Warren Beatty : In Our Culture of Celebrity, Fame Is the Currency

Warren Beatty is a star and has been one for more than three decades. After 19 movies, including “Bonnie and Clyde” and “Shampoo,” an academy award for directing “Reds” and an Oscar nomination this year (his 13th) for his role in “Bugsy,” he has entered that pantheon of the famous who stick around for more than one season--and even more than one generation. Possessed of a legendary libido and known for his active involvement in various Democratic Party presidential campaigns, he is, as they say at those fund-raising dinners he so frequently attends, a man for all seasons and, as much as anyone, the celebrity’s celebrity.

At the center of fame for so long, he has experienced America as few do. Although he dropped out of college after one year, Beatty reads widely and has sophisticated views on the intersection of style, substance and power in our time. He can go on for hours and late into the night intellectualizing on a range of topics--whether or not the tape recorder is on. As a producer, director and actor, Beatty’s experience in the high-stakes entertainment business encompasses the insights of the businessman as well as artist.

Sitting in his apartment at the Carlyle Hotel, talking until 5 a.m., after a long photo shoot for the cover of TV Guide and several television appearances, and with a driver waiting to swish him and his entourage to JFK and a flight to London for more of the same, Beatty has clearly not been exhausted by the ever publicized and frenetic life he has led. But when his new baby stirs in the next room and the fabled playboy is suddenly transformed into concerned father, it does suggest that this may be a propitious moment for some observations on life in the world of the celebrity, which increasingly preoccupies our culture--including our political life.

Beatty has long supported and traveled with Democratic presidential candidates--who must themselves increasingly function as celebrities to succeed. From what he calls the “vantage point of the celebrity,” Beatty offered observations on the world of “infotainment”--which he argues dominates all arenas of our public life, from politics to media.

Question: Your adult life has been spent in the glare of celebrity--almost as the modern American equivalent of royalty. What insight has this experience produced?

Answer: You use the word celebrity as a sort of endearing pejorative. I don’t know what a celebrity is.

Q: I’ll tell you what a celebrity is. When you walk downstairs in any hotel in the world, most people will know who you are, will be excited to tell their families they saw you. That’s being a celebrity. There is a whole industry making you even more of a celebrity, because it’s good for your movies.

A: Talk it up!

Q: You have long lent your celebrity to political causes. But now politicians must first become celebrities to gain the attention of voters. Then, as you have experienced, the glare of that publicity guides a withering search for flaws. Any advice to the politician cum celebrity?

A: The fortunate thing about being famous for a long time is that unless you’re Houdini, they’ve pretty much found all the flaws, all the dirt--the invented dirt or the real dirt. There is not going be some trauma of info shot across your bow. With politicians in the primary process, it seems that the target has to come around twice. The first time there will almost always be a direct hit, which maybe they can survive. When a candidate has been through it on a presidential level a couple of times, he will gain confidence.

Q: Are those hits inevitable?

A: The governmental, political, economic issues are so complex that this type of simpler info about character relating to sexual behavior or behavior in relation to more commonly understood life problems becomes a substitute for judging capacity of public men to deal with public issues. We are in the era of what I call “infotainment,” and there is a huge market and huge money to be made by the media from that which is titillating. There is a lucrative industry in the business of reducing public figures. Also, there is fervor about sexual issues in a society that has never dealt very well with sexual hypocrisy. In the age of AIDS, this has all been heightened.

Q: Are the sexual affairs only dealt with because the media is out to make money?

A: The media needs sexual material to sell, but I think there is a majority in society of two minds about sexual behavior. In this ambivalence, it is hair-raising for the public figure who requires trust to accomplish his objectives. Because on an unconscious level, certainly as relates to the presidency, you’re speaking about trust of a paternal figure. We leave too many important decisions to “daddy” because “daddy” seems to understand the problem, we don’t. All we want to know is if daddy is an honest man who can be trusted to defend our interests and mommy’s interest.

Q: And we want daddy to be “pure” in every respect?

A: We are not sure at this moment what we want daddy to be. We don’t want daddy to be completely asexual. On the other hand, we don’t want daddy to be a liar. We, as a society, don’t know what’s right at this moment because those in middle age lived through the sexual revolution and the sexual counterrevolution. In this area, we are as confused as an idealistic Bolshevik in Red Square.

Q: You knew John Kennedy, who was trusted by the public quite apart from the content of his personal life. Now there is a more demanding scrutiny. In earlier days, to be a celebrity didn’t mean one had be perfect. You’ve been around long enough to be sort of an expert on this.

A: I’m midway. Before I came along, you could really get away with things; it was pre-TV, pre-proliferation of cable TV, pre-tabloids. In that time, the only outrageous outlet was something called Confidential magazine. Now we are all more in the fish bowl, but does it matter anymore? Who’s watching the bowl? There is so much going on in the fish bowl--everybody is in the bowl, with a loss of privacy for everyone, not just celebrities.

I speak about the pace of change here from the vantage point of celebrity. The person who has been famous for 32 years is in a position to observe changes in the accuracy of reporting, and there has been a sharp exponential rise in the curve over the last eight years. The level of trivialization and inaccuracy in reporting everything from nuclear power to the economy has been rising. One is left asking: Does anything mean anything anymore?

If someone invented the story that you and I were married last Thursday in a rebellious act of social protest, this might be interesting news for a few days. But it would be forgotten in a week. There’s no follow-up. Maybe we are moving to the solution the late Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black advocated, where there will be no libel laws and no slander laws. Everyone will say what they freely fabricate.

Q: At what loss?

A: A general deterioration of the social contract. In politics, people are afraid to lead, to get out in front, so they must adhere to the demographics of the moment to win. Following demographic studies is the scourge of our time. Instead of following what in their gut they know is right, they follow what most people think is right. This mass-marketing phenomena permeates every field of life--all parts of culture, politics--and it is a result of structural change in the information business.

Q: How different is it now than 10 years ago?

A: It’s instantaneous, and the technology, from faxes to video tape, is overwhelming. A single piece of video taken by anyone will live in infamy, inescapably haunting a political figure. Even if it’s not accurate or didn’t happen. We all claim to hate the tabloids but we can’t just blame the tabloids, because the media is given to the goal of entertaining rather than informing. Our means of distribution changed drastically in the last 10 to 12 years and that affects all product the same way the completely degenerated means of distribution in Russia will effect the strawberry that finally gets to the plate.

Q: It hasn’t been all bad. You and other celebrities are marketed as commodities and it contributes to your success and presumably the success of your art.

A: I think it would have been naive for someone to have gone into movies and not say they are willing to submit somewhat to the commoditization of one’s self. I’ve never been outraged about being made a commodity. That would be dumb.

Q: How much do we have a right to know? Why do we have the right to know who you’re living with other than the answer sells newspapers?

A: I think it’s sort of a folly to expect a standard other than that you have a right to know anything you can find out.

Q: So you, personally, have no complaints?

A: As Truman said, “If you can’t stand the heat get out of the kitchen.” That’s a price paid from the beginning by the commercial entertainer. I’ve never felt an objection to that. I know there are certain things I have to be careful about, and if I value the privacy in certain areas of my life, I have to do what it takes to keep it private.

Q: As a celebrity, people invest great expectations for your appearances in public. It must be a strain to always play the expected part.

A: Not a big issue

Q: Well, let me apply it to expectations for politicians.

A: Then it becomes a big issue because the commercialization of the performer in movies is different from the commercialization of the leader of public policy. There’s a great line from Cyrano, let me paraphrase; when forced to show all, then one becomes all show. Hence Bugsy, hence Adolf Hitler, et. al.

Q: But you’re saying that an actor can retain some authentic sense of themselves?

A: An actor has to--and they do it by recognizing the problem to begin with and holding onto something private.

Q: What about the actor as politician, Ronald Reagan for example? People said, “Oh, he’s only an actor.”

A: I see nothing wrong with an actor becoming a politician--and I think an actor has many tools to be effective in politics. Everybody knows I don’t agree with his politics--but Ronald Reagan is a good example of the citizen politician. It would be good if we would all, as citizens, be interested in giving years of public service the way Ronald Reagan did. I think the talented actor for the moment has a tiny touch of an unfair advantage for the frantic adjustment that we are making to the new communications world.

The whole point here is to have this technology working for us, not against us, and not to make too many precipitous errors.

Q: It used to be that if you were a U.S. senator, you were, yourself, an important person. That is no longer the case. Now, if you are a senator accompanied by some celebrity, than you’re an important person.

A: This is not so much a matter of the sanctity of the celebrity as it is a measure of the insult we give to people who are in elective office. I prefer to think that most people who run for public office have a strong streak of public service in them, and that they want to help people. We are so tough on them that we destroy their dignity, and our new forms of communications enable that type of assassination to occur.

Q: Any reason for optimism?

A: Yes. Maybe as we come to take the technology of the new communications more for granted--the continuous pulsating town meeting of television--we will learn to make ourselves more present at this meeting. The things that might have been flashy and impressive at the beginning might fade away, and hopefully the thing that ultimately excites us will be the presence of truth. I think that the public is very excited at the presence of truth. It is the shock of recognition of truth, as Melville said, and which Edmund Wilson used in his book--that genius stands in the circle, hand in hand, around the world, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round. I believe our technology can eventually effectuate that. . . .

Let me go get some sleep, so I can get up in a few hours and look like a celebrity on television.