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Excerpt: 'Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America'

NPR | By Peter Biskind

Published February 23, 2010 at 5:45 PM EST

Chapter 5: Don Juan In Hell

Shampoo opened on February 11, 1975, one of the worst times to release a picture, months too early for Oscar awareness. [Producer Don] Devlin, who had another movie with Columbia (Harry and Walter Go to New York), happened to be in [Columbia Pictures chief] Begelman's office "when the Teletypes started coming in with the critics' reviews of Shampoo. They loved it. He should have been elated — the studio was saved, he was going to be thrust into the limelight as this great executive — but he was totally shocked and depressed because his judgment was wrong. He had put all of his bets on the other horse, The Fortune."

The reviewers were mostly ecstatic, but under the sway of auteurism, and showing how little they knew about how films were actually made, they reflexively treated Shampoo as a "Hal Ashby" film. Vincent Canby wrote in The New York Times, "Hal Ashby's Shampoo remains the American film comedy of the year. A witty, furtively revolutionary comedy of manners." Writing in The New Yorker, Pauline Kael, a closet auteurist herself, raved, "Shampoo is the most virtuoso example of sophisticated kaleidoscopic farce that American moviemakers have ever come up with." Beatty and [Shampoo cowriter Robert] Towne had been courting her, and it worked. "Warren and Bob Towne recognized her value, and they were going to snow her, work her," says Paul Sylbert. "They could smell that this woman was a perfect setup for this kind of thing. It was very conscious." She was susceptible to the blandishments of stars, especially star auteurs and glib writers who practiced on her vanity, dazzled her with their attention. "Everyone knew that Kael was feedable, that if you sat next to her and got her drunk, and fed her some lines, you could get it replayed in some other form," says Buck Henry. "There's a trick that Warren and Jack [Nicholson] had with intellectual women. They would turn them on by suggesting that they were hot for them. If any woman had shown up from the Partisan Review, they would have commented on how beautiful she was. Rose Bird was the chief justice of the California Supreme Court, widely condemned for her liberal death penalty decisions, and ultimately run off the court. Warren and Jack told her she was glamorous and sexy, a hot babe, and if that isn't a turn on to a woman who has spent most of her life in law school, nothing is. They seduced Pauline Kael with ideas, with their scripts."

Beatty arranged a special screening for Kael, along with Towne, Michelle Phillips, and Kael's friend, Richard Albarino. According to him, they sat around and discussed the movie afterward, and then went out for drinks. "She'd take out her notebook and say, 'Oh, that's really good,' and write it down. She'd be very bald about it." When she came to L.A., Towne took her out to Trader Vic's. "Towne had Kael wrapped around his finger," says Henry. Indeed, Towne, the co writer, rather than Beatty or Ashby, was the focus of her review, just as [writers Robert] Benton and [David] Newman were the focus of her famous piece on Bonnie and Clyde. Towne has a cameo in the picture, and she flattered him by writing that he looked like Albrecht Durer. He started dropping her name in conversation in a way that suggested that he and Kael were intimates, that he had explained his views to her — that Shampoo was a version of Renoir's Rules of the Game and Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night. When her review came out, it was sprinkled with references to Bergman's film. No one could prove it of course, but people were suspicious. "You think Kael recognized what was behind Shampoo?" continues Henry. "He told her."

According to Beatty, Towne called Kael almost every day when she was at The New Yorker, and dropped her when she retired. Towne got to all the critics, he says, except for Canby. Beatty claims that the writer never liked the ending of Shampoo, and called Time magazine critic Jay Cocks to discuss it with him before Cocks wrote his review — in which he criticized the ending, to wit, "The ending is a betrayal of all that is best in the film, revealing that the film makers have been interested in apologizing for George, not satirizing him."