And I did get a second chance. Just after Wild Turkey was published, there was another round of buzz. Someone even told me that Warren Beatty was showing up at parties with a copy of my book in his hip pocket, telling people he wanted to play the lead. Flattering though it was, that seemed strange to me. The very WASP-y Beatty didn’t seem like much of a fit with the Jewish Moses Wine (I’d imagined Dreyfuss from the start), and in those days I had no idea Beatty was remotely political. I still saw him as the pretty boy who made his mark opposite Natalie Wood in Splendor in the Grass and then continued to amass a long list of equally glamorous leading ladies. In any event, nothing happened and that gossip disappeared into the great maw of the movie business when Warner Brothers bought the rights to Wild Turkey for producer Gene Corman, brother of the notorious Roger Corman of low-budget horror fame.
I worked on a script for Gene, which, to my surprise and pleasure, the studio actually liked on its first submission. Everything moved swiftly. Gene, the Warners executive in charge of the project, and I agreed that Richard Dreyfuss should play Moses. Richard was living in Malibu then, not working. I heard the studio was about to make him a “pay-or-play” offer (usually a guarantee of production, as they didn’t want to “pay” without the “play”) of $500,000—a decent fee in 1975. I also heard that Richard was primed to accept it. All that we needed was the final okay from former agent Ted Ashley, who was then CEO of Warners.
It never came. The script was placed in the dreaded “turn-around,” a process by which the studio returns the now tarnished screenplay to the producer to find financing elsewhere—not an easy thing, since the original studio usually attaches onerous inflated costs. Corman, however, was determined to get my script done, convincing me against my better judgment to bowdlerize my work in the time-honored Hollywood tradition. First we made Moses Wine not Jewish (Jewish characters were generally considered a no-no, despite the large number of Jews in the Industry), then not a detective (there were too many detective movies—we made him city attorney); then we moved the locale from Los Angeles to Atlanta. None of this worked, as acts of desperation rarely do.
The whole affair made me depressed and ornery, so, again in the time-honored Hollywood tradition, I blamed my agent. At this point it was William Morris, but I had several suitors, including Ziegler Ross and Adams, Ray & Rosenberg, both known as respected “literary” agencies. (I put that in quotes because what passed for literary in Hollywood would set eyes rolling in Manhattan. They were the best of a dubious crop.) The Morris office knew that I was ready to jump and asked what they could do for me. I said that whatever it was, they should do it soon, because I was considering other options.
They were aware of Warren Beatty’s interest in my books. He was a William Morris client, so I had an appointment with him almost immediately; as luck would have it, he lived in a penthouse at the top of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, only a moment’s walk from William Morris.
I don’t remember my heart thumping as I rode up the private elevator at the Wilshire, but it surely must have been. It’s hard to fix dates so long ago, but it had to have been late 1975 or early 1976, as you will see. The elevator opened on Beatty’s apartment, which, though it was supposed to be a penthouse, didn’t seem remotely like one. It was a dank place, books and scripts scattered about, making it more like the home of a messy grad student than of a movie star. Warren, who was sitting in the middle of this jumble in his shirtsleeves, gestured for me to enter. He was on the phone but was off quickly and flashed the charismatic smile that the world knew well from the movies.
Beatty’s “star wattage” was at its peak, thanks to a virtually unbroken line of hits from Bonnie and Clyde to McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Shampoo and The Parallax View. I am not the first to note this, but encounters with Beatty are almost always a form of seduction. In the case of men, he goes for your talent. He had read my work and was aware of my leftism, obviously, but I was still surprised that the first thing out of his mouth after saying hello was whether I knew who John Reed was. Sure, I quickly replied, mentioning Ten Days That Shook the World, Reed’s seminal 1919 work on the Russian Revolution, as if I had read it. I hadn’t. Well, Beatty continued, he was planning on directing and starring in a biographical movie about Reed and his relationship to Louise Bryant—the Marxist/anarchist and proto-feminist glamour girl of journalism. It’d be an epic of romance, politics, and revolution. He was planning on picking a screenwriter soon, and wanted to know if I was interested. It was between Paddy Chayevsky and me.
At that point the phone rang again. I was relieved; if it hadn’t, I might have fainted. Forget Moses Wine and the horse he rode in on. There was nothing I could have imagined wanting to write more than this, though I knew that Chayevsky—the author of Marty, The Americanization of Emily , and Hospital—meant stiff, probably impossible, competition.
The call turned out to be from Jimmy Carter. That’s how I can recall that this meeting took place in late 1975 to early 1976; Carter was just launching his run for the presidency. I listened as the Southern governor kowtowed and kissed up to the movie star in search of his support, which obviously meant money and a significant endorsement, also entrée into the liberal Hollywood crowd. The name “Jack” was mentioned. Warren seemed to be enjoying the exchange and was acting out a bit for my benefit. This was my first brush with the Hollywood-Washington nexus, which is now a commonplace.
When he hung up, Beatty asked if I thought Carter would make a good president. I don’t remember my answer, but I probably equivocated. (Now I would just snort.) I was far more interested in my own advancement, and I didn’t want to disturb that possibility with any rash statements. Beatty didn’t do much to tip his hand either. As I later learned, that was typical Warren. He played footsie with politicians the same way he played footsie with potential film collaborators (and, needless to say, girlfriends), relishing his power until he made a decision based on a timetable known only to him—and probably not even to him. The same ambivalence has been apparent in his own tentative steps into electoral politics, when he’s been touted for the California governorship or the Senate, and has publicly played with the idea and then backed away. I was never surprised. He is far too much of a control freak to tolerate the hurly-burly of politics, in which it’s highly difficult to regulate your press in the way a movie star of his stature is used to doing. And he was more obsessive about that than most of them. This is a man who definitely only wants to be photographed one way.
To be fair, Warren was the only person on the Hollywood Left who has ever impressed me with his knowledge of radical politics. That’s not necessarily saying much, but he was familiar with the finer points of theory to a degree that would have left most of his entertainment industry colleagues—and probably some college professors—glassy-eyed. I heard years later that his name appears on the checkout list for several arcane texts about socialist history—works on the Third International and such—at Harvard’s Widener Library. Does that mean he really read them? No, but I suspect that he may have while writing Reds, the movie he was dreaming that day we met in the mid-Seventies. Reds, his highly romantic version of the John Reed-Louise Bryant story, finally reached the theaters in 1981, with Warren playing Reed and Diane Keaton as Bryant. Beatty won the Oscar for directing the film. Its Oscar-nominated screenplay is credited to Beatty and British playwright Trevor Griffiths—no Roger Simon or Paddy Chayevsky in sight.
I may have lost my chance at writing it a few days after that first meeting. I received a phone call from Warren out of the blue asking whether my wife and I would like to go out to dinner that night with him and “Michelle.” By Michelle I knew he meant his main squeeze “Mama” Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas. Dyanne and I had another engagement that night, to go to a spiritualist “table tapping” (calling forth of ancestors) with our friend the anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff. (Barbara apparently believed in such things.) Careerist that I was, I was more than willing to cancel and dine with Warren and Michelle. Dyanne wasn’t, and insisted, for whatever reason, that we honor our obligation to Barbara. I remember fighting about this, claiming that the “table tapping” was nonsense, anyway, but Dyanne wouldn’t relent. Off