[Robert Sellers]Hollywood Hellraisers

Author:Unknown
Format: epub

I’m not even supposed to know girls like that exist.

After his Broadway flop Warren Beatty was to find another mentor in Elia Kazan, who fastened on to the young hopeful straight away. ‘He was awkward in a way that was attractive,’ said Kazan. ‘He was very, very ambitious. He had a lot of hunger.’ Immediately the director launched Warren’s film debut Splendour in the Grass (1961), yet another in a long line of movies exploring how shitty it was to be a teenager with a hard on and square parents.

As he prepared for the role Joan Collins dropped a bombshell — she was pregnant. Warren let the news sink in before enquiring how it had happened. ‘The butler did it,’ Joan quipped. Both knew the timing was lousy, that as a couple they were simply too immature and careerorientated to start a family. But on the drive over to the abortionist Joan suddenly had second thoughts. At odds with his own raw emotions, Warren tried reassuring her and the abortion went ahead; Joan described the experience as ‘horrifying’.

The incident didn’t bode very well for their relationship, though Warren stunned Joan one day by proposing marriage, only to later accuse her of having an affair. He’d got marriage jitters and Joan knew it; he just wasn’t ready to settle down. An astrologer had told her as much, that as an Aries Warren was, ‘ruled by his cock’ and wouldn’t get married, ‘for a long time. Probably not until he’s forty-five or older. After many, many women.’ The astrologer added, ‘He will need a constant inflation of his ego — one woman will not satisfy him sexually.’ Prophetic, or what!

Cast alongside Warren in Splendour was Natalie Wood and at first the two disliked each other intensely. Well established as an actress by now, her affair with Hopper a distant memory, there was no way Natalie was going to put up with a temperamental and egotistical newcomer who proved so difficult to work with that she christened him ‘Mental Anguish’. ‘Here comes MA,’ she’d joke as Warren sauntered onto the set. Having to share a make-up room increased the friction, which got so bad the producer told a crew hand, ‘Natalie can’t stand him, she wants him out of there.’

For one thing Natalie couldn’t get a handle on Warren’s vanity. Joan Collins once quipped that Warren was ‘the only man to get to the mirror faster than me’. One morning assistant director Don Kranze caught the actor grooming himself by separating, with surgical precision, each individual eyelash with a pin. ‘This is six feet of pure ego,’ said Kranze. Warren ended up wasting so much time gazing at his own image that Kazan had every mirror in his dressing room covered up. The fact that he was an Adonis was undisputed, but such preening got the crew’s backs up and they nicknamed him ‘Donkey Dick’. After filming Kranze summed up Warren as, ‘a pain in the ass. His emotional maturity was about thirteen.’

Suddenly things changed, or they did for Natalie.

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