Scandals of Classic Hollywood: That Divine Gary Cooper

Let’s talk straight: there was no cowboy handsomer than Gary Cooper. John Wayne had the sneer, and Gene Autry had the voice, but no one smoldered quite like Cooper. In his early films, he was glamour on a horse: his eyes lined, his face powdered, yet somehow right at home in the saddle — in part because unlike so many city-boys-turned-screen-cowboys, he grew up in Montana, one of the last veritable frontiers of the early 20th century. Over his 30 years in Hollywood, he would play variations on the cowboy — the cowboy goes to war, the cowboy goes to the city — but in each turn, he not only won the girl but did so righteously. Unlike other major stars, who allowed for and even reveled in the opportunity to play against type, Cooper kept things simple. He played slight variations on the same character, but their moral center remained constant: as he once told a screenwriter attempting to fine-tune his character, “just make me the hero.”
Cooper became a hero to many, even as he developed a reputation as one of the most notorious philanderers in Hollywood. He had stiff competition — Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, the list goes on — but Cooper may or may not have slept with EVERY. SINGLE. CO-STAR. No matter his age, no matter their age, he was insatiable, before and during his marriage. How to reconcile his moral righteousness onscreen with his philandering offscreen? That was the work of Fixers, gossip magazines, and the studio system at large, which ensured that Cooper was never caught, never denounced, and held up as a paragon of American values. Of course, the way he looked in pants didn’t hurt.
Cooper was born Frank James Cooper in Helena, Montana, in 1901. His parents were recent immigrants from England, and after nine years returned home for an extended stint in the homeland that just happened to coincide with much of the First World War. His family came back to Montana in 1918, and Cooper enrolled in Grinnell College (cue massive Grinnell rally cry in comments) to study agriculture.
If you’ve never been to Helena, here’s what you need to understand. It’s the capital of Montana, which makes it a big deal in a big state with few people. Cooper’s father went from being a farmer to being a lawyer to being a supreme court judge, demonstrating the sort of upward mobility that now seems a distinct relic of the 20th century. Cooper rode horses and had impeccable manners, which meant that he had none of the problems usually associated with “low class,” ethnic stardom (see especially: the case of Clara Bow). I imagine him not unlike Brad Pitt’s character early in A River Runs Through It, full of potential, swagger, and perfectly sun-kissed, golden shoulders.
The fact of his Montana childhood (never mind those pesky British years!) provided the raw material from which the fan magazines could weave elaborate, Louis L’Amour-esque backstories. One Photoplay article, purportedly penned by Cooper himself, highlighted his natural, rugged, un-urban upbringing on his Montana ranch:

Nights, lying very quietly on your bunk, you attune your ears to every sound that the darkness gives. The faint mournful note of the loon, in the far distance. The round gurgle of Andy’s creek as it parts to pass the huge boulder at its center. The soft patter of chipmunks as they stealthily come to nuzzle at the door, in search of food.

All I’m saying is that if this small-town-turned-sorta-city girl read that in a fan magazine, I’d be all over that Cooper in the same way I want to go live with Bon Iver in a cabin and do watercolors in thick sweaters. In other words: Cooper’s back story appealed to something seemingly primal, something in women, both in the 1920s and today, that wants to go live in wide open spaces with a man who knows how to chop some mother-f-ing wood.
Cooper spent a few years at Grinnell, but when his father retired from the bench and moved his mother to Los Angeles, Cooper gave up ag classes to try his hand as a Hollywood extra. A casting director replaced his given name, Frank, with “Gary,” because she thought Cooper evoked the “rough, tough” nature of her hometown of Gary, Indiana. (Can you imagine “Gary” not being a name for dads and uncles? Up to this point, though, it was just a city. Look at the ridiculous uptick in baby boys named Gary following Cooper’s rise to fame.)
Cooper played an extra in a handful of films before arriving on the set of The Winning of Barbara Worth in 1926. The actor cast as the second male lead didn’t show, and someone shoved Cooper into the part. He didn’t need much — some gesturing, but no words, since the cinema was still silent — and Cooper had his break. Shortly thereafter, he signed a contract with Paramount. When Clara Bow saw him on the Paramount lot, she insisted he be cast in her upcoming film, It. As longtime readers of Scandals of Classic Hollywood know, It made Clara Bow a star – and it also made Bow and Cooper somewhat of an item.
Cooper’s scene in It was unremarkable, but his appearance in Wings, released later that same year, truly launched his career. He plays a World War I flying cadet, and although his screentime was still relatively short, there was one scene — an extended close-up shot, the light streaming in from outside — in which he looked gorgeous. His gorgeousness was compounded by his character's tragic fate (everyone knows a character gets hotter when he dies at the end of the film; just ask Leo).
The fan mail poured in, and in classic Hollywood, fan mail was one of the main gauges of where a contracted star would go next. Did fans like him as a romantic hero? Okay, fine then, let’s do more of that. After Wings, Cooper appeared in a slew of silents, usually playing variations on the romantically rugged yet sophisticated hero. He embodied the Jazz Age masculinity, which is to say he was tall and dressed impeccably, but wasn’t a complete dandy.
In 1929, he filmed The Wolf Song with Lupe Velez. Cooper plays a cowboy who somehow makes his way to Taos, where he meets Velez and falls in love, but nevertheless feels drawn by the call of adventure. Sounds like every guy trying to get out of staying together with his girlfriend for summer break, but bygones. The film is mostly forgotten, but you might seek it out simply because it shows Cooper in full-frontal, Fassbender-style nudity. It’s brief; he’s brushing his teeth in the river; BUT WHATEVER.
If Bow was “The It Girl,” then Velez was “The Mexican It Girl” — spunky, beautiful, buxom, and mercurial. And since Cooper had hooked up with Bow, he naturally hooked up with Velez as well.

Look at them! Aren’t they adorable! Even more adorable? Velez purportedly claimed that Cooper “has the biggest organ in Hollywood but not the ass to push it in well.” OH MY GOD I AM BLUSHING JUST TYPING THAT.
Between poor thrusts, Cooper filmed The Virginian – his first real “talkie,” based on the tremendously successful 1902 novel of the same name. Basic premise: Cooper is from Wyoming, he is a cowboy, and he is the hero. He likes a girl from afar.
The film was a MONSTER hit and cemented the foundation of Cooper’s image: volatile, full of honor, a bit of a secret romantic, yet still and always the hero. Who just happens to look smokin’ in pants:

I mean WOW.

But as Cooper scholar Steven T. Sheehan points out, even in The Virginian, Cooper is still a bit of a glamour-boy. He wears heavy makeup (look at that eyeliner!) that makes his face look even smoother and more boyish when compared to the rough terrain surrounding him. What’s more, the director shoots him in glamour close-ups — similar to the one that made him famous in Wings — usually used for female love interests. Granted, a lot of male stars were still heavily made-up during this time period, but they were usually situated in parlors and urban spaces. Cooper was essentially a pretty-boy cowboy. As will become clear, this look changed as standards of masculinity shifted with the onset of the Depression. In hindsight, the glamour-look underlines just what a product of Hollywood even the most “natural” of stars remain.
Once a studio finds what works, it runs with it — in 1930 alone, Cooper starred in Only the Brave, The Texan, and A Man From Wyoming, all of which exploited his cowboy image. In Morocco, he played a taciturn cowboy in a soldier’s uniform — only this time he was up against Marlene Dietrich. If you read the last column on Dietrich, you know why this film is awesome. And it will come as no surprise that Cooper and Josef von Sternberg, the film’s director and Dietrich’s svengali, did not get along — in part because von Sternberg insisted on filming Cooper in passive positions, always looking up at a beautifully lit Dietrich. I love this, I love it so much.

Power differential manifest.

Cooper supposedly complained to the bigwigs at Paramount — remember, this was von Sternberg and Dietrich’s first American film — and had it stopped. But the backstage intrigue didn’t stop there.
Cooper was still carrying on with Lupe Velez — he wanted to marry her, but Cooper’s mom (recall, she was right there in L.A.) thought her too “vulgar” and “tasteless.” We might attribute her verdict to good ol’ fashioned racism, but Lupe was a bit of a hot mess. Or at least that’s how the press chose to portray her, most likely in keeping with her onscreen image as a fiery Latina. She loved acting “low-class,” and threw parties with cock fights and “stag films,” a.k.a. thinly veiled porn. She got in fights, especially over men, and was prone to extreme jealousy. To wit: angry over Cooper’s close friendship with Anderson Lawler, known, in the time’s parlance, as a “swisher,” or flamboyant homosexual, Velez supposedly “unzipped Cooper’s fly at a social gathering and started sniffing his crotch, claiming to smell Lawler’s cologne.”
I can’t even.
Velez was also framed as an animal of desire: Cooper gave her two eagles, “love birds” to symbolize their predatory affection, and their shared bed was “eight feet square,” which, as film scholar Henry Jenkins points out, makes it sound more like a “wrestling ring” than a “boudoir.” I kinda want her to be my best friend, but I somehow don’t think she had best friends, or friends at all.
How much of these reports were true, and how much were fabricated to fit her image as a “Mexican spitfire,” may never be known. What’s to be relished, however, is how she and Dietrich went head-to-head on the set of Morocco.
Velez insisted on being on-set at all times — and with good cause, given Cooper’s tendencies and Dietrich’s je ne sais quoi. She became even more aggressive as filming continued and evidence of an affair seemed to materialize. (I have no idea what said evidence was; more crotch-sniffing?) The fan magazines satirized their competition, and Velez, famous for her impersonations, did a devastating satire of Dietrich at a prominent Hollywood gathering. In hindsight, Dietrich would explain that “Gary was totally under the control of Lupe.”
Part of me likes the idea of these two powerful women doing crazy shit for Cooper’s affection, and part of me realizes that it’s yet another case of romantic individualism — women dividing themselves in their fight for men. But Cooper was not immune or ignorant to the games being played in his name. He lost 40 pounds over the course of he and Velez’s three-year relationship, and Velez apparently shot at him when he left Los Angeles by train to Chicago. (She missed, started swearing at her poor aim, and fled arrest. Allegedly. Some of this stuff is just too much, but then I look at all of Lindsay Lohan’s crazy antics, and maybe not.)
Over the next few years, Cooper was paired with the most gorgeous and promising female stars in Hollywood — with Carole Lombard in I Take This Woman (1931), Claudette Colbert in His Woman (1931), and Joan Blondell in Make Me a Star (1932). The common theme: Cooper plays a man of few words who woos sophisticated women, which is exactly what’s happening in this photo with Lombard:
In 1932, Cooper and his Paramount “rival,” Cary Grant, were cast against the glorious Tallulah Bankhead in Devil and the Deep (1932). Bankhead was a loose canon who would have totally read The Hairpin, not least because her most famous quote was “The only reason I went to Hollywood was to fuck that divine Gary Cooper.”
Girl deserves an entire column, but what you need to understand now is that it appears she achieved her goal — as did almost all of Cooper’s co-stars. The next few years were more of the same. He played the lead in the first adaptation of A Farewell to Arms in 1933, a role that would eventually lead to a close friendship with Hemingway himself. He looks much better fit for the role than Rock Hudson would 20 years later — or maybe I’m just distracted by the leg?

Amid all his onscreen cowboying and philandering, Cooper began courting Veronica Balfe, a starlet best known as the blonde dropped by King Kong. This time, Cooper’s mother approved, and the two were wed in late 1933. Balfe retired from the screen, fated to become the woman with the least amount of Google Image results who also slept with Gary Cooper.
After a brief reunion with Dietrich onscreen and off in Desire (1936), Cooper appeared in a role that would retexture his image from the eyeliner-wearing cowboy sophisticate to that of a straight-talking everyman — a masculinity perfectly inline with the values of Depression-era America. The film was Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, a delightful piece of what is now known as Capra-corn, a.k.a. films made by Frank Capra (including Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Meet John Doe) that are by turns saccharine, adorable, forcefully American, and intermittently satisfying. Which is to say they take advantage of you the same way that Extreme Makeover: Home Edition does, with a potent ideological mix of chivalry, charity, and consumerism.
Cooper had already been working to eschew his glamour image. A 1935 piece in Woman’s Home Companion made the glamour image and placement on Hollywood’s “Best Dressed List” a thing of his boyhood past. According to Cooper, “I don’t know a darn thing about dressing. I just trust in the Lord and keep my shoes shined.”
It sounds like a line straight out of Mr. Deeds’ mouth. Deeds, the bumbling Vermonter-cum-greeting-card poet who inherits $20 million from his uncle, is taken to New York to sort out the estate, only to have all sorts of con artists take advantage of his straight-talking goodness. Throughout the film, Deeds makes a huge display of rejecting the ridiculous components of wealth: he refuses to be dressed by his Uncle’s valet, and calls out those who would ridicule his Hallmark-esque verse. He also falls in love with the very woman who’s been conning him most obviously — a reporter, played by Jean Arthur, who exploits his weakness for “women in distress,” then files reports of Cooper’s bumbles (feeding donuts to a horse, slugging pompous writers in a restaurant, refusing to bankroll the fiscally ridiculous Opera) on the front page of the paper.
Deeds is one of the first films to show a bit of age around Cooper’s eyes, but he also looks amazingly attractive. He speaks slowly and deliberately, with the sort of steady gaze that reminds me of the boys I used to slow dance to Garth Brooks’ “The Dance” with in high school. He’s not stupid, per se, just wholly without irony. He plays the tuba — in public, with tremendous glee — which should tell you just about all need to know about this man.

Plus look at how nicely he looks at Jean Arthur!

And all rumpled and hungover!
After Deeds figures out that everyone’s been swindling him, he makes to go back to Vermont, presumably to hang out with me on the top of the hill where I currently live, entertaining me by playing the tuba and wearing pants. But before he can go back, a desperate, jobless man — a character familiar to any viewer of films released between the years 1931 and 1939 — attacks and then appeals to Deeds, begging him to take pity on the common man.
What happens next could have been set in the present day: a benevolent, wealthy man who spreads the wealth to the less fortunate in order to make a equitable society ... is framed as literally crazy. The effort to institutionalize Deeds for benevolence falls flat, Cooper gets to punch some more people in the face, Jean Arthur returns to his side, and all is well — and Cooper emerges even more American and “straightforward” than before.
At the time of Deeds’ release, Cooper was 35, two years married, and soon to be a father. Just as the country had reveled in excess and changed its ways, so too did Cooper. The extravagant, overly romantic, ascot-wearing man was no more. He was still the hero, but now he was no-frills. Importantly, the press labored to frame the shift not as a transformation, but as an illumination of the “real” Cooper. The glamour Cooper had always been a Hollywood show; the real Cooper resided beneath the make-up and intricate wardrobe.
The publicity machine also framed this “real” Cooper as filled with wisdom. A 1939 article belabored the point, relying on an anecdote from director Joel McCrea. Cooper arrived at McCrea’s ranch; the two greeted each other and agreed to take a walk. According to McCrea,

We walked for an hour or more, with never a word from him. That was like him. [The two men paused at a beautiful vista.] We stood there for five or ten minutes, perhaps, both of us silent. Finally, Coop drew a long deep breath and turned to me. "You know, McFee, that European situation is a hell of a mess," he remarked. He launched into as intelligent a discussion of international affairs as I have ever heard. When he had finished, he shut up again.

The message: still waters run fucking deep.
With this new, Depression-era masculinity established, Cooper’s career continued to flourish. It’s an object lesson in stardom: stars whose images can shift with the times endure, those whose images are tacked to a specific cultural moment decline and fade.
Cooper turned down the role of Rhett Butler, publicly declaring “Gone With the Wind is going to be the biggest flop in Hollywood history. I’m glad it’ll be Clark Gable who’s falling flat on his nose, not me.” Cooper would later eat his words, but he recovered from the embarrassment by hanging out with Hemingway, shooting and fishing around Sun Valley (and inviting Life Magazine to come along). How very Gary Cooper of him.

Please invite me to this party.

1941 was a blockbuster year: back with Capra for Meet John Doe, this time paired with Barbara Stanwyk, an adorable lose forelock, and the slogan “Be a better neighbor.”

Later that year, he appeared in Sergeant York as a “natural” marksmen and conscientious objector who, because his religion is that of the Tennessee backwoods, is still forced into the army. After lots of hemming and hawing (at one point, Cooper goes home and begs God for answers; the WIND then blows his bible open to a passage that implies that he must serve his country, and in so doing serve God). Cooper goes to war, still morally conflicted, but when his fellow men are cornered by Germans, proves himself a tremendous hero. The moral: he killed only to end the war more quickly, thereby preventing even more killing.
Sergeant York was based on the story of the real-life Sergeant York — a man so humble he refused the opportunity to adapt his story until the producers agreed to use the money to finance a bible school. THAT was the guy Cooper was playing onscreen. The specifics of the narrative were particularly salient to a nation that was still oscillating between isolationism and engagement in the current world war. Having seen the ravages of “The Great War,” how could the nation justify going to war again? How could the “pacifist” be convinced to kill Germans yet again?
Pearl Harbor would make the decision clear just months after Sergeant York’s release — and just in time to push Cooper toward an Academy Award for Best Actor. Recall that most Academy Awards do not, necessarily, go to the best performances; rather, they often go to performances that best embody an ideological moment. See: the post-racism of Crash triumphing over the still-too-transgressive man-love of Brokeback Mountain, or last year’s celebration of a certain attitude towards race relations in the nominations for The Help.  By awarding Gary Cooper with the Oscar for Sergeant York — by then, the best grossing film of 1941 — both the Academy and the nation at large were endorsing a particular attitude toward World War II and war in general: the war might be horrible, but it is necessary, and good, solid, Christian men like Cooper would lead the way toward what was right.
More nobleness followed: as Lou Gehrig in The Pride of the Yankees (1942) and as a sieve for Hemingway yet again, this time with Ingrid Bergman at her most boyish in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943).

The films were fewer and far between, but Cooper was nominated for three straight years for Best Actor. Plus, this picture of him with Selznick and Bergman off-set just slays me:
Hemingway considered For Whom the Bell Tolls the only successful Hollywood adaptation of his work (after seeing The Killers, he supposedly yelled “Get me to the bathroom, I’m going to be sick!), in large part due to Cooper’s work. “You played Robert Jordan just the way I saw him,” Hem told Cooper, “tough and determined. Thank you.”
And then the war ended, and what was a noble hero to do? Hollywood had a gangbusters year in 1946, but then everything essentially went to shit. Newly married post-war couples started moving to the suburbs (and away from picture palaces), television began to expand, and the U.S. government made good on its threat to divest the studios of their exhibition arms (a.k.a. their theaters). The studio system was in slow decline.
The films that Cooper made next were both a reaction to and a expression of those years. He somehow managed to make The Fountainhead bearable in adaptation form, but I’m really only taking the critics' word for it, so strong is my antipathy towards Rand. But The Fountainhead, like all of Rand's books, is a particularly post-war, ego-driven, American novel — in some ways, Cooper was born to play the part. And look at this preposterous poster:
Naturally, the 47-year-old Cooper had an affair with his Fountainhead co-star, the 21-year-old Patricia Neal. Things only get smuttier from there: when Neal became pregnant with Cooper’s child, he purportedly insisted she have an abortion. Cooper’s long-suffering wife found out about the relationship and sent a telegram demanding he end it. Telegram chastising doesn’t work, however, as evidenced by the long-recycled story of Cooper’s daughter, by then in her early teens, spitting on Neal in public.
Amid all this drama, Cooper starred in what is now regarded as his defining role: the beleaguered sheriff in High Noon, battling against time to get his passive townsfolk to give a shit. The film — an obvious but effective parable of McCarthyism — won no small amount of praise, in part because Hollywood itself was one of the most high-profile targets of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). (One of the film’s screenwriters and producers, Carl Foreman, was called before the committee and deemed an “un-cooperative witness” for his refusal to name names. The film’s co-producer, Stanley Kramer, attempted to kick him off the picture, but Cooper intervened; Foreman eventually fled to England to avoid prosecution.)

Cooper had an affair with the very young Grace Kelly, who played his very young and very ardent Quaker wife. The affair presumably set Neal over the edge, as the next year, she suffered a nervous breakdown and left Hollywood. Between the daughter-spitting and Kelly’s beauty, I can see why. But she went on to marry Roald Dahl, with whom she had five children — including Ophelia Dahl, co-founder, along with Paul Farmer, of Partners in Health, a.k.a. the subject of Mountains Beyond Mountains. Between that life and a fleeting affair with aging Gary Cooper, I’d say she chose right.
High Noon is Cooper’s most famous role, and with good reason. It’s a near-perfect film, damning and yet just shy of heavy-handed. In many ways, High Noon is the natural extension of the evolution of Cooper’s image, at least how he was fated to function in the realities of America: dandy cowboy becomes principled cowboy becomes disillusioned cowboy. John Wayne would later call it “the most un-American thing I’ve ever seen in my whole life,” which, if you know any stories of old John Wayne, means it obviously had a lot going for it.

There was something particularly ironic, or maybe just fitting, in the choice of Cooper for the role of the Sheriff. Cooper himself had served as a “friendly” witness when he was called before HUAC in 1947, and was part of the “Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals” with Barbara Stanwyck, Clark Gable, Ginger Rogers, and others. While Cooper was against Communism, he did not support the practice of “blacklisting,” i.e. preventing anyone who had refused to testify from working in Hollywood. All right, all right Gary, you’re partially redeemed.
For all its cultural resonance, the Cooper of High Noon is decidedly middle-aged, and lacks the Craggy Dude hotness that settled in the smile lines of Newman and Redford. And this, I think, is why many contemporary fans don’t see Cooper as a hot Hollywood star — an important star, of course, but more Dad than Hot. I certainly didn’t understand the appeal until I saw Deeds, and then I wanted him to play the tuba and be sincere with me all night.
Cooper converted to Catholicism in 1958, reconciling with his wife and daughter. As he told Hemingway, “You know, that decision I made was the right one.” But in 1960, Cooper fell ill with prostate cancer, which quickly spread to his colon, lungs, and bones. Yet he managed to keep his illness from the press — at least until Jimmy Stewart had to accept an honorary Academy Award in his stead in April 1961. “We’re very proud of you, Coop,” Stewart said, “all of us.” And then broke down. Hemingway, watching the broadcast, had to turn away.
Hemingway would later call Cooper from the Mayo Clinic, where he himself was receiving treatment for all matter of ailments. The chatted the way older men who hate the phone do, a mix of awkwardness and guffaws. They made plans to go to Africa. But as the phone conversation came to a close, Cooper became serious. “Papa,” he said, “I bet I beat you to the barn.” A month later, Cooper was dead.
In the beginning, Gary Cooper was a beautiful, luxurious thing to behold. Then he was a moral, benevolent thing to behold, and finally he was a disillusioned yet enduring thing to behold. No star better embodies the shift in the values and masculinity that guided American society from the ‘20s through the ‘50s. Even amid the Red Scare, when many Americans began to feel a creeping sense of doubt about what their xenophobia and reactionary politics had fostered, Coop was there to prove that righteousness endured. As theorist Richard Dyer would say, he acted out what mattered to millions of people, and that act made him a star beyond measure.
And regardless of his philandering, regardless of the arduous work of his studio’s publicity departments, there was something plaintive, almost childlike, maybe even innocent about Cooper. You see it in the way he talks about himself, and you see it in pictures like the one below. His image may have been a product of manipulation, but no man could so convincingly and unerringly play a certain type of man onscreen without a seed of those characters deep in himself. He may have been a lousy lover and an even lousier husband, but everything about him seemed prime for redemption. Just look at that divine, ridiculous, contradiction that was Gary Cooper, and see if you can’t fathom forgiveness.

Scandals of Classic Hollywood: Dorothy Dandridge vs. The World

Dorothy Dandridge was a fighter.  Growing up in The Depression and making her way through Hollywood in the ‘40s, she encountered resistance — to her skin color, to her refusal to play demeaning roles — at every turn. She was assailed in the press for dating white men, and blamed herself for her husband’s philandering and her daughter’s brain damage.  Nearly every societal convention was against her. And yet she managed to make a handful of gorgeous, invigorating films — films that offer a glimpse at the superstar she would have become if the studios knew what to do with with a beautiful black woman.
Her beauty was indeed phenomenal. She was called “the black Marilyn Monroe” and had flawless, radiant skin the black press referred to as “honey” and “cafe au lait.” And there was the certain way she took ownership of a room, with a reverberating, confident laugh and fierce, dazzling eyes. But being a black actor in the 1950s meant playing savages, slaves, and mamies — debasing roles that Dandridge refused on principle. In the films where she did get to play a a non-servant, non-exotic, non-savage, she was not allowed to do more than kiss, as the idea of a black woman in love was altogether too dangerous for the screen. “If I were white,” Dandridge explained, “I would capture the world.”
Dandridge was born in 1922 to Ruby Dandridge, a performer and aspiring actress. Ruby had left Dorothy’s father five months before, taking her other daughter, Vivian, with her. Both girls showed some sort of aptitude for performance — or maybe that aptitude was drilled into them — and one of Ruby’s friends, a woman named Geneva, moved in to help refine their singing and dancing skills. Years later, Dorothy and Vivian would figure out that Geneva was much more than her mother’s friend, but at the moment, she simply made them practice until they collapsed. Think wrist slaps and tears.
The girls became an act — “The Wonder Children” — and earned a spot with the National Baptist Convention touring churches throughout the South. This went on for three years, which sounds like a whole lot of churching, but Dorothy and Vivian no longer looked exactly like “children.” They added another girl, Etta Jones, to the act and became “The Dandridge Sisters,” touring all over California and eventually landing a gig at The Cotton Club. In short, the Dandridge girls spent their youth being corrected by their exacting stage mother, performing for church ladies, and receiving little to no schooling.

The Cotton Club gig turned into a slew of New York gigs, but Ruby had found moderate success with bit parts in Hollywood, so she sent the Exacting Lesbian Lover Geneva with her daughters to live in New York. Awesome plan. At this point, Dorothy was 16 — and now that you’ve seen the photos of her as an adult, you can only imagine how gorgeous she was at 16. In New York, she catches the eye of Harold Nicolas, one half of the snappy Nicolas Brothers Dancing Team. But The Dandridge Sisters were becoming a big draw, and Geneva signed them up for a European Tour. Farewell Harold, Farewell Teen Love. Except wait: World War II is about to turn everything to shit! Tour is cut short! Dandridge Sisters return to Hollywood! And guess who’s there making films: Nicolas Brothers!
Dorothy resumes her romance and lands a bit part in the race film Four Shall Die. (“Race” films, like “race” music, meant “black art for black people.”) She earned a very small part “opposite” (read: in the same movie as) John Wayne, and, most entertainingly, got to sing and dance with her boyfriend and his brother in a rendition of “Chattanooga Choo Choo” in Sun Valley Serenade.

If you’re still unconvinced about Dandridge’s spark, watch this clip and you’ll believe:

At some point during this period, the Dandridge Sisters split up Destiny’s Child-style so that Dorothy can concentrate on her own career. But to truly pull away from Ruby and Geneva, Dorothy had to do something even more drastic: get married.

Dandridge and The Dancing Harold were married in September 1942, and all seemed well. No more Geneva-beatings, just domestic bliss and Hollywood bit-parts. Only Harold starts philandering all over the place, opting for long tours away from home. Dandridge blames herself — and her lack of sexual experience — for his wandering eye. Feminist digression: PATRIARCHY IS SUCH A DICK. Dandridge becomes pregnant in hopes of roping Harold back home, but we don’t need an Ask a Dude column to know how that strategy would turn out. A daughter, Lynn, is born in 1943.
But as Lynn grows, Dandridge realizes that something isn’t right. Lynn isn’t speaking; she isn’t responding. Doctors can’t seem to agree on what was going on, and with Nicolas constantly on the road, Dandridge is in shambles. Eventually, Lynn is diagnosed with brain damage — probably due to a lack of oxygen during delivery — but Dandridge blames herself. She eventually starts seeing a therapist, and by 1949, fed up with lousy Harold, she asks for a divorce.
Enter Dorothy Dandridge 2.0. With the help of song arranger Phil Moore, she crafts a new image for herself: less dancy-dancy, more smoldering-sultry. Despite her antipathy for the new club scene, she recognizes it as a stepping stone to a studio contract. Dandridge performs all over the States, but despises Vegas, which, at this point, is newly ascendant and filled with Rat Packers. Even hundreds of miles from the South and Jim Crow, the racism is appalling — following her act, Dandridge is “forbidden” from speaking with any of the audience, and cannot use the elevator, the hotel lobby, the swimming pool, even the bathrooms. Her dressing room was a mother-f-ing storage space. I’m so embarrassed for the people who made and enforced those rules, and fear what rules our grandchildren will shame us for. (Easy guess: how long it took to accept gay marriage. That or Nickelback.)
The offers for bit parts started to float in, but to get back on the big screen, Dandridge had to compromise her standards, agreeing to play “jungle queen” in Tarzan’s Peril. If you’re wondering why Dandridge was up in arms about specific roles, the explanation is somewhat simple. Apart from race films, the studios only cast black actors in:
1.) The “roles” they played in many white people’s lives, aka servants. Nannies, butlers, farm workers, train porters. In fact, black people are all over classic cinema — they’re just never onscreen for more than a minute, and they’re given accents and sayings that slot them into easy stereotypes. The overweight (and thus desexualized) mamie, the elderly (and thus desexualized) butler. Hattie McDaniel’s turn in Gone with the Wind and Bo Jangles’ pairings with Shirley Temple. (Note: the only reason Shirley Temple was allowed to be “alone” onscreen with a black man was because she was a child and he was elderly).
2.) “Exotic” roles that associate the black man/woman with the jungle, the animal, and the destructively sexual. Usually these characters die, because in the moral algebra of Hollywood, sex = death.
You can see why black actors would get fed up with these options. But tension remained: should black actors take demeaning, stereotypical roles if it meant that they could work?  And that black faces showed up on screen? But weren’t those appearances perpetuating the cultural understandings that kept blacks subjugated to these roles onscreen and off?  It’s a Catch-22. And if you’ve read any of the discourse surrounding the roles of gay actors and actresses in the 1990s and early 2000s — or, for that matter, any minority group that has been stereotyped and subjugated onscreen — than you know it’s not unique.
But that’s where Dandridge found herself in the early ‘50s, and the tension between making a living and lifting up her race would structure the rest of her short career.
During this same period, Dandridge began to really blow up the club scene. She opened at The Mocambo in Hollywood, the type of place where all the Hollywood stars went to get blasted before “club” meant “filled with the smell of Axe Body Spray.” From there, she booked gigs all over New York, in Paris, on television, and became the first black woman to perform at the Waldorf Astoria. Girl was hot shit. Her act was more overtly sexual than her contemporary Lena Horne, who was, at this point, super pissed at Hollywood for casting Ava Gardner in the role she made famous in Showboat.

Club owners were quick to exploit Dandridge’s sexual edge — one purportedly even sold Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior of the the Human Female to promote her upcoming performances. Dandridge came to resent this sort of hyper-sexualization and hated how it opened doors for her that remained closed to other black formers. “Ella Fitzgerald is one of the most talented people in the world,” she once told a friend, “and it ebarrasses me that she cannot work the rooms that I work. She’s not sexy. The men in the audience don’t want to take her home and go to bed with her. Yet she’s up there singing her heart out for one third the money they’re paying me.”
But the sexy nightclub appearances won Dandridge the type of role for which she had been waiting: the lead in MGM’s all-black production of Bright Road, based on a young schoolteacher’s life in the South, and opposite Harry Belafonte.

Let’s talk about the weirdness going on in this poster: is Dandridge punching that child in the face? Why is Belafonte’s decoupaged head floating? What does it mean to be a “noted song favorite?” And Ladies Home Journal, what praise! “Unusual!” Is that code for “Belafonte made us feel funny things in our bathing suit parts and we had to cross our legs?”  The Ladies Home Journal un-endorsement helped Bright Road win the dubious distinction of “the lowest box-office gross in the South.”
20th Century Fox nevertheless snatched Dandridge up for a three-picture contract, and she went about lobbying for her true dream role: the lead in an all-black production of Carmen Jones (a film adaptation of the WWII stage musical, which was an adaptation of the classic opera Carmen, which was an adaptation of the novella Prosper Mérimée). Whew.
Fox slotted Otto Preminger to direct, which brings us to UNCEREMONIOIUS BREAK FOR FILM HISTORY LESSON:
Preminger had risen to prominence with a slew of noir-flavored films in the ‘40s. In 1943, Preminger was coming off of The Moon is Blue, which, with its “lighthearted” treatment of an affair (read: people having sex don’t die or end in poverty), had violated the Hays Code and pissed off the Hollywood censorship. When Preminger and the studio behind the film, United Artists, refused to modify the script during production, the censorship board refused to grant it the Production Code “seal of approval.” (United Artists was the hippest studio in the 1950s. It wasn’t a studio so much as a production company, but you can read all about it in Tino Balio’s amazing history.)
If United Artists would have tried this stunt even ten years before, no seal would have meant no distribution. (Kind of like what happens when a film earns an NC-17 today. Sure, it’s “legal,” but few theaters will carry it). But UA saw that the moral climate — and tolerance and hunger for more explicit treatments of sex and relationships — had changed, and said fuck it, let’s give it a try. They open The Moon is Blue in a few urban markets, and its success convinces three major theater chains to distribute nationwide. But uptight Ohio, Kansas, and Maryland up and ban the film. Typical.
And here’s where it gets good: Preminger and United Artists realize they had a chance to potentially blow the entire Code out of the water. They sue the Maryland’s state censorship board, and a state Supreme Court judge overturns the ban, famously referring to the film as “a light comedy telling a tale of wide-eyed, brash, puppy-like innocence.” In other words: untwist your panties, state of Maryland. So far so good, so UA tries the same thing in Kansas, but no luck. Stay stodgy, Kansas. But UA says fuck it yet again: might as well go big or go home. They take the case to The Supreme Court, which overturns the Kansas ruling. No more banning of flirtly seduction films!
Paired with the ruling in "The Miracle Case" – when the Supreme Court declared censorship of Roberto Rosselinni’s film The Miracle as a violation of The First Amendment — The Moon is Blue significantly weakened the power of The Hays Code, which, in the decade to come, would dissolve altogether.
Point being: Preminger was the kind of man who tolerated little in the way of bullshit. He thought that black actors were woefully underused, and wanted to make the most of the tremendous talent he saw on the lot. Thus, Carmen Jones.
The story of Dandridge’s attempt to win the part of Carmen has morphed into the stuff of legend, which is another way of saying that half of it is probably bull. But here goes:
Dandridge wanted to prove herself as a serious actor, not a sex-bomb club performer. So when she went to see Preminger for the part, she wore “a navy-blue dress with a white Peter Pan collar. It fit through the waist, then flared. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail.” Very Charlotte York of you, Dorothy.
But Preminger thought she was way too “high fashion.” As he purportedly told Dandridge, “this Carmen is an earthy girl who’s entirely different from you. Every time I look at you, I see Saks Fifth Avenue.”
Dandridge huffs and puffs out of there. Cut to montage of russling through her closet, hemming her skirts shorter, putting on black eyeliner. When she came back, she walked in with “tousled hair, dark makeup, a tight skirt, revealing blouse, and the sexiest swinging hips in town.”
She sounds like she’s wearing the Halloween costume of a harlot, but bygones. Preminger obviously gave her the part. And at some point in there — before or after, it’s unclear — Dandridge also made him his favorite dinner of cold steak and cucumber salad... CUT SCENE.
Thus began a tumultuous, open-secret of a relationship that would span the next several years.
The year to follow was the best of Dandridge’s career. She was once again paired with Harry Belafonte, only this time he got to wear a uniform. Now, you may only know the older, arch, raspy voice Belafonte (the one who endorses Obama and calls out the American government in Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke — I love him so much).  But young Belafonte, sweet lord, he was smokin’.

In what would become Dandridge’s signature outfit, she made the cover of Life — the first black woman to do so.

If looking that good on the cover of a national magazine wasn’t enough, she got to wear this incredible tube-top pants-suit inside the magazine:

And the arm cuff! Hailing Jane: I want!
Meanwhile, the black gossip press wondered, with good cause, if Hollywood would actually “let negroes make love onscreen.” (On the grand scale of magazine headline weirdness, this cover rates an 11).

But Carmen Jones was a monster hit, which is code for “even white people went to see it.” Dandridge was nominated for an Academy Award — the first black woman to be nominated for Best Actress. And will you look at her competition: Judy Garland in A Star is Born, Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina, Jane Wyman in Magnificent Obsession, and Grace Kelly in The Country Girl. Dandridge lost to Kelly, but if you’ve seen The Country Girl, and you watch this clip below, you can see what the Academy was missing:

(Fastforward to 5:35)

“You make sounds I don’t like!”  I LOVE HER SO MUCH. And that red skirt, holy shit: Jane, I beseech you.
You might note, however, that the singing voice doesn’t seem to emerge from Dandridge’s mouth. It didn’t. Both she and Belafonte were dubbed throughout due to the “un-opera-like” quality of their otherwise strong (read: black) voices. The film’s success stemmed from this combination of low-and-high, black-and-white: an all-black cast mapped upon the whitest of art forms. (In close competition: knitting, stain-glass, weaving).

Bonus picture of Dandridge, Belafonte, Preminger — but why is Robert Mitchum hanging around?

Suddenly, everything was awesome. Dandridge could ask $100,000 a picture, draped herself in white beaver (weird?), bought a huge Hollywood mansion, and drove around town in a huge white Thunderbird. She accompanied Preminger to Cannes and waited for the offers to pour in.
A big one arrived: the role of Tuptim in The King and I. The film was going to be a huge production, and the role, while supporting, would’ve been high profile. But Tuptim was a slave, and after consulting with Preminger, Dandridge refused, certain that more offers would be forthcoming. The role went to Rita Moreno; the film was a smash. Dandridge had lost the momentum, and would later view the refusal of Tuptim as the beginning of her fall from grace.

Preminger looking grade-A skeezy with the Dandridge sisters

Still waiting for a role, Dandridge’s relationship with Preminger became strained. In part because he was, well, married, but also because they couldn’t appear together in public unless they were promoting a film. At some point, Dandridge became pregnant, but had an abortion to avoid scandal. The press began linking her a list of white stars: Peter Lawford, Tyrone Power, Michael Rennie, Farley Granger Jr. Dandridge was, indeed, dating some, but certainly not all, of these men. As her sister Vivian later explained, she wasn’t dating white men because she was “prejudiced” against black men, as some press outlets alleged. Dandridge “would have been very happy to have married someone like a Harry Belafonte or a Sidney Poitier. But those men were already married. [Dorothy] just didn’t meet Black men in her world.”
Anxiety over Dandridge dating “out of race” popped up in, you guessed it, Confidential, which went for some good ol’ fashioned miscegenation fear-mongering, publishing a story on “What Dorothy Dandridge Did in the Woods.” (Read: Had Sex With a White Person.)
By this point, Dandridge was fed up. She filed suit against Confidential, testifying at the “Trial of 100 Stars” that attempted to take down the smut-rag. (The story behind the trial is fascinating and crucial to the future of the gossip industry; see Mary Desjardins' article in Headline Hollywood.

One very pissed off Dandridge testifying against Confidential

And still, Dandridge waited for a role. Recall, she was still under contract to Fox — which still wanted to make her a star. The problem, of course, mirrored that of her private life: they couldn’t find a way to put her onscreen with a white man. Finally, Fox cast her in Island in the Sun — a controversial script, set in the West Indies, that paired Dandridge, a “restless” bank clerk, with (white) John Justin, a governor’s aid, and low-class Harry Belafonte with (white) high-class Joan Fontaine.

I could show you the clip of somewhat creepy  John Justin but I couldn’t pass up another chance to show you Belafonte.

Fox exploited the controversy over the couplings into a demi-hit, yet Dandridge complained that there was no “intimacy” in what was meant to be a “love scene” between her and Justin. Think Julia Roberts and Denzel in The Pelican Brief — that sort of staid yearning.  But it was also Dandridge’s first appearance on screen for nearly three years. The momentum was indeed lost.
Two small, unremarkable films followed (Tamango, The Decks Ran Red). Dandridge was increasingly desperate. So in 1959, she took the lead in Samuel Goldwyn’s production of Porgy and Bess. Big role! Awesome! Not so much: the characters of the well-known play were straight-up black stereotypes. Porgy’s a drunk, Bess is a drug addict, and other black characters are rapists and ne’er-do-wells. Belafonte was offered the role of Porgy, refused it on principle, and encouraged Dandridge to do the same. But Dandridge was still haunted by her decision to turn down The King and I, and took the role, alongside Sidney Poitier and Sammy Davis Jr.
And when Preminger, now quite estranged from Dandridge, stepped in to replace the director, everything went to hell. Already known for his harsh manner on set, Preminger brought Dandridge to tears on a regular basis. Think of it this way: you’re desperate for work, so take an embarrassing-yet-high-paying job. It’s okay, you think, I’ll be fine — at least I’ve got some hot and funny guys working with me. But then your just-fine, normal boss is replaced by your dick ex-boyfriend, and he shames you in front of your new co-workers constantly. That is the shit that Dandridge had to tolerate.

Despite claims that Porgy and Bess would “introduce a new era in motion pictures,” the film was a flop. Dandridge received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress, but in those days, Golden Globes were serious farm league.
And the unraveling begins. Dandridge meets Jack Denison, a true juicebox of a restaurant owner, and falls for his promises. They marry in June 1959, and he forces her to perform at his small-fry restaurant, effectively driving down her value with every appearance. He starts managing her career, beats her regularly, and loses a significant amount of her money. The other chunk of her money had been tucked away in what Dandridge thought to be a solid, fool-proof oil investment, but when it proves a massive scam, Dandridge and a dozen other stars lose everything.
Dandridge begins to drink heavily. No longer able to afford her daughter’s personal care, she’s forced to put her in a state mental home. She declares bankruptcy and takes piecemeal, embarrassing gigs to pay the bills. After a few years of terribleness, she ditches the juicebox, puts her life back together, and decides to make a second go — booking international club appearances and beginning rehearsals. But it was all very Michael Jackson preparing for the “This Is It” tour. She injured her foot while practicing, re-lost the momentum, and fatally overdosed — accidentally or purposefully – on her anti-depressant.
The year was 1965. Dorothy Dandridge was 42 years old. She had $2.14 in her bank account.
In the end, Hollywood forced her to embody one of the stereotypes she so loathed: the tragic mulatta, a woman accepted in some ways by both the black and white communities but rejected in other, crucial, heartbreaking ways. The white community loved her “white” beauty and the specter of her sexuality, but refused to allow her to actually act on that sexuality. Think early Britney Spears: be sexual, but don’t do anything with it.  And if you do, you’re a slut.
Dandridge saw this clearly. “America was not geared to make me into a Liz Taylor, Monroe, or a Gardner,” she explained. “My sex symbolism was as a wanton, a prostitute, not as a woman seeking love and a husband, like other women.” Dandridge wasn’t the last black actress to be treated this way. Even today, Race-that-is-not-white + Sexualty = Something incendiary, something dangerous.
Dandridge suffered so that others wouldn’t have to. Yet fifty years after her death, when one would hope that all vestiges of discrimination, prejudice, and sexual stereotyping would have dissipated, they’re still alive, however quiet. Think of (mainstream) black female stars. There’s not a lot of them, so this won’t take you long.  Now think about who they’re allowed to be with onscreen, and the discourses about their sexuality off-screen. Whitney Houston could do little more than kiss Kevin Costner in The Bodyguard. Halle Berry was archly criticized for taking a role in which she was hyper-sexualized and can’t open a movie. Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer, Jennifer Hudson, Mon’ique — none of them can get a leading role in a major Hollywood picture, much less a romantic leading role. We may have a black president, but most Americans still don’t know what to do with a black, sexual woman onscreen.

I look at the pictures of Dandridge in her prime, and I see someone who thinks she’s on the cusp of something big. That the world was going to accept her on her merit. That things were going to change. I look at that hope, and I feel terrible sadness. The real tragedy of the story of Dorothy Dandridge, then, is the tragedy of enduring, unspoken, insidious prejudice.

Scandals of Classic Hollywood: Warren Beatty Thinks This Song Is About Him

Warren Beatty wasn’t your typical handsome. There was something earnest about him — something plaintive, needy — that made women want to protect him. And, of course, sleep with him. And if you know anything about Warren Beatty, it’s probably that he’s rumored to have slept with 13,000 women over the last 75 years. I call bullshit on that math, but womanizing has nevertheless become Beatty’s defining characteristic. His sister famously said he “couldn’t even commit to dinner.” Woody Allen once asked to be reincarnated as his fingertips.
But here’s the thing: for all his flirtatiousness, for all his storied ability to romance over the phone, for all his “What’s Up Pussycat”-ing, Beatty was also one of the most important figures in film over the last 50 years. He was demanding, he was irritating, he wasn’t always a good actor, but he might have been brilliant. And that — along with the prodigious womanizing — is what I’m going to remember him for today.
I’m talking about Beatty in the past tense, but he’s very much alive — in fact, he’s the first subject of this series who's still alive, despite beginning his career at just about the same time as Paul Newman and Natalie Wood. But he hasn’t made a film since 2001 (let’s not talk about it) and seems rather retired. He, along with Shirley MacLaine (his sister), Jane Fonda, and a handful of other stars, still signify the “Silver Age” of Hollywood, when the studios, caught in freefall, allowed a handful of experimental, untested directors with names like Coppola, Scorsese, and Polanski to make inexpensive yet exquisite masterpieces.
The story of Beatty’s career is the story of the last 50 years of Hollywood: his first work was in television, he moved to films made in the last gasp of the studio era, and finally found success by putting together film packages (story, script, producer, director, and stars — of some iteration thereof — included) and selling them to the studios. He grew up in Virginia, the son of educators and baby brother to Shirley, enjoying things that kids of teachers generally do: reading and playing the piano. But something changes when he reaches high school — he’s elected class president, plays football like a pro, and is, essentially, big man on campus. He’s known as “Mad Dog.” Despite offers from several schools to play football, he goes to Northwestern to study drama. How very Finn Hudson of you, Warren.
But drama school doesn’t stick, and after a year, Beatty moves to New York City, where his sister is acting on Broadway. He takes some acting classes with Stella Adler, a.k.a. the American promulgator of The Method. To make rent, he works all sorts of standard starving-actor jobs: bricklayer, dishwasher, and, my personal favorite, cocktail lounge piano player.
So picture this: Beatty. In New York. In the 1950s. Kids trained in the Method are blowing up all over the place — Brando in Streetcar, Clift in A Place in the Sun, James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, Paul Newman in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Beatty clearly saw what his life — and talent — could look like. But he couldn’t seem to land the right auditions, and spent time languishing in bit parts on various “anthology” television series, the ‘50s version of Masterpiece Theater meets network television.
During this period, he also hooked up with Joan Collins. Now, if your memory of Joan Collins is anything like mine — which is to say filled with shoulder pads and ‘80s power suits — then you need to replace that memory with this one:

Girl was a minx. A minx with a contract with 20th Century Fox, which wanted to pit her against Elizabeth Taylor. Collins was getting roles, Beatty was not, but they were head-over-heels for each other — and apparently having a tremendous amount of sex. They became engaged in late 1958, moving to a teensy apartment in the Chateau Marmont.

Beatty may have been a romantic, but he also understood the benefits of a demi-star as a fiancee. He finagled a part in playwright William Inge’s A Loss of Roses. Inge was gay and apparently had a thing for Beatty; Beatty, already resourceful, played that thing into an audition for director Elia Kazan’s latest production, for which Inge had written the script.
That production was a little something called Splendor in the Grass. Beatty won the part of Bud Stamper, a small-town middle-American teen with, well, urges for his girlfriend, played by Natalie Wood in her comeback role. (I love it when 23-year-olds have “comebacks.”) I’ve written about this film (and Wood in it) elsewhere, but it must be said again: IT IS A MARVEL. A hysterical, yearning, roll-on-the ground marvel. The French translated it into Fever in the Blood. That’s what I’m talking about.

Sidenote: I bought my best friend the poster for her birthday, and now it’s framed in the guest bedroom where I’m currently lazing through my Seattle summer, and I wake up every morning and read the text on the side and get chills.

And I look at the image below and suddenly it’s wide-eyed and scary and dangerous indeed.

Now, Collins and Beatty were still engaged, but Collins was off shooting elsewhere, and as Beatty’s star rose, his need for an engagement seemingly fell. Or, who knows, they might have just figured out they had irreconcilable sleep schedules, or that only one of them liked black licorice. A planned wedding was called off just in time for the hoopla surrounding Splendor in the Grass, and its pile of Golden Globe and Academy Award nominations, to crest. Oh, and for a hot relationship with co-star Natalie Wood to develop, all RPattz and KStew-style. Their relationship apparently apes that of their onscreen characters in Splendor, all rollercoastery and emotional, although I bet they actually had sex instead of going crazy and/or becoming poor.

Wood and Beatty attend the Oscars arm-in-arm, surrounded by cameras, and when Wood loses Best Actress to Sophia Loren, gossip maven Hedda Hopper exclaimed “Natalie Wood was robbed! But at least she got the nicest consolation prize — Warren Beatty.”
Around this time, Beatty began to establish the beginnings of his image as a fresh-faced womanizer. Already, there’s something about the way he looked at women, and the way that women blossomed under his gaze. You see it here, when he’s pretty much the hottest man ever to wear glasses:

And again here, when Photoplay tries its best to insinuate that Beatty has a huge package:

Beatty was all sorts of visible, and he appeared in three high profile projects before the end of 1963. The problem, then, was that all three of these films — The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, All Fall Down, and Lilith, director Robert Rossen’s last film — were disappointments. Lilith has aged well, and was underestimated at the time, but Beatty was increasingly frustrated with his inability to make good on the promise of his turn in Splendor. He would barrage directors with questions, growing increasingly frustrated with their lack of decision or direction. He was spending his star capital, and it would run out soon.
His obsession with knowing everything that was happening — everywhere, all the time — grew. After much back and forth that reminds me much too keenly of my sophomore year in college, Beatty and Wood broke up, sparking a string of one night stands on his part — seldom for sex so much as for connections.
What’s fascinating is how Beatty combined the masculine prowess associated with promiscuity, yet used it the way that we usually think of women and sex in Hollywood: to get ahead. He slept with co-stars, slept with producers, and when a female critic panned Lilith, he purportedly slept with her, too.
After some testing of the waters, Beatty was linked to Leslie Caron — she of An American in Paris and Gigi Kewpie-doll fame. Caron was married to Peter Hall, the director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, with whom she had two small children. But Beatty was no (legitimate) home-wrecker: Caron and Hall’s marriage had been long-strained, with both of them living apart to pursue their respective ambitions. As Hall himself admitted, “by 1962, there wasn’t much left but resentment.”

Caron in full Gigi mode.

Caron was six years older, a mother of two, and Beatty was apparently totally smitten. According to Caron, “he was a very sensitive, private person and not really comfortable in a crowd — but he played the part of a playboy movie star conscientiously, as if it were an acting job.” And he was horribly insecure: he allegedly once woke Caron at 5 a.m., worried that “You’re sleeping. You’re not thinking of me.”

Not 5 a.m.

Which is another way of saying that Beatty was essentially becoming The Worst. He had become increasingly frustrated with his backseat role as leading man, and as his films continued to lose money, it seemed clear that audiences didn’t want to see Beatty onscreen. It was almost as if they were wary of him, or only wanted to think about him, not actually see him — otherwise how can you explain the fact that no one went to go see the clearly awesome Mickey One?

Comedian targeted by the mob? American attempt at nouvelle vague? Warren Beatty in a role intended for Lenny Bruce? Supposedly Polish? Surrealism meets trampolines?!? This film is disaster, but it’s a beautiful disaster, even if Beatty himself admitted that it was “unnecessarily obscure,” which is kind of how I describe 95% of MA thesis topics.
Somewhere around this time, Beatty began to develop an amazing ability with the phone. Meaning he was constantly on it — but not in the annoying, always-be-closing stockbroker sort of way. More the purring, sex-on-the-line sorta way. He’d wake up, day or night, and get on the phone, and call everyone he knew, starting each conversation (with a woman) with “What’s new Pussycat?”

Various people in Hollywood figured out this was happening, that it was awesome/farcical, and producer Charles Feldman started working with Beatty to develop a film quasi-based on Beatty’s philandering lifestyle. The title, natch, would be What’s New Pussycat? To help flesh out the script, direct, and take a supporting role, the two hired an unknown talent by the name of Woody Allen.
What’s New Pussycat seemed to be Beatty’s way to show that he had a sense of humor — and reactivate his star image in a way that wasn’t just sleeping with famous women. But Beatty sent Feldman dozens of telegrams questioning every detail of the production — we’re talking a teenage texting level of telegrams — that drove the producer batty. They disagreed about casting, about the direction of the plot, about characterization ... and, worst of all, Allen was making his own character more and more crucial to the film, effectively giving Beatty second billing in his own production.
The whole thing is so Woody Allen I can’t even stand it. Then, the final straw: a gossip column claims that Caron has been cast in the lead — which Feldman archly opposed. Feldman becomes convinced that Beatty is trying to outmaneouver him and boxes him out of the production. The movie, featuring Beatty’s own f-ing catchphrase, proceeds forward — with Peter O'Toole in the lead. It makes a fair amount of money. But Allen “hates every frame.” The experience so burns both Allen and Beatty that from that point forward, they essentially won’t let another person touch their work.
Enter Bonnie and Clyde. Or, rather, enter the build-up to Bonnie and Clyde.
Caron and Beatty are hanging out in London, and Beatty hears that Francois Truffaut, he of The 400 Blows and Jules et Jim and, you know, all of those other French masterpieces, has an adaptation of Fahrenheit 451 in the works. Caron sets up a meeting for her overanxious boyfriend and Truffaut, but Truffaut says no way, mon ami, but maybe you want to develop this other gangster thing? It’s called Bonnie and Clyde, give it a shot, you and your girlfriend can play the leads.
Beatty dithers over buying the script, thinking that Westerns are washed up — the stuff of television and B-movies. But Caron tells him to stop being a doofus: it’s a gangster movie, stupid. Beatty buys the script for $75,000, but tells Caron that she’s too French to play Bonnie. He wants Bob Dylan for Clyde. Maybe his sister for Bonnie? But then he decides that he wants to play Clyde, which means that his sister TOTALLY CANNOT PLAY BONNIE.
He offers it to (still good friend) Natalie Wood, but she turns it down. So did every other female star in Hollywood: Jane Fonda, Ann-Margaret, Sharon Tate, the list goes on. In the end, it was Arthur Penn, who Beatty had wrangled to direct, who discovered Faye Dunaway on the stage. She was Bonnie; Bonnie was her. The rest is history.

Now, when was the last time you saw this film? Was it in my college film history course? Was it with your dad sometime in high school? Whenever it was, it was too long ago. Because this film is perfect.
I would show you a clip, but all that’s really available is this masterpiece montage set to Bon Jovi’s “It’s My Life” and this one of Jay-Z and Beyonce going south of the border with bikinis and berets.
But maybe this will entice you?

Or maybe this?

Beatty was in his element: he was controlling the film, and he was playing the role he was destined for — a hapless, affable, cocky schmuck. He was impotent yet charismatic — when you see how Dunaway looks at him in the beginning shots of the film, you understand exactly why she leaves her life to be with a man with little more than a gun. Part of this is acting; part of this stems from the very real fact that unlike every other situation in the last ten years of his life, Beatty didn’t sleep with Dunaway. The frustration is palpable.
Beatty and Dunaway’s performances underline the ennui, oppression, and hopelessness of the summertime in the heat of the Depression. There’s a poetry to this film that has only expanded with age, plus the commentary on the formation of public images, well, as you know, that’s the sort of incisive cultural commentary that AHP loves. I can’t get enough of this film, and while Dunaway, Penn, Gene Hackman, and even Estelle Parsons, the single most annoying film character of the second half of the 20th century, have a lot to do with it, Beatty was its mastermind.
As douchey as the preceding 2,000 words have made Beatty sound, this film — and the courage it took to convincingly portray an impotent man — defined his career. No longer was he Beatty, the man no one wanted to watch: he was the man everyone wanted in everything.
But Bonnie and Clyde almost didn’t even get seen. You can read a lot more about why in Peter Biskind’s various books, but here’s the short version: Warner Bros. agrees to fund and distribute the film, but really doesn’t think much of it. There’s also the matter of the visceral violence at the end of the film, which, despite the existing holes in the Production Code, was still something else altogether. All the major film critics think it’s an abomination, including Bosley Crowther, the old man of the old Grey Lady. Exhibitors are cautious, and it makes next to nothing.
OH BUT WAIT ONE SECOND, because Pauline Kael, then just a staff writer at The New Yorker, writes a rave to end all raves, effectively forcing other critics to reappraise the film or get the hell outta town. “Bonnie and Clyde is the most excitingly American movie since The Manchurian Candidate,” she wrote. “The audience is alive to it.” She was totally right.
The Times fires Crowther for being such a moralizer, and the film goes on to gross $70 million — a truly phenomenal number for 1967, especially given that it was made for $2.5 million. And the story gets even better: because Warner Bros. had put so little stake in the film’s success, they agreed to give Beatty 40% of the film’s profits. That’s some Mel Gibson-Passion of the Christ money right there.
And enough for Beatty to make whatever movie he wanted, with whomever he wanted. For DECADES. That is some serious capital — the kind we haven’t really seen since Gibson’s own flame-out.
But while Gibson chose to use his star capital to entertain the Christian fundamental base, Beatty bided his time. According to lore, he sees Julie Christie, still hot after Doctor Zhivago, meeting the Queen, and falls for her. But Christie was having none of it: “I was always attracted to people who appeared think you were a dross, people who I felt thought I was really stupid and frivolous, and who didn’t give a toss what I looked like.”
In other words, Christie f-ing loved hipster boys. She was engaged to a British artist, and thought Beatty the equivalent of a state school frat boy. But he managed to get her to come to dinner, and surprised her with his intelligence. He stays in the background, biding his time until she outgrows her hipster boyfriend and moves back to L.A. They move in together; have a lot of sex; go full counter-culture. Really just adorable stuff.


The soprano sax! I DIE!
(Did I mention that he broke up with Caron? And slept with several dozen women between her and Christie? Sorry, I was getting bored with listing hook-ups.)
For all his love of Christie, Beatty couldn’t let go of his telephone. When Christie was off shooting elsewhere, he’d pick up the phone. Peter Biskind tells it best:

Never identifying himself on the phone, speaking in a soft, insinuating voice rarely raised about a whisper, flattering in its assumption of intimacy, enormously appealing in its hesitancy and stumbling awkwardness, he asked them where they were, with whom, where they were going next, and would they be sure to call him when they got there. His appetite for control and thirst for information were as voracious as his appetite for sex, and it seemed that inside his head was a GPS indicating the whereabouts of every attractive young woman in Los Angeles.

Maybe because I’m allergic to the phone, I can’t quite understand the appeal. Do you think he’d be today’s version of a good text messager/emailer? The kind who manages to be witty and addictive, who replies just often enough, who can be funny and beguiling and hot and smart all at once? If so, then okay, I’m on it.
Between GPS tracking, Beatty looked for his next project. He could be very, very picky. There was the unfortunate mess of The Only Game in Town, but Beatty was just there to co-star with Elizabeth Taylor. (Lucky You, starring Eric Bana and Drew Barrymore, is a remake of this film. That should tell you what you need to know.) Oh, and $, sometimes referred to as Dollars, with Goldie Hawn, is maybe just as fun as Oceans 11, but with better music. I can’t really tell you; I haven’t seen it since it aired on TBS when I was 10.
Amid this mess, Carly Simon writes “You’re So Vain.” She refuses to reveal who the song is about. Beatty, having dallied with Simon at some point in the past, thinks the song is about him. He calls Simon to thank her. Obviously.
The Only Game in Town and Dollars were relative shitshows, but then there was the melancholy marvel of McCabe & Mrs. Miller. If Beatty had only made this film and Bonnie and Clyde, he’d still be among my favorite stars. He returns to the bumbling, wide-eyed quasi-naif, and watching Julie Christie out-man him at life is just so amazingly pleasing. I forgive him everything. And that last scene! That last, heartbreaking scene! Screw you, Leonard Cohen soundtrack! I’m falling to pieces over here and I’m only watching the trailer!
Plus Julie Christie, HOT DAMN.

Granted, this film might not be for everyone — especially if you are the type of everyone who doesn’t like Robert Altman or genre revisionism — but oh, it is for me. Beatty apparently hated Altman, as someone with the sort of obsessive, questioning personality like Beatty probably would if paired with the nonchalance of a director like Altman. Christie loved Altman. Cue break-up with Christie.
Throw in some Parallax View, a few years off to campaign for George McGovern, and you find yourself at Shampoo, which, along with Burt Reynolds on a bear rug in the pages of Cosmopolitan, is one of the true great cultural artifacts of the 1970s.
Beatty was one of those guys who stays friends with all of his exes. Which is part of how he convinced both Goldie Hawn, a “friend” from his $ days, and Christie to co-star in a movie about a male hairdresser who pretends to be gay ... but is really bedding all the girlfriends and wives in town.
It’s a beautiful farce, and not just because of outfits like this one:

And haircuts like these:

Beatty was, as usual, in full micro-management mode, pissing everyone off and making the director, Hal Ashby, adhere to his vision of the film. (Anecdotal evidence has Ashby high and off in a corner while Beatty actually directs the film.) Once it wrapped, everyone in Hollywood thought it was going to bomb. It was too much, too offensive — when Julie Christie’s character goes “under the table” in the last act of the film (read: starts to give someone a blow job) a full third of the test audience walked out. It was blowing the sexual and political hypocrisy of the Nixon years out of the water, and execs, agents, and others too close to Hollywood didn’t know what to do with it. They were, in part, the ones being satirized.
But the critics loved it. So did everyone else. It was a monster hit, and reinvigorated Beatty’s image. Here was a man playing a manwhore: a hapless, frustrated, confused manwhore who can’t keep his girlfriends, mistresses, and mishaps in order. Beatty satirizing Beatty, or at least the image of Beatty. With a line — “I don’t fuck anyone for money, I do it for fun” — that only further defined him. It’s an underrated performance in an underrated film, and you should probably watch it right now for free via Amazon Prime, if only to see how much you should be mourning Kate Hudson’s recent movie choices. Plus the minidresses, the beautiful minidresses!
And the hairstyling, it really is pretty great. When Beatty tells Christie that he wants to cut her hair, it’s such a gesture of unadulterated affection.

And so things went for the next 20 or so years: a much-belabored film interspersed with new romances. He successfully wooed the Academy with Reds, which I find somewhat tedious and not nearly as revelatory as Bonnie and Clyde, and bombed out big with Ishtar. He spent years on the overkill that was Dick Tracy, started dating Madonna, and looked so incredibly embarrassed in her Sex movie.

In many ways, Beatty and Madonna were a perfect match: both keenly understood how sex intertwined with their respective images, and how to exploit those images in a way that would endure. They were, and remain, survivors. But Madonna’s particular brand of showmanship was a better fit for Beatty circa 1970, and my guess is that, among other things, she might have made him feel old. Or at least undersexed, if that is even possible.
And then there was Bugsy, Annette Bening, an actual marriage, a rather pulseless remake of Love Affair, and four children. With Bullworth, he evidenced that he was not only still a star, but still very much engaged in making smart, incisive satire.
It should be clear that Beatty could be an asshole. Or, perhaps more precisely, a real pain in the ass. Barbara Walters once named him the most difficult man in the world to interview. He could be withholding and cagey, exacting and relentless. But so could Orson Welles, and we remember him for his movies, not his love affairs (of which there were also many).
Beatty was certainly a womanizer, and probably (most likely) a sex addict. So were lots of stars of Classic Hollywood. The difference was that sex became part of his image in a way that it never could for his antecedents. Beatty’s image encapsulated the masculine role in the sexual revolution — the casualness, the sheer proliferation of partners — and the accompanying emotional distance and unsated hunger. In his films, and in interviews, you sense both: the distance, the hunger, and the logical yet absurd conclusion that a life of fulfilled desire was, ultimately, unfulfilling. In subtle, unspoken ways, his image spoke truth to the lie of the American sexual revolution: namely, that free love brings freedom.
I’m not suggesting that Beatty found monogamy and somehow found himself, or even found happiness. (For what it’s worth, he did claim that “for me, the highest level of sexual excitement is in a monogamous relationship.”) Yet the problem with free love in America — and with Beatty’s image in America — is that it grinds against more than 200 years of puritanical sexual conservatism.
Because Beatty’s image is overtly sexual, it must morph grotesque: suddenly he didn’t just have sex with hundreds of women, but thousands. He becomes an object of fascination and repulsion: he’s feminized (manwhore! slut!), made abject. And, as has occurred with so many female stars, the focus is not on his work — which really is staggering — but what his body can and has done. If you watch Shampoo closely, you realize that’s what it’s really about: all Beatty’s character wants is to prove himself, to get out from underneath his condescending boss, to cut a truly beautiful head of hair. But no one will stop fondling his package long enough to let him.
Now, I realize that Beatty was not some exploited female starlet. He did no small amount of exploitation of his own reputation, not to mention women’s affections and his position of power. But the scandal of Beatty’s image is that a man who really just wanted to make beautiful, incisive films, get worthwhile candidates in office, and have a lot of sex along the way is remembered almost exclusively for the last of those three. Sex becomes Beatty.
As for me, I’ll remember Beatty best for his portrayals of sexual frustration — the breathless desire of Splendor in the Grass, the wide-eyed bewilderment at the heart of his Clyde. Sex doesn’t become him; it beguiles him. Fifty years from now, scholars will look back and consider not what Beatty’s image was, but how our twisted reception of it illuminates the hypocrisy at the heart of American sexual values.