In Which Warren Beatty Is A Dirtbag For The Ages

Warren Beatty In Love

by ALEX CARNEVALE

If I have a fault in relation to women, it's that I'm too dependent on love. When I'm deeply involved and all is not going well, my creative impulses become somewhat sublimated. I used to think the answer was not to get involved.

Warren Beatty was wild about Joan Collins. He was enthusiastic about his relationship with her beyond anything he had sampled before. As Warren's friend Verne O'Hara put it, "Sex drives Joan. She was besotted with him. And he was besotted with her." He defended her acting ability constantly, with his fists if necessary. He also used her for his own ends; suggesting she leave the set of a British adaptation of Sons and Lovers as the cast left for England because the publicity she attracted was more useful to him by his side. She was something in Hollywood, and that was what he wanted to be.

For her part, she was devoted to him, and he even bought an engagement ring for her, a gold beacon surrounded by emeralds and diamonds. In January of 1959, they moved into a tiny studio apartment in the Chateau Marmont.

on the set of 'A Loss of Roses'At 22, Beatty was a veritable ball of energy, utilizing his photographic memory for phone numbers to make hundreds of calls a day in between fucks. He resisted proposing to Collins because he simply could not get cast. It was Elia Kazan putting him in the William Inge, Kansas-set morality play Splendor in the Grass that began his career better than lhis sideshow act with Collins ever could. (The magnetic Natalie Wood was his co-star.) Right before his first day on the set of Splendor, Collins became pregnant, and aborted the child quietly so as not to alert the press. The next day production began. When Beatty faltered opposite his celebrated costar, Kazan said, "Pretend it's Joan, Warren."

wardrobe test for 'splendor in the grass' from elia kazan's private albumBeatty was so incredibly into himself that he began weight-training during the production to make sure he looked his best onscreen. When teenage girls around the production noticed megastars Collins and Wood but not him, Warren righted the wrong by arranging for another group to giggle loudly during his scenes. Eventually Joan Collins had to go to Rome to shoot Raoul Walsh's Esther and the King, and while she was there Beatty became convinced she was unfaithful to him.

on the set of 'The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone' with Vivien Leigh and girlfriend Joan CollinsAs his time on The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone was ending, he wrote to agent Eleanor Kilgallen from London:

Dear Eleanor,

Don't ask me why all of a sudden I'm able to write letters. I don't know. Anyway – I'm through with the picture now. I have just a little dubbing and stuff to do and that will be it. Next I want to go to Paris and then on to Rome and anywhere else that is interesting and everything is interesting.

with Joan CollinsAs you know – this is the first time I haven't had to worry about where my next dollar is coming from and it is making a lot of things more enjoyable for me. I have been offered several scripts – but I don't know what I am going to do...some people over here have offered me a thing called Bird of Passage (which I am)...

I think I will be a few more weeks over here in the old world before New York – But who knows, they may call me back to accept an academy award for last year...

Love,

Warren

with joan collinsAlthough he and Collins were still engaged, they had already called off a planned wedding and were continents apart. He went after Julie Newmar in Rome without success and sought consolation with the daughter of Actors Studio founder Lee Strasberg, Susan, in Rome. He had sex with her continuously, notably in Luchino Visconti's bathroom. (Visconti was older, gay and loved Beatty.)

in an episode of the hitchcock tv series 'Suspicion'When Beatty returned to Los Angeles, his relationship with Collins consisted largely of fighting and fucking. She eventually ended it when she saw he would not. On the promotional tour for Splendor in the Grass, the previously unfriendly Natalie Wood, freshly divorced and starving herself down to 88 pounds, began to know get to know Warren better. It's amazing she didn't run screaming in the other direction.

The press jumped all over Warren as a homewrecker because Natalie would not publicly reveal that her ex-husband Robert Wagner was the cause of the divorce. In any case, the relationship sold the movie well, and continued to bring attention Beatty's way.

on the set of 'The Only Game In Town'

After the release of Splendor in the Grass, Beatty took up residence at the Delmonico Hotel on 59th Street and Park Avenue in New York. His relationship with Wood stood in stark contrast to the life he shared with Collins. Joan was a carefree, happy woman; Wood was depressive, serious and self-involved. As the romance began to fall apart, Beatty's behavior became increasingly extreme. On a blind date with one woman, he invited her to a restaurant he knew was closed, took her back to his house, closed the door and dropped his pants.

One of his one-night stands was an unknown 16 year old Cher, who later reflected that "I did it because my girlfriends were just so crazy about him, and so was my mother. I saw Warren, he picked me up, and I did it. And what a disappointment! Not that he wasn't technically good, or couldn't be good, but I didn't feel anything. So, for me, I felt there's no reason for you to do that again." Shortly thereafter, Warren began to see an analyst for the first time.

with natalie woodBeatty's infidelity towards Wood around Hollywood became an open secret. His signature move was calling women up in the middle of the night, when he would regale them with "What's new, pussycat?" Incredibly, this worked, but it wasn't necessarily the approach. Warren could be very sweet to women; he excelled at paying them the kind of attention they desired and he looked like a god. When Warren asked Wood to come say goodbye to him at an airport, she finally summoned the courage to dump him.

After a terrible experience filming Robert Rossen's Lilith, Beatty decided he wanted more control on future projects. Keen to promote himself off the failure, Beatty planted ludicrous items in the gossip columns about himself. One read: "Three girls who met each other at one of Warren Beatty's swinging bachelor parties in New York last week discovered that, in various years, they had all been Miss Sweden." To lend credence to the hyperbole, he took up with Italian babe Claudia Cardinale.

His savvy eye as a producer led him to a rough script by Billy Wilder's writing partner I.A.L. Diamond. After a co-producer heard Warren whisper his trademark seduction to one young woman, he suggested What's New, Pussycat as a title. The script, however, was dated. After Beatty's first choice to punch it up, Elaine May, declined, he settled on a young Jewish comic he'd seen perform in New York: Woody Allen. The day John Kennedy was assassinated, Beatty spent a cold morning trying to get Stanley Kubrick to direct the picture.

His new love was precociously beautiful French actress Leslie Caron. At 32, she was six years older than him. When they met, Caron was married to the English stage director Peter Hall, and the European coupling had already produced two young children. This of course meant nothing to Warren: Caron's background in ballet reminded Beatty of the career in dance shared by his mother and sister Shirley MacLaine, and Caron's marriage was falling apart. Peter Hall recalled that she flew to him in London and "after a couple of days, Leslie told me she was in love with Warren Beatty and had decided to leave me and go back to Hollywood."

Caron and Beatty were very close – she even administered oxygen out of a tank to him on the set of the film Mickey One. That didn't stop Warren from running around behind her back, including a particularly memorable jaunt at the Playboy Mansion.

with alexandra stewart on the set of Mickey OneThe road to Bonnie and Clyde began when Beatty met Esquire writer Robert Benton shortly after his breakup with Gloria Steinem in spring of 1963. Benton's despondency had led him to the films of François Truffaut (especially Jules and Jim), and the Texas-born writer and his friend David Newman began to write a script about Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker.

After the two showed their treatment to Truffaut himself (they could barely believe it), Truffaut considered Jean-Luc Godard as director, since Godard could speak better English, a choice later abandoned when the Paris-born director demanded they shoot it in New Jersey. Beatty inserted himself into events by picking the treatment for Bonnie and Clyde up off the desk of producer Harrison Starr. When he was cut out of What's New, Pussycat, he pursued his passion for the project, vowing he would have total control.

He had a remarkably similar attitude about his relationship with Caron, which was rocked by a messy custody case brought on by her ex-husband Peter Hall. Beatty found her an analyst. She later reflected: "Once he was interested in a woman, he would never let go. He enveloped her with his every thought. He wanted total control of her, her clothes, her make-up, her work. He took notice of everything. He sent every one of us to a psychoanalyst. He believed the experience was beneficial. He was right."

When his performance in Lilith was roundly slammed by critics, he slept with one of them, and his infidelity became even crazier. He had sex with Bernadette Peters after seeing her once onstage. When he paid $75,000 out of his own pocket for the rights to Bonnie and Clyde in 1965, his real Hollywood career began.

Beatty's first idea was to cast his sister as Bonnie and Bob Dylan as Clyde, which would have been extremely weird. He also thought about directing, but when he fell in love with the part of Clyde Barrow, both his sister and directing were out.

As with his previous relationships with starlets, Leslie Caron had to break up with Beatty. She was deeply hurt that Warren had dumped her from Bonnie and Clyde, and flew to England to be with her children. (Before he took up with Julie Christie, who he had glimpsed during a screening of Born Free, Beatty became infatuated with the married 44-year old Russian ballerina Maya Plisetskaya.)

curtis hanson's photoset of faye dunawayStill friendly with Natalie Wood, Beatty wanted her for the part of Bonnie, but director Arthur Penn didn't want a star. Jane Fonda said no. Tuesday Weld said no. Ann-Margret said no. Sharon Tate said no. Natalie Wood said no again. According to Beatty, "I was turned down by every living actress." After seeing her onstage, it was Penn who found Faye Dunaway, and photos taken by Curtis Hanson secured her the role.

Somehow, Warren kept his hands off her. Dunaway felt that if they were not platonic, it would ruin the film. A friend of Beatty's submitted in Suzanne Finstad's biography that "Warren didn't do it with Faye because Clyde was supposed to be impotent."

standing ovation at the montreal film festival for 'bonnie and clyde'Julie Christie was still on his mind. He drove out to Sausalito in a long white limo, circling for hours until he found where she was staying. Christie was different from most women he tried to seduce; she was completely without pretense or affectation, and initially resistant to his advances. But they got together anyway. Because of the resounding success of Bonnie and Clyde, Beatty was on top of Hollywood for the first time in his life. He turned down Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby, feeling it was "not important enough." It was the first in the string of immortal projects he passed on, many because he would be preoccupied by campaigning for George McGovern, including The Godfather, The Sting, and Butch Cassidy.

He fell in with Polanski anyway, joining a group of men who were more interested in testing the sexual limits of the sixties than the psychedelic ones. The parties were generally every Friday night, and operated out of the Chateau Marmont. Warren was particularly interested in threesomes. His lifestyle did not really bother Christie, who never desired marriage and had no desire for children or a family.

february 1966

The couple began to drift during the shooting of Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller. Christie adored the director's improvisational style, but Beatty couldn't deal with it and forced Altman to storm off the set more than once. Things weren't much better between him and Christie. The two lived apart for much of the shoot and there was not much in the way of affection between them.

with his sister on the set of McCabe & Mrs. Miller Julie and Warren argued constantly. (He would become especially incensed with Christie over a sex scene she did in a Nicholas Roeg film, Don't Look Now.) McCabe and Mrs. Miller did not register with critics or at the box office, and Beatty directed his attention towards the project that would become Shampoo while acting in a variety of other films. Now 36, he was concerned with how aging would affect his box-office appeal. He even considered running for governor of California, figuring that if Reagan could do it, so could he.

with christie in the early 1970sAn affair with the actress Liv Ullmann was the final straw in his relationship with Christie. She would stay close to his sister, and despite his behavior, he was heartbroken over losing her. On the wild set of Shampoo, which he co-wrote with Robert Towne, he struggled with his feelings. The week before filming, he had found his dream house at the top of Mulholland Drive, where he began living with Jack Nicholson's ex-girlfriend Michelle Phillips. He renovated his new pad with an architect recommended by Candice Bergen.

here i dreamt i was an architect - warren's mulholland drive padBeatty was very protective of his relationship with Phillips, and she felt like she was being caged in his renovated house. They never went out. As Phillips said, "he doesn't want anyone to know I'm here." In some ways, he got along better with Michelle's seven-year old daughter Chynna. Although he told others that he wanted to marry his housemate, he was still seeing Christie from time to time behind Michelle's back, and then in front of her face. As Phillips later put it, "If you want a shallow relationship, I can recommend Warren Beatty."

nancy reagan, warren beatty, diane keaton After his successful life-after-death comedy Heaven Can Wait grossed $80 million and a number of Oscars, Beatty pursued another passion project, Reds. He became involved with the thirty-two year old Diane Keaton in 1978 after seeing her in Looking for Mr. Goodbar and becoming obsessed. She was blown away at the idea he would be interested in her – her Academy Award for Annie Hall had helped inflate her in his eyes.

Like many of his past girlfriends, Keaton was extremely demanding, and friends saw them as something like the parody of a middle-aged couple. When she saw that being faithful was not in his makeup, she took care not to fall in love. Keaton would also blame herself for the relationship's failure, saying, "To be with me was just too hard. I think Woody said that being with me was like walking on eggshells."

after winning an Oscar for 'Reds'Still, Keaton would not completely fade out of his life. New loves came in as fast as they had in his twenties. It is impossible to estimate how many women Beatty has actually been with, although some have said that it must number around four figures. Beatty maintained a variety of concurrent relationships through the one technique that never abandoned him: his superior phone conversation skills. In the early 1980, he seduced a vast array of actresses and models, including Mary Tyler Moore, Isabelle Adjani, Britt Eklund, Bitten Knudsen and Janice Dickinson.

with isabelle adjani and dustin hoffman on the set of ishtarSeveral things happened to change Warren's life at the end of the 1980s. The first was that the film he made with Elaine May, Ishtar, became one of the most spectacular failures in Hollywood history, and the second was that Beatty's favorite politican, Gary Hart, was destroyed by an extramarital with a 29 year old model. Because Hart's past and present was basically Beatty's own, the scandal hit him particularly hard, as if he himself had been accused of wrongdoing. The third thing to happen was that Warren's father died.

Dick Tracy, mined from the comics his father used to read to him, would become Beatty's life. A story in the Sunday Times found Beatty claiming that he identified with the protagonist of his comic adaptation as "an aging professional who never married." When he began to shoot the movie in 1989, he dumped actress Joyce Hyser for the 30 year old Madonna, who had been cast as Breathless Mahoney. In a change of pace, it was she who did the pursuing of Warren. According to Suzanne Finstad, he called one of his friends excitedly to say, "You won't believe this: I'm sleeping with Madonna!"

the comic that had a penis for a first nameSandra Bernhard recollected Madonna's premediated intercourse to Peter Biskind: "Madonna and I were in the back of a limo driving to some concert in LA, and she said, ‘Sandy, did you fuck Warren Beatty?’ I said, 'No.' And then a month later she started dating him. I always thought, what if I had said yes; would that have meant she wouldn’t have wanted him? The deal would have been off? I guess she was just testing the waters."

By the Oscars of next year, Madonna was too busy for Warren, and he could not find a date for the event. (He took Jack Nicholson.) As he prepared his next film, the mob drama Bugsy, an actress who auditioned for the part in Dick Tracy that had gone to Glenne Headley caught his attention.

The 31 year old Annette Bening had been a sexpot in Stephen Frears' The Grifters, and her full frontal nudity caught Beatty's attention right away. They met for lunch, and while Warren was sizing up her capacity for motherhood, she looked at the meeting as an audition, conscious that the man was a prolific romancer, and also twenty-one years her elder. He dated 22 year old model Stephanie Seymour for a few months to get his last bachelor urges out of his system and then focused on Bening, who he has been married to since 1992.

On the set of the remake of Love Affair, before their relationship had been consummated, Annette's parents came to visit. They all had a nice dinner together, and as her parents were leaving, he asked to speak to Annette in private. He said, "I want to tell you that I'm not making a pass at you, but if I were to be so lucky as to have that occurrence happen, that I want to assure you that I would try to make you pregnant immediately." He was true to his word, and the couple conceived Kathlyn Beatty that evening.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He twitters here and tumbls here. He last wrote in these pages about the art of the Third Reich.

rehearsing with director jose quintero

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making his TV debut

In Which We Break Jack Nicholson Down Again Into Five Easy Pieces

Playing Piano On Top Of A Truck In Traffic 

by MOLLY LAMBERT

Five Easy Pieces, 1970

dir. Bob Rafelson

MOLLY LAMBERT V. JACK NICHOLSON: ROUND 2

I encountered Jack Nicholson onscreen for the first time in 1997, when I saw James L. Brooks' As Good As It Gets. In that film Jack Nicholson plays a character whose entire existence requires the context of "Jack Nicholson" to make any sense. Here is how I saw it: a sad neurotic old man totally undeserving of love gets his wish fulfillment fantasy via a much younger waitress who doesn't really make any sense as a character and Greg Kinnear is gay. I had never been so mystified to see a movie win so many awards. "Man, Hollywood..." I said, shaking my head perplexedly and being fourteen.

I enjoy an intellectual romantic comedy as much as the next English major but I could not get behind that movie. We're all trying for Annie Hall but there's nothing worse than characters that assume your sympathy without really earning it. Woody's heroes are often horrible people but they manage to be sympathetic. Woody's worst movies have many of the same problems as As Good As It Gets. "You make me want to be a better man." What made you so sure you're such a bad man to begin with Jack? 

My freshman year of college I saw Carnal Knowledge, a movie which opens (semi-hilariously) with Jack Nicholson as a freshman in college. Suddenly I got Jack Nicholson. I got what As Good As It Gets had assumed I would already know. And I understood that the current Jack Nicholson, the grandfatherly type in sunglasses in the front row of the Oscars, still felt exactly the same inside as this guy I really wanted to fuck. And that was really weird, vaguely creepy, confusing, hot, and the very end of puberty.

1970s Jack Nicholson is THE man. He wins everyone over and gives the appearance of not trying. He walks into the room and pushes the needle off the record player. He looks incredible in clothes. He says something completely terrible and insulting and then is forgiven because he smiles to acknowledge that he knows he is being terrible. What he wants he just takes and if he can't get it he destroys property. He is charming but he is also evil. Are all charming people evil? Isn't that sort of what charm is about?

image probably repeated on This Recording the most times in different posts 

Jack Nicholson believes that men are innately different from women ("cunt...can't understand normal thinking") He thinks men have egos that overpower everything around them and appetites that require constant maintenance to be restrained. He does not understand that this is the human condition. It would be insulting to say that he is too old to learn this, but I suspect it is something he has secretly known all along, and that most of being Jack Nicholson is pretending to be "Jack Nicholson" for the enjoyment of people wishing to live vicariously through his imagined lifestyle.

That men have a brute sexuality uncomplicated by emotion is the biggest lie ever. So why is it pushed on us so hard, in Jack, James Bond and Jay-Z? It is the founding lie of rap music and pornography. Remember how cool Jay-Z used to be and how lame he is now that he's crazy in love with Beyoncé? Why did he seem so much cooler when he was pretending like no woman ever had any effect on him? Because the truth; that men are vulnerable, with emotional needs, things projected on people like Jennifer Aniston (who is fine, duh) is so deeply threatening to the present order of the universe. 

The men who admit to these vulnerabilities are free. To quote myself to myself: It's not emasculating if you like it. The other human condition is being deeply horribly sensitive in a way you are convinced must be specific to you. We are all the main protagonist of our own life. That is why Jack Nicholson is so beloved. He is bigger than everyone else onscreen. I don't think everyone who has a good live show hates themselves necessarily, but that is certainly the message suggested by Five Easy Pieces. Plenty of people just hate themselves and don't even have a good live show. 

There's an early scene where two girls hitting on Jack start talking about his hair and he looks tremendously worried all of a sudden, like they might start talking about how he is balding. That men have no physical insecurities is the other biggest lie ever. Vince Vaughn might not have any physical insecurities but damn dude you fell off SO HARD. In Husbands Cassavetes is constantly bringing up his own shortness. Can a woman have a Napoleon complex? I'd still like to be tall every time I'm at a show.

"Hey Dennis. Hey Dennis. Hey Dennis, man. Hey Dennis. I'm going to fuck your wife."

And yet young Jack Nicholson is as attractive as a person could possibly be, in part because he pretends not to care. Is it pretending not to care that is attractive? Actually never caring about anything is completely impossible. We all care in some situations and feel nothing in others. And then pretend to care/not care in various amounts. Thus is Don Draper. Bill Murray's whole pathos is perched on the gulf between them.

We associate sunglasses with cool, and Jack Nicholson with sunglasses. Sunglasses block the eyes from view, thus blocking others from being able to see what emotions a person is actually feeling. They do not prevent you from still feeling those emotions. A character like Jack Nicholson's Bobby in Five Easy Pieces, who so aggressively displays his ability to hurt people and not ever feel bad about it, is more terrified of getting hurt than anything. Hurting other people first is merely a preemptive strike.

Value is largely construct. Competition creates value. I guarantee you Warren Beatty never once left Julie Christie alone with Jack Nicholson. The reason Warren would never have left Julie Christie with Jack Nicholson is because he knows just how easily he Warren Beatty, the great seducer, was seduced by Jack. The weird thing about straight male sexual competition is how little it can have to do with women. That's why it is so refreshing when men treat you like a human being. That it is refreshing is depressing. 

Discussing the Warren Beatty/Jack Nicholson/Dustin Hoffman FMK post Julie Klausner and Natasha Vargas-Cooper wrote for The Hairpin (a truly astonishing piece of writing that is, to quote James L. Brooks on Annie Hall, "like watching a spaceship land") in an e-mail with me Klausner said "Well, the '60s caused the '70s. And in some cases, the '70s caused the '70s. These three bros basically caused the women's movement."

It is not hard to feel totally horrified reading the infamous Teri Garr AV Club interview where she talks about how Dustin Hoffman grabbed her ass in every take of a scene on Tootsie and Sydney Pollack thought it was hilarious. I get the impression this is why Megan Fox actually left Transformers. I want to radicalize Megan Fox so fucking bad. I am sure she has caught on by now that it is still always Mad Men somewhere.

Five Easy Pieces alternately celebrates and repudiates Jack Nicholson's brand of charisma. It is Easy Rider's black swan for sure. It understands that volatility is not without expense, but neither is it without enormous payoffs. Nicholson's character Bobby is not violent, but he uses speech as violently as The Shining's door axe chop. Talking is a sexual act and Jack Nicholson is always trying to fuck everything in sight.

The problem with being a woman and romanticizing a boys' club is that you would not actually be welcome. The fantasy of being welcome there is an impossible fantasy, one nobly attempted by Anjelica Huston. You never feel completely welcome, because your presence makes it into something else. Not all groups of men are boys' clubs. Boys' clubs specifically involve the exclusion of women with the occasional tokenism.

Five Easy Pieces is a slice of life movie. Much of the tension comes from putting characters in rooms together and then leaving the audience in suspense a little bit about what their relationship is to one another. You think Bobby is a blue collar drifter and then it turns out he's an upper class kid trying to escape his intellectual family. It's very beautiful and realist (László Kovács!), evoking Ed Ruscha in the oil fields portion and the figurative work of Fairfield Porter in the last act at the family estate.

The famous "chicken salad sandwich" scene, where Jack as Bobby (but let's face it, Jack) berates a waitress is about the way you put yourself on stage sometimes in order to perform your personality. Involuntary non-genuine performance (as in working retail) is different from voluntary genuine performance. Whether genuine performance is a contradiction is an ultimate question. I had just been talking with Tess about how we both often insist on ordering for everybody at restaurants. What the hell is that about? 

Performing yourself all the time is exhausting. That's why traveling with people is so hard. There's no person that doesn't need downtime from being themselves. The public self is such a weird thing, especially for women. Kartina Richardson wrote a great essay about Black Swan and bathrooms, bathrooms being one of the only places you can escape the gaze of others (also the only thing I remember about The Bell Jar).

Jack Nicholson can be a truly astonishing actor. He may be arrogant bordering on sociopathic, but he earned it with his performances. Towards the end of Five Easy Pieces there's a moment where he stops at a gas station bathroom, looks at himself in the mirror, and you can see him think "Who the fuck are you kidding?" The most performative actor when he speaks, Jack does subtle remarkable work with silences.

He illuminates the intimate connection between the two; performing one's self, which you attempt to control and through that control other people, and then just being one's self, which nobody can control. That's what makes him so magnetic as an actor. He is never just a dick. If he were really just a dick, he would not be nearly as interesting. Jack, it is implied, is only such a dick because he is so deeply emotional. Endlessly relentlessly unable to stop feeling things, always trying to silence his inner self. It is what makes his performance in Chinatown so insanely perfect and poignant.

In Five Easy Pieces Jack Nicholson expounds so much forceful energy creating and implementing his persona, and then is disgusted by anyone who can't immediately see through it to his white hot core of self-loathing. He can't respect anybody who'd respect him. Does Jack Nicholson actually hate himself? His films are constantly positing this as a corrective to his real life image and insane seeming levels of narcissism but it could just be wishful justification for him fucking Paz De La Huerta.

Lest you think only men can be Jack Nicholsons, I give you Paz De La Huerta and Angelina Jolie. All eight hundred kids aside, I'm not sure Angelina Jolie is capable of putting anyone before herself any more than Jack is. When you take Ayn Rand as gospel certainly you can achieve some ambitious goals, but other more mundane ones become impossible. Compromise is seen as weakness, and human relationships require compromise. You can't really love anyone without giving up some control.

Taylor Swift's insane crusade for true love is just as impossible and entitled as Jack Nicholson's endless fuckquest. What is so super hilarious about Taylor Swift and her surprise face is that no amount of fake humility can cover up her tremendous ego, her enormous feelings of entitlement, and barely-disguised Kenny Powers rage that she has not been immediately given everything she feels she justly deserves. She won't own up to her aggression. She is a Jack Nicholson who is a virgin who can't drive. 

Swift's experience with Taylor Lautner seemed to open her up somewhat to realizing that this thing she thought she wanted more than anything might not actually be what she wants at all. That there is a certain perverse pleasure in wanting and getting not necessarily present in having. That she desires John Mayer because she can't have him and doesn't care about Lautner until he is unavailable. That on a sick level she wants it to be hard, correlates difficulty to satisfaction, and like Jack is making everything impossible for herself. Hopefully she figures out next that she's primarily just horny.

Warren Beatty fell in love onscreen a hundred times before he ever fell in love. It's like the gap between John Mayer's music and John Mayer. If Jack Nicholson tells us in films and interviews that he is sensitive, that what he really desires is to be dominated by a woman with a personality as strong as his, does it matter if he's really still out fucking twenty year old cocktail waitresses? I am sure nobody finds the idea that getting laid by a new girl constantly is supposed to be making him happy more ironic than Jack. 

How much of charisma is related to being a prick? I've always respected aggression much more than passivity. We all want to ask for things and be given them. At what point does aggression become poisonous? To what extent does its poisonousness aid in its effectiveness? Kanye, Brando, Tony Soprano, Tony Montana, Frank Sinatra, Don Draper, Kenny Powers, Kobe, LeBron, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Daniel Plainview.

this doesn't need a fucking caption why are you even reading just look at these two

The man with no self-restraint is the American archetype. But he is always just kidding himself that he has no capacity for self-restraint. He restrains himself every day, even if it is mostly to restrain himself from restraining himself. There is wildness in restraint. People like having their bluffs called just as much as they like bluffing. They can't believe everyone buys what they're selling and they secretly hope someone won't.

That is also why I talk about John Mayer so much. If he brought any of the aggression that he brings to his own life to his music, he'd be making early Elvis Costello albums. Although to be fair, those early (perfect) Elvis Costello albums are about my least favorite kind of prick, the person who is a vengeful angry prick about how he's not getting laid, which is really the same kind of prick Taylor Swift is. Ladies is pricks too. 

Everyone is chasing the feeling of winning. The feeling of triumph. And yet while short term success does bring temporary happiness, endlessly chasing ephemeral successes is a guaranteed roadblock to long-term happiness. And then sometimes long-term happiness can get really fucking boring and you remember what you liked in the first place about the whole process of chasing it. No person can always be winning at all times. Into each life a little The Two Jakes/Anger Management/The Fortune must fall.

I also watched Nicholson's directorial debut Drive He Said, which has some genuinely astonishing shots and sequences. One wonders why Nicholson didn't direct more, although the failure of The Two Jakes probably accounts for that (Jack had no chance at topping Polanski). Drive He Said is not a film noir but a coming of age movie about a college basketball player. Nicholson never appears in it, but his aura is spread out among the three main characters. I was never bored and I was occasionally stunned.

The protagonist (William Tepper) is a troubled athlete, possibly more conventionally handsome than Jack but lacking any of his magnetism. The guy utterly looks the part but there is nothing there, no spark. Whatever Jack Nicholson has, this guy doesn't have it, which brings us back to what it is exactly that Jack Nicholson has. Michael Margotta plays the crazy radical roommate like James Franco in Pineapple Express.

Nicholson's deep understanding of cinematic aesthetics makes itself evident immediately. Hidden safely offscreen he elucidates some of his own private themes; the conflict between the athletic physical self and the intellectual spiritual self. Jack exposes the pure graceful masculine performance of basketball as the inspiration for his own acting style and generally proves that he is a sentimental Irish-Catholic boy.

The best and most revelatory performance belongs to Karen Black, who plays Nicholson's conception of a sort of female Jack Nicholson. It is a testament to Karen Black's acting talents that I had no idea she was not really her character in Five Easy Pieces, who is kind of a beautiful idiot. In Drive He Said she plays a female character that is so much more interesting and complex than most of what you see onscreen that it makes you a little depressed there aren't more movies with characters like this.

It's incredible that Jack Nicholson manages to do what seems to elude so many male directors; he gives his female character subjectivity. Karen Black's Olive is judged no more or less harshly than the men. She is naked several times but never merely objectified, which is amazing given Karen Black's cartoonish beauty. She is neither overly idealized nor overly cruel. She is idealized and sentimentalized by the main character but not by the film. Jack Nicholson is not a misogynist. He's a champion of pleasure. He doesn't hate women at all. He loves women. He loves them too much. 

Sometimes when I go in really hard on somebody I can't tell if it's obvious that I'm only going in that hard because I respect them a lot. I went in incredibly hard on Aaron Sorkin because I loved The Social Network. You know what's cooler than being quoted a million times? (yes, you do) Some things you love unconflictedly, but I'm always most drawn to the things that open up internal contradictions. It's not just that I enjoy Jack Nicholson's acting and want to fuck him but that I feel exactly like him constantly. 

I'm writing about him again because of all those contradictions; that me feeling like Jack in no way means that Jack ever thinks he feels like me (the mistake Madonna made when she took on Warren Beatty), that it can be really fun to watch somebody being a prick until they're being one to you, that channelling ability sometimes means having to crush everyone in your path and there's really no way to be nice about it.

That women, starting from birth, are encouraged and expected to be "nice" in ways that men are not, and then are rewarded and punished accordingly throughout their lives. How an old man can live on eternally in the memories of the extremity of his talents as a younger man. I will probably keep writing about Jack Nicholson forever. At least as long as we're still stuck in traffic and I've got this piano on top of this truck.

Molly Lambert is the managing editor of This Recording. She is a writer living in Los Angeles. She twitters here and tumbls here, and runs GIF Party and JPG Club. She last wrote in these pages about author photos.

"In the Real World" - Bright Eyes (mp3)

"Singularity" - Bright Eyes (mp3)

"Lua" - Bright Eyes (mp3)

In Which Pauline Kael Unveils The Face Of Film

Wide-Eyed Wonder

Sex is the great leveler, taste the great divider.

Reading the reviews of Pauline Kael is a pleasure not only because of how often she was right (except with Blade Runner), in retrospect, about what actually made a movie good. It is rewarding because of her descriptions of actresses and actors — beyond taking them to task for their mere talent, she was able to describe the effect they had on people visually and through their continuing cinematic presence. Kael properly deduced that a huge part of going to the movies consisted of how the audience responded to the people on the screen, rather than simply basing her critique on the competence of the writing or the technical aspects of the cinematography. Her sentences in her radio and print reviews about the onscreen talent of the twentieth century rise to the level of expert observation of humanity in all its manifold variety. Here are a few of my favorite descriptions. - A.C.

Marilyn Monroe

Her mixture of wide-eyed wonder and cuddly drugged sexiness seemed to get to just about every male; she turned on even homosexual men. And women couldn't take her seriously enough to be indignant; she was funny and impulsive in a way that made people feel protective. She was a little knocked out; her face looked as if, when nobody was paying attention to her, it would go utterly slack — as if she died between wolf calls.

She seemed to have become a camp siren out of confusion and ineptitude; her comedy was self-satire, and apologetic — conscious parody that had begun unconsciously. She was not the first sex goddess with a trace of somnabulism; Garbo was often a litte out-of-it, Dietrich was numb most of time, and Hedy Lamarr was fairly zonked. But they were exotic and had accents, so maybe audiences didn't wonder why they were in a daze; Monroe's slow reaction time made her seem daffy, and she tricked it up into a comedy style. The mystique of Monroe — which accounts for the book Marilyn — is that she became spiritual as she fell apart. But as an actress she had no way of expressing what was deeper in her except in moodiness and weakness. When she was "sensitive" she was drab.

Paul Newman

Somehow it all reminds one of the old apocryphal story conference — "It's a modern western, see, with this hell-raising, pleasure-loving man who doesn't respect any of the virtues, and, at the end, we'll fool them, he doesn't get the girl and he doesn't change!"

"But who'll want to see that?"

"Oh, that's all fixed — we've got Paul Newman for the part."

They could cast him as a mean man and know that the audience would never believe in his meanness. For there are certain actors who have such extraordinary audience rapport that the audience does not believe in their villainy except to relish in it, as with Brando; and there are others, like Newman, who in addition to this rapport, project such a traditional heroic frankness and sweetness that the audience dotes on them, seeks to protect them from harm or pain. Casting Newman as a mean materialist is like writing a manifesto against the banking system while juggling your investments so you can break the bank.

Barbra Streisand

As Streisand's pictures multiply, it becomes apparent that she is not about to master an actress's craft but, rather, is discovering a craft of her own, out of the timing and emotionality that make her a phenomenon as a singer. You admire her not for her acting — or singing — but for herself, which is what you feel she gives you in both. She has the class to be herself, and the impudent music of her speaking voice is proof that she knows it. The audacity of her self-creation is something we've had time to adjust to; we already knew her mettle, and the dramatic urgency she can bring to roles.

In Up the Sandbox, she shows a much deeper and warmer presence and a freely yielding quality. And a skittering good humor — as if, at last, she had come to accept her triumph, to believe in it. That faint weasellike look of apprehensiveness is gone — and that was what made her seem a little frightening. She is a great undeveloped actress — undeveloped in the sense that you feel the natural richness in her but can see that she's idiocsyncratic and that she hasn't the training to play the classical roles that still define how an actress's greatness is expressed. But in movies new ways may be found.

Warren Beatty

There is a story told against Beatty in a recent Esquire — how during the shooting of Lilith he "delayed a scene for three days demanding the line 'I've read Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov' be changed to 'I've read Crime and Punishment and half of The Brothers Karamazov.'" Considerations of professional conduct aside, what is odd is why his adversaries waited three days to give in, because, of course, he was right. That's what the character he played should say; the other way, the line has no point at all. But this kind of intuition isn't enough to make an actor, and in a number of roles Beatty, probably because he doesn't have the technique to make the most of his lines in the least possible time, has depended too much on intuitive non-acting — holding the screen far too long as he acted out self-preoccupied characters in a lifelike, boringly self-conscious way...

The role of Clyde Barrow seems to have released something in him. As Clyde, Beatty is good with his eyes and mouth and his hat, but his body is still inexpressive; he doesn't have a trained actor's use of his body, and, watching him move, one is never for a minute convinced he's impotent.

Cary Grant

Cary Grant is the male love object. Men want to be as lucky and enviable as he is — they want to be like him. And women imagine landing him. Like Robert Redford, he's sexiest in pictures in which the woman is the aggressor and all the film's erotic energy is concentrated on him, a sit was in Notorious: Ingrid Bergman practically ravished him while he was trying to conduct a phone conversation...

Many men must have wanted to be Clark Gable and look straight at a woman with a faint smirk and lifted, questioning eyebrows. What man doesn't — at some level — want to feel supremely confident and earthy and irresistible? But a few steps up the dreamy social ladder there's the more subtle fantasy of worldly grace — of being so gallant and gentlemanly and charming that every woman longs to be your date. And at that deluxe level men want to be Cary Grant. Men as far apart as John F. Kennedy and Lucky Luciano thought that he should star in their life story. Who but Cary Grant could be a fantasy self-image for a president and a gangster chief? Who else could demonstrate that sophistication didn't have to be a sign of weakness — that it could be the polished, fun-loving style of those who were basically tough? Cary Grant has said that even he wanted to be Cary Grant.

Katharine Hepburn

There were occasions in the past when Hepburn had poor roles and was tremulous and affected — almost a caricature of quivering sensitivity. But at her best — in the archetypal Hepburn role as the tomboy Linda in Holiday, in 1938 — her wit and nonconformity made ordinary heroines seem mushy, and her angular beauty made the round-faced ingénues look piggy and stupid. She was hard where they were soft — in both head and body. (As Spencer Tracy said, in the Brooklyn accent he used in Pat and Mike, "There's not much meat on her, but what's there is cherce." Other actresses could be weak and helpless, but Davis and Hepburn had too much vitality.

Unlike Davis, Hepburn was limited to mandarin roles, although some of her finest performances were as poor girls who were mandarins by nature, as in Little Women and Alice Adams, rather than by birth or wealth, as in Bringing Up Baby and in the movie that the public liked her best in, The Philadelphia Story (even if her dedicated admirers, including me, tended to be less wild about it). Hepburn has always been inconceivable as a coarse-minded character; her bones are too fine, her diction is too crisp, she wears clothes too elegantly. And she has always been too individualistic, too singular, for common emotions. Other actresses who played career girls, like Crawford, could cop out in their roles by getting pregnant, or just by turning emotional — all womanly and ghastly. Hepburn was too hard for that, and so one could go to see her knowing that she wouldn't deteriorate into a conventional heroine that didn't suit her style...

When an actress has been a star for a long time, we know too much about her; for years we have been hearing about her romances or heartbreaks, or whatever the case may be, and all this carries over into her presence on the screen. And if she uses this in a role, she's sunk. When actresses begin to use our knowledge about them and of how young and beautiful they used to be — when they offer themselves up as ruins of their former selves — they may get praise and awards (and they generally do), but it's not really for their acting, it's for capitulating and giving the public what it really wants: a chance to see how the mighty have fallen.

Meryl Streep

Meryl Streep just about always seems miscast. (She makes a career out of seeming to overcome being miscast.) In

Postcards from the Edge [rate:0] unknown votes

 

, she's witty and resourceful, yet every expression is eerily off, not quite human. When she sings in a country-and-Western style, she's note-perfect, but it's like a diva singing jazz — you don't believe it. Streep has a genius for mimicry: she's imitating a country-and-Western singer singing. These were my musings to a friend, who put it more simply: "She's an android." Yes, and it's Streep's android quality that gives Postcards whatever interest it has.

This tale of sorrowful, wisecracking starlet whose brassy, boozing former-star mother (Shirley MacLaine) started her on sleeping pills when she was nine is without the zest of camp. It's camp played borderline straight — a druggy-Cinderella movie about an unformed girl who has to go past despair to find herself. The director, Mike Nichols, is a parodist who feigns sincerity, and his tone keeps slipping around. What's clear is that we're meant to adore the daughter, who is wounded by her mother's cheap competitiveness. Nichols wants us to be enthralled by the daughter's radiant face, her refinement, her honesty. He keeps the camera on Streep as if to prove that he can make her a popular big star — a new Crawford or Bette Davis. (She remains distant, emotionally atonal.)

Replying to Listeners

by PAULINE KAEL

I am resolved to start the New Year right; I don't want to carry over any unnecessary rancor from 1962. So let me discharge a few debts. I want to say a few words about a communication from a woman listener. She begins with, "Miss Kael, I assume you aren't married — one loses that nasty, sharp bite in one’s voice when one learns to care about others."

Isn’t it remarkable that women, who used to pride themselves on their chastity, are now just as complacently proud of their married status? They’ve read Freud and they’ve not only got the illusion that being married is healthier, more "mature," they’ve also got the illusion that it improves their character. This lady is so concerned that I won’t appreciate her full acceptance of femininity that she signs herself with her husband’s name preceded by a Mrs. Why, if this Mrs. John Doe just signed herself Jane Doe, I might confuse her with one of those nasty virgins, I might not understand the warmth and depth of connubial experience out of which she writes.

I wonder, Mrs. John Doe, in your reassuring, protected marital state, if you have considered that perhaps caring about others may bring a bite to the voice? And I wonder if you have considered how difficult it is for a woman in this Freudianized age, which turns out to be a new Victorian age in its attitude to women who do anything, to show any intelligence without being accused of unnatural aggressivity, hateful vindictiveness, or lesbianism. The latter accusation is generally made by men who have had a rough time in an argument; they like to console themselves with the notions that the woman is semi-masculine. The new Freudianism goes beyond Victorianism in its placid assumption that a woman who uses her mind is trying to compete with men. It was bad enough for women who had brains to be considered freaks like talking dogs; now it’s leeringly assumed that they’re trying to grow a penis — which any man will tell you is an accomplishment that puts canine conversation in the shadows.

Mrs. John Doe and her sisters who write to me seem to interpret Freud to mean that intelligence, like a penis, is a male attribute. The true woman is supposed to be sweet and passive — she shouldn’t argue or emphasize and opinion or get excited about a judgment. Sex — or at least regulated marital sex — is supposed to act as a tranquilizer. In other words, the Freudianized female accepts that whole complex of passivity that the feminists battled against.

Mrs. Doe, you know something, I don't mind sounding sharp — and I’ll take my stand with those pre-Freudian feminists; and you know something else, I think you’re probably so worried about competing with male egos and those brilliant masculine intellects that you probably bore men to death.

This lady who attacks me for being nasty and sharp goes on to write, "I was extremely disappointed to hear your costic speech on and about the radio station, KPFA. It is unfortunate you were unable to get a liberal education, because that would have enabled you to know that a great many people have many fields of interest, and would have saved you from displaying your ignorance on the matter." She, incidentally, displays her liberal education by spelling caustic c-o-s-t-i-c, and it is with some expense of spirit that I read this kind of communication. Should I try to counter my education — liberal and sexual—against hers, should I explain that Pauline Kael is the name I was given at birth, and that it does not reflect my marital vicissitudes which might over-complicate nomenclature?

It is not really that I prefer to call myself by my own name and hence Miss that bothers her or the other Mrs. Does, it is that I express ideas she doesn’t like. If I called myself by three names like those poetesses in the Saturday Review of Literature, Mrs. Doe would still hate my guts. But significantly she attacks me for being a Miss. Having become a Mrs., she has gained moral superiority: for the modern woman, officially losing her virginity is a victory comparable to the Victorian woman’s officially keeping hers. I’m happy for Mrs. Doe that she’s got a husband, but in her defense of KPFA she writes like a virgin mind. And is that really something to be happy about?

Mrs. Doe, the happily, emotionally-secure-mature-liberally-educated-womanly-woman has her opposite number in the mailbag. Here is a letter from a manly man. This is the letter in its entirety:

Dear Miss Kael,

Since you know so much about the art of the film, why don’t you spend your time making it? But first, you will need a pair of balls.

Mr. Dodo (I use the repetition in honor of your two attributes), movies are made and criticism is written by the use of intelligence, talent, taste, emotion, education, imagination, and discrimination. I suggest it is time you and your cohorts stop thinking with your genital jewels. There is a standard answer to this old idiocy of if-you-know-so-much-about-the-art-of-the-film-why-don’t-you-make-movies. You don’t have to lay an egg to know if it tastes good. If it makes you feel better, I have worked making movies, and I wasn’t hampered by any biological deficiencies.

Others may wonder why I take the time to answer letters of this sort: the reason is that these two examples, although cruder than most of the mail, simply carry to extremes the kind of thing so many of you write. There are, of course, some letter writers who take a more “constructive” approach. I’d you to read you part of a long letter I received yesterday:

I haven’t been listening to your programs for very long and haven’t heard all of them since I began listening … But I must say that while I have been listening, I have not heard one favorable statement made of any “name” movie made in the last several years…. I have heard no movie which received any kind of favorable mention which was not hard to find playing, either because of its lack of popularity or because of its age. In your remarks the other evening about De Sica’s earlier movies you praised them all without reservation until you mentioned his "most famous film — The Bicycle Thief, a great work, no doubt, though I personally find it too carefully and classically structured." You make me think that the charge that the favorability of your comments on any given movie varies inversely with its popularity, is indeed true even down to the last nuance.

But even as I write this, I can almost feel you begin to tighten up, to start thinking of something to say to show that I am wrong. I really wish you wouldn’t feel that way. I would much rather you leaned back in your chair, looked up at the ceiling and asked yourself, “Well, how about it? Is it true or not? Am I really biased against movies other people like, because they liked them? When I see a popular movie, do I see it as it is or do I really just try to pick it apart?” You see, I’m not like those other people that have been haranguing you. I may be presumptuous, but I am trying sincerely to be of help to you. I think you have a great deal of potential as a reviewer…. But I am convinced that great a potential as you have, you will never realize any more of that potential than you have now until you face those questions mentioned before, honestly, seriously, and courageously, no matter how painful it may be. I want you to think of these questions, I don’t want you to think of how to convince me of their answers. I don’t want you to look around to find some popular movie to which you can give a good review and thus “prove me wrong.” That would be evading the issue of whether the questions were really true or not. Furthermore, I am not “attacking” you and you have no need to defend yourself to me.

May I interrupt? Please, attack me instead — it’s this kind of “constructive criticism” that misses the point of everything I’m trying to say that drives me mad. It’s enough to make one howl with despair, this concern for my potential — as if I were a cow giving thin milk. But back to the letter—

In fact, I would prefer that you make no reply to me at all about the answers to these questions, since I have no need of the answers and because almost any answer given now, without long and thoughtful consideration, would almost surely be an attempt to justify yourself, and that’s just what you don’t have to do, and shouldn’t do. No one needs to know the answers to these questions except you, and you are the only person who must answer. In short, I would not for the world have you silence any voices in you … and most certainly not a concerned little voice saying, “Am I really being fair? Do I see the whole movie or just the part I like—or just the part I don’t like?"

And so on he goes for another few paragraphs. Halfway through, I thought this man was pulling my leg; as I got further and read "how you missed the child-like charm and innocence of The Parent Trap … is quite beyond me," I decided it’s mass culture that’s pulling both legs out from under us all. Dear man, the only real question you letter made me ask myself is, “What’s the use?” and I didn’t lean back in my chair and look up at the ceiling, I went to the liquor cabinet and poured myself a good stiff drink.

How completely has mass culture subverted even the role of the critic when listeners suggest that because the movies a critic reviews favorably are unpopular and hard to find, that the critic must be playing some snobbish game with himself and the public? Why are you listening to a minority radio station like KPFA? Isn’t it because you want something you don’t get on commercial radio? I try to direct you to films that, if you search them out, will give you something you won’t get from The Parent Trap.

You consider it rather “suspect” that I don’t raise more “name” movies. Well, what makes a “name” movie is simply a saturation advertising campaign, the same kind of campaign that puts samples of liquid detergents at your door. The “name” pictures of Hollywood are made the same way they are sold: by pretesting the various ingredients, removing all possible elements that might affront the mass audience, adding all possible elements that will titillate the largest number of people. As the CBS television advertising slogan put it—“Titillate—and dominate.” South Pacific is seventh in Variety’s list of all-time top grossers. Do you know anybody who thought it was a good movie? Was it popular in any meaningful sense or do we just call it popular because it was sold? The tie-in campaign for Doris Day in Lover Come Back included a Doris Day album to be sold for a dollar with a purchase of Imperial margarine. With a schedule of 23 million direct mail pieces, newspaper, radio, TV and store ads, Lover Come Back became a “name” picture.

I try not to waste air time discussing obviously bad movies — popular though they may be; and I don’t discuss unpopular bad movies because you’re not going to see them anyway; and there wouldn’t be much point or sport in hitting people who are already down. I do think it’s important to take time on movies which are inflated by critical acclaim and which some of you might assume to be the films to see.

There were some extraordinarily unpleasant anonymous letters after the last broadcast on The New American Cinema. Some were obscene; the wittiest called me a snail eating the tender leaves off young artists. I recognize your assumptions: the critic is supposed to be rational, clever, heartless and empty, envious of the creative fire of the artists, and if the critic is a woman, she is supposed to be cold and castrating. The artist is supposed to be delicate and sensitive and in need of tender care and nourishment. Well, this nineteenth-century romanticism is pretty silly in twentieth-century Bohemia.

I regard criticism as an art, and if in this country and in this age it is practiced with honesty, it is no more remunerative than the work of an avant-garde film artist. My dear anonymous letter writers, if you think it is so easy to be a critic, so difficult to be a poet or a painter or film experimenter, may I suggest you try both? You may discover why there are so few critics, so many poets.

Some of you write me flattering letters and I’m grateful, but one last request: if you write me, please don’t say, "This is the first time I've ever written a fan letter." Don’t say it, even if it's true. You make me feel as if I were taking your virginity — and it’s just too sordid.

You can find more by Pauline Kael here.

"The Lucky Ones" - Brendan James (mp3)

"Nothing for Granted" - Brendan James (mp3)

"Emerald Sky" - Brendan James (mp3)