Star: The Life and Wild Times of Warren Beatty by Peter Biskind

Star: The Life and Wild Times of Warren Beatty Reviews

• 
  Toby

  Peter Biskind says it himself in the introduction, Warren Beatty didn't really want to participate in the writing of this biography despite virtually commissioning it, and that his reticence was transferred to pretty much every major player from his life who was still alive. This is not the hallmark of a great living biography. It comes across in Biskind's text quite readily too, plenty of repetition in place of interesting new insight. Generally I enjoy Biskind's writing style and from the little bits and pieces on Beatty that are included in
  Easy Riders, Raging Bulls I was intrigued enough to covet a copy of this book from the moment of publication. But not enough to go out and buy it in hard cover. Impatience and a booksale won out and for the past week or so I have been hefting around this giant brick of a book for what turns out to be no reason at all.
  
  I admit that my interest was in how Beatty became a star, the rise of that star within New Hollywood and his relationship with Annette Benning once he decided to abandon his playboy womanising lifestyle. Biskind hits two out of three of these segments very well very early on, leaving a lot of hearsay filler which essentially just showed how Beatty repeats the same mistakes continuously, as he values himself above all else and quite willingly treats people like shit whilst generally making them feel good about it. I don't dislike Beatty for this; the man has talent and has done some great things in cinema, he has a way of seducing women that none of them ever seem to complain about and that's all fine too, I just wish this had been a much less important part of the biography.
  
  I've just finished reading it and I can't recall much being said about his life outside of Hollywood, what he is like as a father and husband, do these things not define a man as much as his ability to have sex with every woman he meets? In other ways Biskind is the perfect biographer, being one of the many who idolise Beatty, he presents a case for him as one of the most under appreciated visionary film makers of all time whilst at the same time allowing his own disappointed fandom to shine through the text as the end of Beatty's career is seen as being one of a great talent wasted by vanity and narcissism.
• 
  Erin

  I didn't know much about Warren Beatty before picking up this book. I had seen a couple of movies he was in Bulworth, Town & Country, Dick Tracy, and Rules Dont Apply but I never saw them because of Warren Beatty. I of course also saw him in Madonna's infamous documentary/concert film Truth or Dare but at the time I didn't know who he was. I went into this book with a clean slate when it came to Warren Beatty.
  
  So after reading this what do I think of Mr. Beatty?
  
  I dont like him.
  
  At all!
  
  And my dislike of him makes me kind of dislike his uber talented wife Annette Bening.
  
  Warren Beatty is a man of his times. He came of age in Hollywood during the 1950's and 60's and he lived life with that very misogynistic worldview. He was known as a Hollywood man whore..I mean a Hollywood playboy. He slept with half of the women in Hollywoodand possibly a few men(It's never quite clear). He apparently hated condoms and tried to seduce a 15 year old Carrie Fisher(he was almost 40)
  
  I didn't like Warren but the book wasn't a complete waste of time because I did enjoy the stories about what happened behind the scenes of his movies. A few books could be written about just the making of Bonnie and Clyde or Ishtar. I much preferred hearing about the politics behind getting a film made, than yet another story about how a middle aged Warren seduced a 22 year old aspiring actress.
  
  No rec but I'm also not saying you shouldn't read it. If you like behind the scenes stories about movies you might have seen than pick it up but just be prepared to dislike Mr Beatty.
  
  
• 
  Donald Trump (Parody)

  You gotta be fuckin' kiddin me. I don't get invited to that COWARD McCain's funeral, but this scumfuck is a pallbearer? When I heard he was gonna be there I picked up this book to see what the big deal was, and I just don't see it, folks. There's no way he got that much action. I mean the guy's pecker woulda fallen off. Me on the other hand, everything you've heard is true, I'm not ashamed to say it. I'm a real animal when it comes to tail-chasing. This Beatty guy wasn't even good looking. I mean his hands were just so tiny you could barely see them. How does this guy get to go to McCain's going away party and I don't? I tell you, folks, I had disagreements with the guy but I thought he woulda had some fuckin' class at the end of the day. Old fart couldn't keep it together, he was obviously crazy. He probably didn't even know this guy. This Beatty fuck couldn't even read a stupid Oscar envelope, how is he gonna be a pallbearer? You know, I think I'm just gonna show up. What're they gonna do, kick me out? I'm the fuckin' President and I feel very underappreciated. SHAMEFUL!
• 
  Tom Hamilton

  You can tell this is an authorized bio. Why else would Biskind say something like "Bugsy was far and away the best picture that year". Really, better than Silence of the Lambs, that ended up winning the Oscar? Maybe you think so Peter, but it's certainly debatable.
  
  There's also a section where he talks about "how many defining motion pictures does a filmmaker have to make to be considered great?" He gives Beatty three as a director: Heaven Can Wait, Reds and Bulworth. He only gives Sam Peckinpah one: The Wild Bunch. So Bulworth and Heaven Can Wait are great films, but Straw Dogs and The Ballad of Cable Hogue are not? Fucking absurd.
  
  He also claims Beatty is a better director than Clint Eastwood. False.
  
  Despite Biskind's questionable taste, this book is fun. The tone is very gossipy, which fits this subject perfectly. Sometimes the conversational tone leads to sentence structures that don't scan very well, but that's an easy problem to gloss over, as the book has an unstoppable momentum. Just like Beatty.
• 
  Judith

  "Madonna turned thirty-two on August 16. She picked up Tony Ward, age twenty-seven, on the beach at Malibu during a party thrown for her by friends. Recalls Jeremy Pikser, who had been hired by both Beatty and Madonna to write scripts, 'He tried to stay friends with her but she was mad at him. ' There was some backing and forthing about which script Pikser would write first. "
  
  Is this a new stream-of-consciousness style of writing biographies? Who writes like this? In one part of one paragraph we meet Tony Ward (never to be seen or heard from again) and a script-writer who opines about Beatty and Madonna's relationship; and learn about "backing and forthing" presumably a description of dialogue. I am guessing these statements have something to do with each other but not the usual something. Is Beatty mad at Madonna about Tony Ward? Is Madonna mad at Beatty about the script-writer?
  
  And this is the tip of the iceberg. The whole book is like this. I did learn that Jane Fonda purportedly was talented at oral sex because her jaw was double-jointed like a python. sigh. TMI.
• 
  Kit Fox

  I almost don't care what the subject is, I'll grind a Peter Biskind book up into a fine powder and do massive rails of it off my coffee table. His writing is always entertaining as shit and he never ceases to dig up some serious dirt. One kinda awkward stylistic thing, though: I noticed several pop culture references that could best be described as "a couple of years ago." Case in point: I noticed two references to HBO's Big Love and one apiece to Borat, Paris Hilton, and Amy Winehouse going to rehab. 'Sup with that? Maybe he had E! News on in the background when he was writing this. Highly addictive stuff either way, though. And I do hope Beatty gets around to making his Howard Hughes film. That'd be beyond epic.
• 
  F.R.

  A fascinating book about someone who holds himself almost divinely remote. A story of a great seducer, whose subject does not come across all that well. It almost feels like Peter Biskind – who met with Beatty – has come through the other side and is now left cold by him. It’s not Roger Lewis’s book on Peter Sellers, or Shaun Levy’s on Jerry Lewis – both of which actively dislike their subjects – but it doesn’t leave you feeling warm hearted towards the man.
  
  There’s not much childhood here, instead it’s almost immediately into SPLENDOUR IN THE GRASS, then revolutionising the industry with BONNIE & CLYDE, and on to his triumphant period of the Seventies and then the falling off in the Eighties and Nineties. Interspersed is a lot of stuff about Beatty the lothario. There’s only one film this book doesn’t cover (the terrible RULES DON’T APPLY), but in its depth and research, this is probably as good as book as you’re going to get about the man.
  
  In the introduction, Biskind muses that no one under forty (or indeed fifty) cares who Beatty is. That’s possibly true. For whatever reason, most of his films have not stayed in the public consciousness. As such, because in the future there may not be the biographers willing to give the time to work on such a book about the man, this might be the best biography we ever get about him. So it’s interesting that for this great charmer, we end up with a book where he seems a lot more infuriating than charming.
• 
  Michael Martin

  Peter Biskind is an obvious fan of film, and has written some truly insightful books about the American film industry, of which my favorite is "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls."
  
  This book, "Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America," is not quite in that league, but is still a fun summer read. It is an insightful look into the making of Beatty's great films (Bonnie and Clyde, Shampoo, Heaven Can Wait, Reds) as well as his duds (Town and Country, Love Affair, Ishtar). It gives you an amazing sense of what baggage comes with talent, and how infuriating it must have been to be on a set with him. I admire not only those successful four films, but many of his other efforts also. For instance, McCabe and Mrs. Miller (directed by Robert Altman) has held up amazingly well.
  
  A great deal of this 600-page book is obsessed with Beatty's sexual escapades in his pre-Annette Bening years. If even HALF of these stories were true (and I suspect most are, as the book has a 30-page footnote section of who supplied the quotes and info), you gotta at least give the old dude credit for stamina and unbelievably weird narcissism. I particularly like the detail that he'd only shoot close-ups for three hours in the late morning, after cucumber slices had been resting on his eyes to bring any puffiness down.
  
  It's a great, fun, trashy summer read.
• 
  Dick

  Make sure you have the hand sanitiser ready when you read this because you will feel grubby after you put it down.
  
  Biskind is a decent writer (although he does expect you to retain a lot of names in your head as you read.) His problem is the subject of the book - Warren Beatty.
  
  I started reading feeling fairly neutral towards Beatty (I bought it cheaply and have a general interest in movies) and ended it thouroughly disliking him.
  
  Although Biskind treats Beatty as a talent worthy of great respect Beatty still come off very poorly. He comes across as a sleazy narcissist with appalling taste in friends (one close one being writer/director James Toback who has been accused of sexual wrong doing by over 300 women).
  
  Beatty also comes across as the worst type of Hollywood liberal. He likes to present himself as to the left of the democratic party but is responsible for Bulworth a movie in which he (a fifty something white politician) is transformed by a relationship with a 29 year younger Halle Berry. This takes the form of him wearing a baseball cap and rapping. Cultural appropriation and use of the "magical negro" trope all in one film.
  
  I'm a big movie fan and enjoy reading about the making of them but I'm bored of reading about white male directors who prove their macho bona fides by treating people shabbily. I look forward to reading more about directors and writers such as Marielle Heller, Sofia Coppola, Greta Grewig and Ava Du Vernay.
  
  
  
• 
  Cat

  I wanted to like this book. I actually wanted to learn more about Beatty's filmmaking. Sadly, I did not. I knew it was going to be a bit trashy when, still on the first half of the first CD, I learned what made Jane Fonda give such great blow jobs. Gross. I did get 3/4 of the way through it but didn't finish. Really just the same story over and over again. New film, halfway through, broke up with then girlfriend, on to next film. There was no real insight into Warren Beatty. And yes, I get that he's a an introspective man, albeit an empathetic one. But if you want to learn anything about him, this ain't the book for that.
• 
  Ryan

  I forgot to log this. Warren Beatty’s greatest asset as a movie star is his willingness to look like an idiot. This book is really fascinating. I think Peter Biskind is the best journalist at writing about Hollywood. Sound off in the comments for similar recs, please.
• 
  Paul Lyons

  It might be just too easy to place harsh judgement on legendary movie star Warren Beatty after reading Peter Biskind's giant biography "Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America." Given Warren Beatty's distaste for interviews and his wish to keep his private life, private, it can be argued that Beatty is academically unknowable, and an impossible subject for any and all writers who dare to chronicle and discuss in detail the wide berth of this unique Hollywood movie star's life, and love(s). Though well-written, and meticulously researched by the author (who happens to have some sort of friendly-semi-professional acquaintanceship with the "Star" himself), one can't help but feel at least a little concerned that Biskind's book makes Warren Beatty look consistently bad, very bad.
  
  Setting out on a 600-plus page journey in an attempt to cover Warren Beatty's entire life from birth in 1937, to his time in the early 21st century, and left without Beatty's authorization, and minus the participation of the "Star"s closest friends and family, the author took everything he DID have access to, and spun a yarn that not only covers Warren Beatty's early career in New York, yet also each and every movie (more, and less) that Beatty worked on, was involved with and starred in...AND, of course...the multitude of women that Warren Beatty dated, courted, hit on, and yes...married, AND...not forgoing Beatty's dip into politics! SO, yes...despite a very large handicap, Peter Biskind made the most of what he had, what he could research, and what he could dig up.
  
  On the positive side, it was very enjoyable to read about the making of some of Warren Beatty's best films, such as BONNIE AND CLYDE, SHAMPOO, HEAVEN CAN WAIT, REDS, BUGSY and (arguably) BULWORTH, as well as some of the worst films he was involved with such as ISHTAR, LOVE AFFAIR and TOWN & COUNTRY. Peter Biskind does seem to paint quite a vivid portrait of what it was like working with the writers and the film studios in developing these films, and being on set, in the editing room, and so on until the big marketing push to release.
  
  Also on the positive side, the author takes great pains to present as full a painting as possible in so far as Warren Beatty's relationships with actresses, models, and other noteworthy women such as Jane Fonda, Joan Collins, Natalie Wood, Cher, Leslie Caron, Julie Christie, Diane Keaton, Joyce Hyser, Stephanie Seymour and Annette Bening...to name a few. More than a basic kiss-and-tell, the author does his best to showcase where relationships went right, where they went wrong, and how much Warren Beatty was in control of the whole thing.
  
  "Control" being the operative word. Although Peter Biskind declares how much he admires and respects Warren Beatty, even going so far as to refrain from including anything (regarding sexual flings, and more?) past the time that Beatty met Annette Bening in 1991, and fell in love, so as not to embarrass their children, the fact is..."Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America" portrays Warren Beatty as an insane control freak to the extreme, making the "Star" sound like an impossible person. According to Biskind's account, Beatty is a brilliant yet vain and shallow manipulator, a troublemaker, a director destroyer, a writer wrestler and the most selfish, narcissistic man who ever existed in and around Hollywood. If the reader were to take "Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America" at face value, he or she would conclude Warren Beatty is nothing more than a seductive, hedonistic, charming yet altogether ruthless and destructive man. My problem is, if that were true, really true, Warren Beatty would not have had a long career on screen, let alone great success off screen, and Peter Biskind would have no "Star" to write about.
  
  The title of Biskind's book alone implies that Beatty is a trickster, using some form of seductive sleight of hand that made Hollywood and America (um, JUST America?) love him. Rather than exploring what could possibly be behind Warren Beatty's personality, and what exactly did ALL of those women see in Warren Beatty (on top of his looks), and more importantly...how exactly DID Warren Beatty "Seduce America," and the many women who were drawn to him? Handsome men in Hollywood are a dime a dozen. What made Beatty stand out? Was the actor the only smart handsome man in town? Was he just a great juggler of people, and juggled women like no one else in history? The author never attempts to answer these questions.
  
  Instead, Peter Biskind uses words like "charm" and "seduce" as well as reporting that Warren Beatty as a man, as a producer, as a director, was relentless in his pursuits and IMPOSSIBLE to resist. If Beatty was a man who always gets what he wants (as the biography appears to point out), a reader of his biography just might want to know if its just an issue of Beatty's force of will, his star power, or is that Warren Beatty is just better, smarter, taller, and just more evolved than everyone else? That could be, yet how does one explain his films that flopped, and his relationships that fell apart?
  
  So, no, I am not going to think of "Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America" as a substitute for actually knowing Warren Beatty, nor anything about what really happened with this or that movie, and this and that woman, and his relationship with so and so. No. Instead, I will appreciate "Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America" as a (mostly) enjoyable, well designed half (or one-quarter)- portrait of who Warren Beatty might be, and how he operates in his life and career. I will admire Peter Biskind's hard work, and applaud the author's interest in the actor-producer-director. That is all.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• 
  Joy

  "How many women were there? Easier to count the stars in the sky," Biskind writes in what he claims is an authorized biography. "Using simple arithmetic, 12,775 women, give or take, a figure that does not include daytime quickies, drive-bys, casual gropings, stolen kisses and so on."
• 
  Loukia Borrell

  I found "Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America," in a bargain bin at a grocery store and thought, "Why not?" It was my summer read and while it was slow in some places, author Peter Biskind gives us an insider's view of how Beatty evolved from Virginia boy to Oscar winner - one of the biggest names in Hollywood during the late 1960s and 1970s. Beatty's career has had some ups and downs, but there are a number of his films that have stood the test of time, namely "Bonnie and Clyde," "Heaven Can Wait" "Shampoo," and "Reds," all made over the course of about 15 years, from the late 1960s to early 1980s.
  
  "Star" gives us a lot of information about how scripts are developed and sold, how films are cast, the path to pre-production and execution of a film and how movies are promoted. Beatty is a director, producer and actor and the book seems to say he is proudest of his achievements in directing. Beatty also understands the audience. He fought hard to make sure "Bonnie and Clyde" did not fall by the wayside. As buzz began to develop for the film, Beatty insisted the studio re-release it so the movie could catch on with moviegoers. Beatty is described as having his hands all over his movies; he's a perfectionist, controlling, has trouble moving forward with certain decisions, and is obsessed with tiny issues, as well as the big picture.
  
  The book held my attention with little details that are entertaining. Beatty was born in Richmond, was raised a Baptist, went to high school in Arlington, left his drama studies at Northwestern University and arrived in New York City when he was 19. He found an apartment for $13 a week, "lived on" peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and worked odd jobs including washing dishes, construction and playing the piano. His earliest acting gigs included regional theater, summer stock, and TV shows, including a recurring role in "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis." In 1961, Beatty solidified his stardom with "Splendor in the Grass," in which he played Bud Stamper, the son of a wealthy businessman who has a doomed relationship with Deanie Loomis, played by Natalie Wood.
  
  A good portion of the book is dedicated to Beatty's sexual exploits. He was so much of a Romeo (Wood, Julie Christie, Diane Keaton, and Joan Collins are among his exes), the author tells us it is possible Beatty had sex with 12,775 women. The author clarifies that Beatty had sex with that many; "blowjobs....stolen kisses" are not included in the figure. I tried to think about what the number would mean and finally concluded it was impossible because Beatty would have had to have sex with a different woman every night for about 35 years.
  
  "Star" was released about 10 years ago. Today, Beatty is 82, the father of four children and husband to Annette Bening. He has evolved from rising star, superstar, Hollywood icon to an older gentleman with a family. At more than 550 pages, it is a big book, but worth a look at a man whose contributions to the film industry are enduring and admirable.
• 
  Charles Matthews

  This review ran, in an edited version, in the Washington Post.
  
  
  STAR: How Warren Beatty Seduced America
  By Peter Biskind
  Simon & Schuster, 627 pp., $30
  
  It's bad to get a sinking feeling at the start of a book, but Peter Biskind gives the reader just that in the introduction to his new book.
  
  “Why Warren Beatty?” Biskind asks. “It's distressing to have to make a case for his importance just because no one under forty (maybe fifty?) knows who he is.” Beatty made his last movie, Town & Country, nine years ago. And it has been 19 years since his last major film, Bugsy, which was a critical success but a box office disappointment.
  
  Since Beatty left the screen, his friend and contemporary Jack Nicholson has made half a dozen films. His rival Robert Redford is still acting on screen, as is Dustin Hoffman, with whom Beatty shared the ignominy of Ishtar. His older sister, Shirley MacLaine, is still a working actress. Woody Allen, two years older than Beatty, continues to write and direct at the film-a-year pace he set three decades ago, and Clint Eastwood, seven years Beatty's senior, is perhaps the most successful actor-turned-director of our time. In 1994, former studio executive Robert Evans said, “How many pictures has Warren made in his career? Twenty-one? How many hits did he have? Three! Bonnie and Clyde, Shampoo, and Heaven Can Wait. That’s batting three for twenty-one. In baseball, you’re sent back to the minors for that.”
  
  But Biskind is determined to persuade us that Beatty was “one of the foremost filmmakers of his generation.” Biskind’s earlier book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls was a chronicle of American filmmaking in the 1970s, an era heralded by Beatty’s breakthrough movie, Bonnie and Clyde, and he has been trying to get Beatty to agree to cooperate on a book for years. For this book, Biskind agreed to leave Beatty’s current life, as husband to Annette Bening and father to their four children, “off limits.” And many of the people who know him best, such as MacLaine and Nicholson, as well as many of Beatty’s more famous ex-lovers, such as Leslie Caron, were “all afflicted with a contagion of silence.” Biskind also refuses to psychologize, telling us almost nothing of Beatty's childhood and youth, other than that he remained a virgin until he was “19 and ten months.” That leaves a 600-plus-page biography with some rather large biographical gaps.
  
  “Even the promiscuous feel pain,” Beatty once said. If he had gone on to add that obsessive perfectionists cause pain, he would have summed up the twin themes of Biskind's book. Much of it is a chronicle of fighting and fucking. Biskind opens with a scene in 1959 at a Beverly Hills restaurant where Beatty, dining with Jane Fonda, gets his first look at Joan Collins. And so the account of Beatty’s already well-chronicled sex life begins, and the reader who is so inclined can find plenty about what he did and whom he did it with, including not only the usual suspects – Collins, Natalie Wood, Caron, Julie Christie, Diane Keaton, Madonna, and so on – but also some unusual (and questionably documented) ones: Vivien Leigh, Brigitte Bardot, Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia, and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
  
  But Biskind clearly intends the sexual escapades to be a sideshow. For him the main attraction is how Beatty’s movies got made. And so he gives us behind-the-scenes accounts of the making of not only Beatty’s best films (among which Biskind includes Splendor in the Grass, Bonnie and Clyde, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Shampoo, Heaven Can Wait, Reds, Bugsy, and Bulworth) but also disasters like Ishtar and Town & Country. The trouble with behind-the-scenes stories is that there are a lot of rumors to sort through, and the sources have memories clouded by time, resentment, pride, and occasionally illicit substances. For every allegation there’s almost always a denial.
  
  Biskind makes it clear that Beatty, “a self-described obsessive-compulsive,” could be maddening to work with, even on his best films. Trevor Griffiths, hired to write the screenplay for Reds, which Beatty took over from him, calls him “a brute” and “a bully.” On Reds, Beatty shot what one source estimates as 3 million feet of film – enough for a movie two and a half weeks long -- and he worked a team of editors nearly to death. There are those who blame Beatty’s flops on his extravagance, his meddling and his sometimes indecisive ways, but Biskind prefers to focus on directors – Elaine May for Ishtar, Glenn Gordon Caron for Love Affair, Peter Chelsom for Town & Country – who were unwilling or unable to collaborate effectively with Beatty.
  
  Beatty holds an Oscar record for having been twice nominated as producer, director, writer, and star, for Heaven Can Wait and Reds. To date, the only other quadruple-threat nominee in Oscar history is Orson Welles, for Citizen Kane. Beatty won only one Oscar, as director of Reds, but the Academy also gave him the Irving G. Thalberg Award as a producer, even though all but two of the films he produced were those he starred in. And in the end, it may be as producer that Beatty deserves the most recognition. Richard Sylbert, the production designer who worked on many of Beatty’s films, claimed that Beatty made the people who worked for him “dramatically better.”
  
  One problem with this book is that it’s too early for a definitive assessment of Beatty and his career. Cultists have been known to save films from scorn and obscurity before, and there are even those who love Ishtar. Some of his hits, including Bonnie and Clyde, Shampoo, and Heaven Can Wait, are beginning to look glossy and tricked-up. Reds has suffered from the current distaste for historical epics. Ten years from now Bulworth may look a lot better, and Bugsy may look worse. Or vice versa.
  
  Beatty himself may yet be seen as either a visionary who deserves more respect or a man who never fully developed his talent. Jack Nicholson became perhaps the most successful of any actor of his generation by working with Roman Polanski, Milos Forman, Michelangelo Antonioni, Stanley Kubrick, John Huston, and Martin Scorsese. But after his early movies with Elia Kazan (Splendor in the Grass) and George Stevens (The Only Game in Town), the only director of the first rank that Beatty worked with was Robert Altman, on McCabe & Mrs. Miller. They fought bitterly, but it’s one of Beatty’s best performances and one of Altman’s best films.
  
  And Beatty could still choose to make Biskind’s book premature. He’s 72, not too old to make a film he has always planned about Howard Hughes, or at least Hughes in his old age, which Biskind tells us “Beatty considers more interesting than the first half of his career.” And much of Biskind’s book deals with Beatty’s political activities. He worked for George McGovern, who called him “one of the three or four most important people in the campaign,” and Gary Hart. Arianna Huffington urged him to run for president in 2000. He wisely declined, but one wonders what might happen if Dianne Feinstein decides not to run again for the Senate. It’s not like California is averse to actors going into politics.
  
• 
  Mark Taylor

  Actor. Writer. Producer. Director. Sex symbol. Family man. Warren Beatty is all of these things and more, as Peter Biskind shows in his 2010 biography of Beatty, Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America. Biskind examines the full scope of Beatty’s life and career, and Star features interviews with numerous people who know Beatty or have worked with him. Biskind is obviously an admirer of Beatty’s talent, but he doesn’t turn a blind eye to Beatty’s faults.
  
  Star is not an authorized biography of Beatty, but Biskind was able to interview Beatty for the book. In the introduction Biskind spells out his relationship with Beatty, and one of the ground rules that Biskind set out for himself was that he would not dig into Beatty’s personal life during his marriage to Annette Bening. I can understand Biskind setting this rule, as he knew that he needed to keep his access to Beatty. But it weakens the book, because that’s the part of Beatty’s story that’s missing. How is it that Hollywood’s most famous ladies’ man for thirty years suddenly became a steady and stable family man? That’s a very interesting change, and I wish there was more about it in the book.
  
  Jeremy Pikser, who wrote the screenplay for Bulworth with Beatty, gave his own theory as to how Beatty went from bachelor to family man: “I don’t think there was a great sea change in Warren, other than it was time. He never gave up the idea of having a family, and being a movie star he was able to delay that much longer than a normal person could. If somebody said to me, ‘You can fuck as many beautiful women you want until the age of fifty, and then you can get a beautiful thirty-year-old woman to marry you, and have children with you’- who’s gonna turn that down? Annette was the perfect person, with a strong family background of her own, who was relatively stable, not a nut job, and a good actress.” (p.463)
  
  If you want dirt on Beatty’s serial womanizing before he met Bening, you’ll get plenty on that in Star. Well known for his many high profile relationships, Beatty dated actresses Joan Collins, Natalie Wood, Leslie Caron, Julie Christie, Diane Keaton, and Isabelle Adjani. He also had relationships with singers Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas, and Madonna.
  
  Perhaps the most ridiculous paragraph in the book is the one in which Biskind attempts to calculate how many women Warren Beatty has slept with. There’s a quote from Beatty in which he supposedly said he couldn’t go to sleep without having sex. Biskind takes Beatty literally, and so he arrives at the figure of 12,775 women. (p.160) Contrary to what Biskind says in the book, that figure does not account for time that Beatty was in a relationship and having sex with the same woman night after night. Biskind simply took 35 years, from 1956 until Beatty met Annette Bening in 1991, and multiplied 35 times 365 days a year. I find it pretty unlikely that Beatty actually slept with a different woman every single night for 35 years. That would tire out anyone.
  
  Beatty’s reputation as a ladies’ man, and the attending attention his love life has received from the press, has threatened to overshadow his reputation as an actor and a filmmaker. It’s ironic that Beatty’s private life has drawn such attention, because Beatty actually is a very private man, who only gives interviews with great reluctance, and goes to great lengths to avoid actually saying anything in those interviews. But if Beatty didn’t want so much attention to be focused on his private life, he shouldn’t have dated so many famous actresses.
  
  One of the best stories in the book comes from Dustin Hoffman, who co-starred with Beatty in the ill-fated 1987 comedy Ishtar. Hoffman and Beatty were on location in Morocco, and Hoffman noticed that Beatty’s attention suddenly drifted to a woman who was walking on a sand dune hundreds of yards away. Hoffman asked Beatty, “Theoretically, is there any woman on the planet that you would not fuck? If you had the chance?”
  “That’s an interesting question…Is there any woman that I wouldn’t fuck? No, there isn’t.”
  “Theoretically, you would fuck any and every woman…”
  “Yes.”
  “You’re serious.”
  “Yes.”
  “Why?”
  “Because…you never know.”
  Hoffman said, “I thought that was the most romantic thing I’d ever heard a man say, because he was talking about spirits uniting.” (p.357-8) It’s a great anecdote that goes a long way towards explaining the mindset of Warren Beatty. Why sleep with another woman when you've slept with so many already? Because you never know, the next one might be the perfect one. Why shoot another take after you've shot 25 or 30 takes? Because you never know, the next one might be the perfect one.
  
  Beatty is well-known for being a perfectionist on the set of his movies, a trait that can drive some people nuts. Buck Henry, who co-directed Heaven Can Wait with Beatty, had this to say about working with him: “Except for actors, everybody {who works with him} ends up so bitter that they have a skewed vision of what actually takes place, and you never can quite piece it together.” (p.234-5) Biskind has interviewed many people who have worked with Beatty on various movies, and they offer valuable insights into Beatty’s working habits and his complicated personality. However, as Buck Henry’s quote above shows, their stories need to be taken with a grain of salt. There are a lot of stories from people who have worked with Beatty who basically say, “He’s a perfectionist, he’s annoying,” and eventually it becomes quite repetitive.
  
  Beatty’s chronic indecisiveness and his perfectionism have hampered his ability to finish film projects, and Beatty’s filmography is quite small. Beatty has made just 22 movies since his screen debut in 1961. Fortunately for Beatty, among those 22 movies are some truly great ones, like Bonnie and Clyde, Shampoo, Heaven Can Wait, Reds, and Bugsy. Beatty has long been a favorite at the Academy Awards, and he is the only person to be nominated for four Oscars for a single film more than once, for his films Heaven Can Wait and Reds. Beatty won the Oscar Best Director for Reds in 1981.
  
  Biskind has a lot of material in his book on Beatty’s successes like Heaven Can Wait and Reds, and also a lot on Beatty’s disasters like Ishtar, Love Affair, and 2001’s Town and Country, which remains Beatty’s most recent movie. (Beatty has apparently finished filming his long-gestating movie about Howard Hughes, but there’s no release date yet.) If you’re looking for stories about Warren Beatty being a perfectionist, there are many of those in this book.
  
  Star is an excellent book, and it will probably stand as the definitive biography of Warren Beatty, unless a future biographer gains Beatty’s full cooperation and access to his personal archives.
• 
  Magnus Stanke

  Enfant terrible Peter Biskind comes back after 'Easy Riders to Raging Bull', one of the definite works on New Hollywood with a biography of one of the key players, who eventually grew up, seducer par excellence Warren Beatty.
  Some of this book is great, but ultimately it's a tad too long at 700 pages for my liking as Biskind focuses on 40 years of Beatty's life and oevure (1960-2000), his active film making years, 23 films in all, some of them Absolute Great Ones (Shampoo, McCabe and Mrs Miller, Bonnie and Clyde), some good ones (The Paralex View, Reds, Bugsy) and the rest.
  Still, this is likely to be the best book on the Beatty while he's alive, and perhaps afterwards too.
• 
  Patrick von Stutenzee

  The book charts the life of Warren Beatty from bed to bed and from fling to fling, leaving out a lot of them, but mentioning more than you ever wanted to know. He had to go through all this for a few measly roles in movies. How devastating must it be for him? It made me really pity him. The book claims that this was his choice; if so, at the latest since Tiger Woods everybody knows that sex addiction should be treated.
  
  
  Read the full review/a>
• 
  Miguel Ravelo

  Brutal.
  
  El mejor epílogo para este libro es haber visto a Beatty y Dunaway equivocarse al entregar el Oscar a Mejor Película para Lalaland y sus posteriores reacciones cuando se hizo todo el relajo en el escenario.
• 
  Tom Wile

  Interesting. Guy was a sociopath.
• 
  Rachel

  Interesting, but definitely not an unbiased biography.
• 
  E. B.

  Very informative, sometimes too informative, but good account of this guy's life thus far.