Interview: Warren Beatty
Warren did share my concern about the seemingly futile quality of our conversations. I remember how we would pace around his swimming pool, fretting together. “Let’s keep moving around from subject to subject,” he said, “and maybe I’ll not be boring on something.” Often I would try to engage him by sharing tidbits from my personal life: I told him how an actress had recently wreaked havoc on my heart. He asked her name, then said, by way of consolation, “I never dated her.” Whereupon he imparted staggering wisdom on the perils of dating actors and actresses, but this was during an off-the-record break. I asked him to repeat himself when the tape was going, but all he said after a long silence was “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” That always struck me as one of his finest moments.
Now, about those Pauses: Never had I encountered silence to match the breadth and scope of Warren’s silences. Historically, silence, like odorlessness, is difficult to portray in print, which is understandable, since there is not a lot you can really say about it Still, I could not cheat readers out of Warren’s astonishing silences. You needed to experience them to fully appreciate their richness. But how to communicate this? A solution came to me on a flight to Chicago. Upon deplaning, I called my transcription service back in Burbank, where a team of typists was about to begin work on the interview tapes. “Time them,” I said. “Time what?” said the chief transcriber. “The Pauses,” I said. And so a roomful of women in headphones set about clicking stopwatches on and off, measuring one man’s reluctance.
It is no secret that, as a result, Warren’s Pauses became something of an international sensation. Because modesty had always prevented Warren from bragging about the length of his Pauses, I seized the opportunity to help. I took the hard numbers and salted them throughout the published article. Readers could endure Warren as authentically as I did, by simply consulting the second hand of any timepiece. Hubbub ensued. USA Today reported that Warren’s longest Pause was fifty-seven seconds. (There were, in fact, longer ones, but they preceded responses so bland they were unpublishable.) VJ Martha Quinn did dramatic readings from the piece on MTV. When Madonna was handed the magazine in a limousine, she reportedly recited the story aloud, repeating favorite comic passages over and over. She then included a tribute to Warren s Pauses in at least one of her Blond Ambition concerts. (She would ask a leering question of a dancer dressed as Dick Tracy, then turn to the audience and announce, “Pause, twenty-seven seconds.”) Several weeks later she expressed her glee over the piece by giving me the high five at a party. Clearly, she was grateful that I had shown readers the Warren she knew so well. But when I asked her where he was that night, she said, a tad bitterly, “Who knows?” Such is love’s mercurial way.
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As for Warren, I was told he read the piece on a flight to New York and pretended to be unmoved. “I don’t hate it,” he told his travel companion, “and I don’t like it.” (Always the diplomat!) Still, I am certain that impact was made. After all, there comes a time in every man’s life when being cagey gets dull. Confronted with his own excellent Pauses, Warren could only reassess his dedication to Avoidance. Soon thereafter, he began work on another film, the splendid Bugsy, and fell in love with his costar Annette Bening, herself a woman of great reticence. Next, news came that she was expecting Warren’s baby. There was talk of marriage. When it was time to promote Bugsy, a different Warren emerged in interviews, a Warren who actually spoke sentences of merit and color, of self-revelation and candor. He hardly even Paused! Then his daughter, Kathlyn, was born, and he got awards for Bugsy. Warren had stopped running away from truth, and suddenly he had much to show for it.
It is not my nature to take credit, but I have lately placed many calls and sent several faxes to his home, in order to congratulate him on the new openness in his life. His assistant assures me that Warren has gotten all of my messages. I’m sure I will be hearing from him.
Interview: Warren Beatty, Page 2 of 2
