce a screenplay. He decided to star as well as produce, but realized that directing would be too much, so he brought in Arthur Penn. After being turned down by Columbia and UA, Beatty got a modest budget from Jack Warner, supposedly by begging and kissing Warner’s well-shod feet. His relationship with Caron ended when he told her that she could not play Bonnie, which to be honest, made sense given her French accent. It became an iconic movie to a rebellious generation, and made Beatty really rich, since Jack Warner had given him 40% of the gross to make up for a modest budget. The success of an anti-establishment film opened the doors for other such risky projects as Easy Rider (1969). Comments that he had glorified cold-blooded killers were shrugged off with the reply that he wanted to mirror violence in the 60’s.

Finding acting unsatisfying, he became involved in RFK’s campaign for the democratic nomination. However, the success of Bonnie & Clyde didn’t win Beatty audience support when he tried to speak out in favor of gun control after RFK’s assassination. Once again, he shrugged off criticism that as the star of a violent film, he was not the ideal spokesman for anti-gun laws. Beatty continued his involvement with the Democratic Party by working with Hubert Humphrey during the 1968 campaign, although he later abandoned Humphrey when he refused to oppose the Vietnam War. Beatty then devoted a year to arranging rock concerts and other celebrity events in support of George McGovern’s 1972 campaign. In fact, he apparently wrested control of the campaign from Gary Hart, the actual campaign manager. Worst of all, he convinced McGovern to downplay his war record in order to not turn off younger voters. While his devotion to McGovern’s campaign did not help either his film career or McGovern’s campaign, it did spark his own political career, as people began to talk about him taking Reagan’s place in the governor’s mansion.

Beatty returned to making films after two and a half years of playing politician, and scored big with Shampoo (1975), which is considered to be modeled partially on his own empty, sex-crazed life, and even starred former lovers such as Julie Christie and Goldie Hawn. His position in the Hollywood elite was so established that he took another two years off after Shampoo.

Apparently, Jimmy Carter considered Beatty but chose Walter Mondale as his running mate, although this did not prevent Beatty from throwing himself into Carter’s campaign. Carter’s later loss to Reagan highlighted Beatty’s missed opportunity to subject himself to the rigors of a presidential campaign instead of helping to run one.

Beatty’s returned to Hollywood in 1978 when he directed himself in the unimaginative Heaven Can Wait (1978), which made him even richer. It was a warm-up for Reds (1981), which co-starred Diane Keaton, his then current lover and potential wife number five or six, one loses track. Unfortunately, it went catastrophically over budget, and he was too exhausted as star, producer, and director to promote it properly. Incomprehensibly, he refused to allow press previews, which doomed the film. The financial disaster of Heaven’s Gate (1980) is usually chosen to mark the end of New Hollywood, but Beatty’s Reds was just as much of a cause in the death of the period he had helped bring to life. Paramount owner Charles Bludhorn’s response to Beatty’s pitch for Reds says a lot about both Beatty’s power and Bludhorn’s opinion of the story. “Do me a favor, go to Mexico, spend one million dollars (on the picture), keep 29 million dollars for yourself. Please, don’t make this picture."

Hart clearly had no bad feelings from the McGovern campaign since Beatty became his key advisor during Hart’s failed 1984 run for the Democratic nomination. Frustrated in politics, Beatty focused his creative energy on Ishtar, whose main accomplishment was to set a new standard for financial disaster. He walked away relatively unharmed, and six million dollars richer, but his position in the pecking order was slipping. Fortunately, the film ended in time for him to help Hart with his second attempt at the Democratic nomination. Hart and Beatty got along well, and Hart enjoyed chasing women under Beatty’s guidance. Many of Hart’s saner advisors wanted him to distance himself from the very public sleaziness that surrounded Beatty, but Hart remained loyal. Beatty himself misjudged the danger, commenting that he did not believe that “the majority of people in this country are interested in whether you are married or not or what your sexual preferences are.” Being around Beatty’s sex-infused lifestyle eventually proved to be too much temptation for Hart, and he lost his chance for the 1987 Democratic nomination when he was caught having an affair. Michael Dukakis’ defeat can not be blamed on Beatty since he kept Beatty at arm’s length despite his genuine desire to help the Democratic party.

Beatty had often lamented the commercialization of movies, Hollywood’s growing emphasis on style rather than substance, but aware that he needed a hit, he happily abandoned his pretensions to scruples, and produced and starred in Dick Tracy (1990), which was both commercial and had less energy than the two dimensional comic strips it was based on. He and co-star Madonna made money, but Jeffrey Katzenburg publicly expressed disappointment. His relationship with Madonna ended when he chose to promote the film instead of accompanying her on her world tour.

Beatty began dating his co-star in Bugsy (1991), Annette Bening, while filming and she quickly produced four kids, which the less charitable have suggested was intended to ensure that Beatty stick around, rather than trade her in for his next co-star. Despite the Oscar nominations, the film was not a hit, so Beatty pushed Tristar to put more muscle into its marketing efforts, but not even a marketing budget bigger than the film’s budget could save the film. The limp response to Bugsy should have been counterbalanced by the joy of seeing a Democratic president for the first time in 12 years, but Clinton had somehow managed to get elected despite disregarding Beatty’s advice to put some fire into his speeches by shouting “fuck” a few times.

While Bulworth (1998) was not a financial success, it did drive many Democrats to push him to run for president. After a shadow campaign, he decided against running, saying that he started too late, although another viewpoint is that he can’t commit or was unwilling to subject himself to the scrutiny of a presidential campaign.

Looking at the list of his lovers, it appears that Beatty has based his selection equally on attraction and usefulness in advancing his career, non-celebrities were regulated to the one night stand section. Despite the large number of conquests, he has avoided any scandals, a remarkable achievement given the number of paparazzi in Hollywood.

Movies:

Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
Directed by Arthur Penn
Starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway
During the middle of the Depression, a small gang of bank robbers in the mid-West go on a crime spree but as they become more famous, the police make greater efforts to hunt them down.
McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971)
Directed By Robert Altman
Starring Warren Beatty and Julie Christie
A young man cooperates with an experienced madam to set up a whorehouse/tavern in a booming Pacific Northwest town but encounters trouble when he refuses to sell out to a major mining corporation that wants to buy out the whole town.
Reds (1981)
Directed by Warren Beatty
Starring Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton
Tells the story of John Reed a radical journalist who becomes involved with lanor unions in America and then goes to Russia to cover the 1917 Revolution.
Bugsy (1991)
Directed by Barry Levinson
Starring Warren Beatty and Annette Benning
New York gangster Bugsy Siegel goes to Los Angeles and falls for the lure of the movies. His attempt to become a movie star fails but he conceives of the idea of setting up a casino in the desert that eventually becomes Las Vegas.

Books:

The Sexiest Man Alive: A Biography of Warren Beatty-Ellis Amburn, New York: harper Entertainment, 2002.

The author is clearly a huge fan of Warren Beatty, and thinks that he single-handedly modernized Hollywood, which should not surprise, since he is writing about his youth. It is a bit too psycho-analytical, but Amburn gives brief summaries of everyone who crossed paths with Beatty in order to understand them. The focuses more on mapping out Beatty’s sexual escapades, which is fine since they require a book on their own. Actually, it is a very well-researched book, not just the material on Beatty, which is to be expected, but it is also very informative about everyone who dealt with him, slept with him or orbited him. Unfortunately, Amburn is more interested in gossip, understandably since it sells copies, than giving dates, everything is mid-sixties, early seventies, never more specific.