Failing grade for a Warren report

HERE’S something I’ll bet you didn’t know about Warren Beatty: When he was a cute-as-a-puppy teenager, he was baptized, via the full-immersion method, in a see-through font, in front of an enthusiastically devout congregation. Given his subsequent career as a movie star, enigmatic public figure and, yes, legendary womanizer, this image creates a disconnect: How does this shivering sliver evolve into the alleged playboy of the Western world?

In her virtually unreadable biography, “Warren Beatty: A Private Man,” Suzanne Finstad makes much of the incident. It is, for her, symbolic of his entire childhood. The son of a woman whose theatrical ambitions were thwarted and of a distant, alcoholic man whose academic aspirations were equally frustrated (he ended up in real estate), the brother of a woman (Shirley MacLaine) who goadingly preceded him to movie stardom, Beatty, in Finstad’s view, is a man whose best work has been conditioned by a desire to make films that would, at least in part, please his parents and his own younger self.

I think that’s probably true enough. No less than any other nice middle-class boy, Beatty still sometimes answers to the call of the mild. But unlike most such types, he is obviously possessed of a restless and suggestible mind, a powerful ambition and an iron -- if occasionally dithering -- will that is cloaked in mannerly, often self-deprecating good humor. In other words, core values aside, adulthood has taken him to places unimaginable to the suburban spirit. If it hadn’t, he’d have ended up in real estate too.

But Finstad, whose manically repetitive, endlessly foreshadowing and totally inert style compares with that of a high school book report, does not apparently believe in adult education. For her, genetics irrevocably bends the twig, and nurture inevitably stunts its growth. Unable to talk to Beatty or very many others who have been close to him, she depends on interviews with every focus puller and prom date who briefly crossed his path, every newspaper and magazine clipping she can round up. But that’s just gossip, not insight. For that she relies on Freudian zingers that would be sublime self-parody were they not so smugly deployed. Poor Warren -- doomed forever to the working out of his primal drama. Poor us -- doomed for more than 500 pages (and some 2,000 footnotes) to struggle through this reductive and patronizing ooze.

We have to concede, on the basis of Finstad’s evidence, that Beatty early on attached himself to father figures either more dynamic than his dad (Elia Kazan) or more sympathetic (William Inge). We must also concede that his mother’s dashed theatrical dreams must have influenced his (and his sister’s) choice of professions. But that leaves out that while still a teenager Beatty quit college, took off for New York and eked out a subsistence living as a cocktail pianist and occasional television actor. It also ignores the fact that these years supply more half-hidden autobiographical references to his work -- the small-timer’s poverty (see “Ishtar”), the outsider’s guilty obsession with celebrity (see “Bonnie and Clyde” and “Bugsy”) -- than his childhood and adolescence do.

And that says nothing about the more well-known yet mysteriously motivated aspects of Beatty’s manner -- the aforementioned dithering and his compulsion to micromanage every aspect of his career. Robert Towne, the screenwriter and director who is one of the few Beatty intimates to speak with Finstad, says: “Warren is a guy who is quite capable of thinking two opposite things at the same time and thinking they both may be true.” One excellent battle plan may lead to Marengo, the other to Waterloo.

But this is not something Beatty learned at his father’s knee or his mother’s apron strings. Neither was Beatty’s other most prominent characteristic: his drive for control. As an actor and producer, his tendency has been to involve himself with excellent directors (Arthur Penn, Robert Altman, Robert Rossen, Mike Nichols, Barry Levinson), then drive them nuts with his nudgings. The fight for control of a film is the central drama of almost every movie. It is one that’s unimaginable to an adolescent: It is a (more or less) grown-up conflict. It is something you discover when you achieve (or simply seize) enough power to participate in the fight. The fact that Beatty won his first such major contest -- his relentless compulsion rescued “Bonnie and Clyde” from Jack Warner’s hatred and his studio’s indifference and turned it into one of the few icons of modernism that American film has ever produced -- has never been forgotten. Though the results, inevitably, have been mixed: some very good movies -- some (to put it kindly) not so hot.

That, however, is of small consequence to the audiences; his image has long since transcended the work he has accomplished. In the popular imagination, he has become the Casanova of his age, an elusive figure with a mysterious power to bend people to his will. The fans are mainly talking about success with women, of course. And I must say that when the names of all these famous women are compiled in a single volume, the list is awesome. But when Beatty focuses his charm and attentiveness -- emotional intelligence practiced at something like the genius level -- on anyone, the results are equally impressive. Yes, women fell for him. But what about the supposedly hard-nosed studio bosses who were for a long time willing to toss him a few extra million to realize his visions, never mind that he was already over budget?

There is nothing in his genetic history or childhood experience that Finstad can adduce to account for this talent. What he inherited was intelligence. How he has used it is, of course, an existential improvisation, which is always beyond the range of a reportorial biography to comprehend. Such a book is forever locked to the printed record and the fallible, frequently envious recollections of ordinary people. It can, for example, trace Beatty’s liberal political views to parental guidance. It can find the roots of his elusiveness in the bourgeois reverence for privacy. But it can never explicate the inexplicable.

It is self-evident -- to me at least -- that you cannot usefully write about someone like Beatty by plodding along in his evanescent wake, notebook in hand, tape recorder at the ready. If clues to his thoughts and nature are to be found, you have to look to his work. It is stamped -- metaphorically, of course -- with the personality of a man who continues to embrace the increasingly unlikely notion that a film aiming to be popular can yet speak in some way to our intelligence.

Take “Bonnie and Clyde,” for instance. When we meet Beatty’s Clyde Barrow, he’s a preening nobody, sexually impotent but toting a huge unfired gun. Set aside the impotence and Barrow’s like a handsome young actor, jobbing from one inconsequential role to the next. But as he starts to kill people his impotence is magically cured -- as, of course, Beatty’s professional impotence was cured by analogous success. As important, Clyde begins to enjoy his tin-pot fame, to feel -- well, yes -- omnipotent. Whereupon reality asserts itself and he is gunned down as, metaphorically, movie stars eventually are when they age, which was prescient of the young Beatty to notice. Sure, a whole lot of people -- director, writers, costars -- shaped this film. But Beatty’s sly, self-referential, unafraid-to-play-stupid performance is crucial to its success. And to our understanding of what was on his mind at the time.

You could say the same about a lot of his films: “McCabe & Mrs. Miller” (which the star apparently likes less than he should) is among other things a delicious satire on American entrepreneurship, “Reds” a saddening study of political idealism and personal romance tragically interacting, “Bugsy” a viciously funny parody of ignorant celebrity hubris, “Bulworth” a cry from a despairing liberal heart.

In the end, what he has created (or co-created) is the only legitimate reason for inquiring into the life of someone like Warren Beatty. But Finstad has no gift for critical inquiry. She will not study or analyze film’s text or subtexts. To her, they are nothing in comparison to the blinding insight that her subject’s election as vice president of his eighth-grade class “was his first step in a careful strategy to alter his image and redirect his life.” Or her delight that his good, late marriage to Annette Bening and his beaming fatherhood to their four children at last fulfills his bourgeois boyhood’s destiny. Fine. One is happy for him. But this incompetent biography is bound to make any reader miserable. Once again, the movie’s masked rider has eluded a determined pursuer. And I say good for him. *