Peter Biskind's new book, Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America, is an enjoyably salacious tale of the intersection between star power, the death of the 60s and auteurship. During the editing of Reds (1981), Beatty's team took to calling him Masturbeatty due to his obsessive-compulsive tendencies that resulted in an estimated 3 million feet of film (which shifted even Stanley Kubrick to Ed Wood's one-take side of the production curve). He made Gene Hackman do over 80 takes for one line, and then required his editors to consider the nuances of each delivery to divine the best interpretation. Editing took about a year and a half. That is to say, Beatty wasn't fond of the accidental and liked to be in complete control, which sums up his personal relations, as well:
"Two people cannot both live for one person[.] Warren didn't want me to act. He wanted me to be with him all the time[.] When Barbara Walters asked him about all the women in his life, he said, 'Well, they always broke up with me, I never broke up with them.' While I was watching the interview, I was holding m stomach laughing so hard [I fell] on the floor. That certainly is the strategy that works for some men. But you can't go with a hundred different women and a hundred different women reject you, over and over again, when you're such a wonderful person." -- Michelle Phillips
Probably the most notorious Lothario of the 60s and 70s, Beatty's line of sexual conquests rivals his spools of film footage (Biskind estimates over 12,000, not including hand- and/or blowjobs). Like his politics, his sexual preferences were rather staid, but the power trip wasn't all that far off from what Pasolini depicted in Salò. He'd point, and one of his handlers would fetch. "Masturbeatty" is right -- who needs one's own hand when others are willing to do it for you? And like most cads, he was possessive of the women (at least the ones who stayed with him for more than 5 minutes), narcissistically requiring a level of devotion that he never expected of himself ('serial monogamy' was his euphemism for it). He was the embodiment of what many feminists defined as "free love," another excuse for male domination.
