Warren Beatty: A Private Man (ISBN 1400046068)

Amazon.com Review:
Amazon.com Exclusive: Joe Laitin and Warren Beatty Excerpted Interview Excerpt and photographs courtesy of the author, Suzanne Finstad, by permission of Peter Laitin. Beatty with Joe Laitin JL: There apparently aren't that many people who really know you anyway. I don't know whether you deliberately keep people at arm's length. I suppose you do... WB: I am finding more and more that it's really very hard to please a lot of people. And I would say it's impossible. And so I have been allowing that need to try to please a lot of people to slip away from me in the past couple of years. So that I realize now that there will be a lot of people that dislike me just on principle, there will be a lot of people that will resent me, there will be a lot of people that will like me, and there'll be an awful lot of people that just don't really care one way or the other. So if I allowed myself to be upset by that, then I'd be a pretty upset person. So I've got to just enjoy my own work. My business is not exploitation and my business is not selling pictures. My business is not figuring out good angles for press and so forth. My business, or my work, is acting right now. And once I forget about that, I'm gonna be a boring actor and I'm not gonna have any fun at it. And that's why I hire people to do--that's why I have an agent, that's why I have somebody who's a press representative, and that's why I have a business manager. Because I don't want to think about those things. And I find that if I try to think about them, I don't do it well. All I know is when I'm enjoying my work in acting and when I'm not, when I think I'm doing well and when I don't. It's like the more attention that is brought to you, the more obstacles that are put in your path, just doing an honest day's work creatively. There are more obstacles. With sister Shirley Maclaine It's nice to have a guy from Time magazine want to come and talk to you on the set. On the other hand, he wouldn't want to come and talk to you if you were doing a play off-Broadway somewhere, and maybe you would be able to concentrate a little better. And if he comes onto the set, you've gotta either be polite to him and acknowledge his presence and talk to him, or you have to forget about him--if he tries to talk to you, ignore him and just think about your work. In which case, he's gonna think you're a nut, or that you're trying to be rude to him or offend him in some way. And that's why, when a lot of strangers come on the set, I usually go to my dressing room or something. But there can be an awful lot of those obstacles, and those obstacles, I think they can just eat you up.

"A biography reader":
I love and collect biographical books. This book was totally disappointing. The entire book was an effort to "elect" Warren to some future office. I had hoped to gain some insight to his personal life and was left entirely with mindless minutiae. A total disappointment for such a large book...little or no new information of any value.

Smells like Honey:
It took me days to finish this book, and I'd say you get your money's worth by halfway through, and the rest is gravy. Oddly enough, however, the book feels a bit topheavy, so that the bulk of it is spent on Beatty's difficult period between meeting William Inge and making LILITH about four years later, and then all of a sudden the last 40 years are rushed through at a clippety clop. WB isn't quite as entertaining as Suzanne Finstad's previous biorgaphy, the sublime NATASHA, which really did bring Natalie Wood alive again for her fans; and it's likely that the parts of the present book with the most emotional resonance are the years Beatty spent with Natalie, trying to cheer her up after Wagner betrayed her. Finstad does an admirable job of showing us the psychological underpinnings of Beatty's affairs with Joan Collins (almost persuading us that Collins is a real person, not just a glitzy British sex bomb--almost, but not quite), Natalie Wood, Leslie Caron, and Julie Christie. But when she gets down the list to Michelle Phillips, her pretense at analysis ends. She doesn't even try. I wonder if the book wasn't originally twice as long, and she was asked to curtail the later years into a series of briefer chapters. I mean, she could have written 100s of pages on Mary Tyler Moore and Isabelle Adjani, but instead they're reduced to ciphers. As a boy, Beatty was enraptured by the original cast album of OKLAHOMA! by Rodgers and Hammerstein and Finstad successfully shows us that, subconsciously or not, Beatty succeeded again and again in replicating the Curly-Laurie romance in his own adult life. It does seem as though Beatty was propelled to stardom by a clutch of gay visionaries including Inge and Tennessee Williams, and crypto gay figures like Joshua Logan, who signed Beatty to a personal contract and had him screen tested kissing Jane Fonda from morning to night. Inge wrote not only SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS, but A LOSS OF ROSES and ALL FALL DOWN for Beatty, and apparently never asked him for a thing in return. The stage production of A LOSS OF ROSES turned out to be a true nightmare of conflicted egos and desperate desires, what with Barbara Baxley threatening to jump off the cliffs of Malibu if replaced by Carol Haney, and Shirley Booth quitting on opening night. Joey Heatherton, the one and only, was also fired, thus setting the scene for a long and poignant second act that never quite came. Would Joan Collins have been effective in the movie version of DH Lawrence's SONS AND LOVERS? Would Warren have succeeded playing Tony in WEST SIDE STORY? The book gives us crazy dreams of movies that might have been. Afdera Fonda, the former wife of Henry Fonda who dallied with Beatty briefly in 1963, said that he was "naughty, charming and playful. He smelled like honey, and he came and went like a shadow in the night."

Warren Beatty: A Private Man:
Is an objective look, at the man who captivated audiences around the world. Beautifully written, honest and poignant, the book takes the reader deep into the lives and backgrounds of a family that spawned not only one star-but Two. Suzanne Finstad's "A Private Man" gives the reader perspective as it takes you through the inner workings of a boy's life as he grows up to be one of Hollywood's most charismatic and influential leading men. Gracefully structured and truly the definitive Warren Beatty biography...A Must Read! J.J. Gillock (Easy Company Productions)

Fascinating book, fascinating man:
Everything a great bio needs - a compelling subject, exhaustive research, good storytelling - is here. There are flaws, but they are largely outweighed in this excellent book that really made me think. True, it's a bit repetitive at times, and like so many chronological works, falls into the trap of being front-loaded. The biggest casualty here is Bening - a woman worth a more thorough treatment in the book in the context of what the relationship says about Beatty. In the end, I disagree with two of the author's main themes (one of the best things about this book is that it's thought provoking): first that Beatty was driven by a fear of failure. I simply can't believe that a man who has failed so spectacularly and so publicly so many times, in his relationships, his business ventures and his political causes, is afraid to fail. In fact, I think it's quite the opposite. I also don't think Beatty is any more "private" than most of us, and what appear to be the characteristics of a private person are in fact clues into what makes him so successful. Being elusive with the media is not necessarily about privacy - in fact I was surprised at the number of very personal statements cited from media interviews over the years - it's about control. He does what the most seductive people do so well - he makes every person he encounters, professional or personal, feel like they are special, a theme repeated throughout the book by the many people who have known him. His self-created image only furthers the seduction, as everyone he touches flatters themselves that "he's a very private man; I know him better than you do." He even achieves this illusion at a very public level by presenting a series of autobiographical films - leaving each person to decide if he's George Roundy or Jay Bulworth or John Reed or Bud Stamper or Joe Pendleton or Dick Tracy, or some complicated combination of all of them. That's not a private man - that's a man who knows how to manipulate his own image, and to get what he wants out of life in the long run, both personally and professionally. Loved the book, really made me think, will now read others by the same author on this basis.

Could be better!!!:
Gets really boring at times. Jumps all over the place and keeps on repeating......... But otherwise informative.