Warren Beatty A Private Man

The year 1959 clearly was meant to be Warren Beatty's moment in time. On the same February day as Beatty's first screen test with Jane Fonda, the head of production at Warner Brothers in Los Angeles sent a letter to Elia Kazan, who was rehearsing Sweet Bird of Youth on Broadway, promising to "alert the boys here" to look for a boy of nineteen to twenty-one to star in Splendor in the Grass. Kazan wanted to start filming in August, unless he was contractually obligated to Twentieth Century Fox to direct the film Wild River first. The timing coincided with actress Natalie Wood's return to Warner Brothers that February after a seven-month suspension. The studio had resolved its dispute with the former child star using the lure that she could play Deanie Loomis, the fragile teenager in Splendor in the Grass whose first love ends in tragedy, a role with painful parallels to Natalie Wood's own life. Natalie Wood was drawn to Deanie as a moth to the light, just as she was to "Gadge" Kazan, whose psychologically nuanced work she revered. William Inge, who already had cast Warren Beatty mentally as Deanie's athlete boyfriend, Bud, was at first "dubious about Natalie," whose promise in Rebel Without a Cause seemed to flicker after Warner Brothers put her in a pair of shallow movies with Tab Hunter that featured only her beauty. "But Gadge wanted her," Inge said later, "and he was right." After meeting privately with Wood, the director discovered she was "disgusted with her image" and had a "desire for excellence" in her work. Kazan preferred to cast actors whose personalities matched the characters they were playing, and he quickly assessed the vulnerable and intelligent Natalie Wood as "true blue with a wanton side held down by social pressure," similar to the sweetnatured Deanie. Inge was still rewriting the screenplay, further refining the part of the high school football hero to fit Warren Beatty, who continued to visit the playwright frequently at his apartment on Sutton Place. Jane Fonda, who had become pals with Beatty while they were preparing to costar in Parrish, thought at first that he was Bill Inge's boyfriend. After both Beatty and Fonda were famous, she often would be included on the long list of his girlfriends, but their relationship was more like brother and sister. "Warren and I became friendsnot lovers, but friends," said Fonda. Beatty's intimate circle recognized the distinction. "He did only hang out with Jane," affirmed Verne O'Hara, who still sometimes shared her husband's hotel suite with Beatty, and was thus able to observe his bedroom partners firsthand. In O'Hara's evaluation, "Warren was of the good girl/bad girl school in those days." Jane Fonda, who had graduated from Emma Willardsimilar to the seminaries for young ladies both Tat and Blanche MacLean had attendedwas the former. As Tom Laughlin noted, "Jane was not a sex machine. She was a sensitive, beautiful, caring person...what would you look to, Eva Marie Saint? That kind of sensitive, beautiful quality." When he went out with Jane Fonda in 1959, Beatty entertained her with tales of his carnal adventures, which seemed to surprise and amaze the essentially Baptist son of Ira and Kathlyn Beaty as much as they did the sheltered Fonda. "We mostly talked about sex," Fonda recalled, laughing. "I mean, we talked about lots of thingsI'm not saying that we didn't talk about professional things, but...maybe it was because I wasFinstad, Suzanne is the author of 'Warren Beatty A Private Man', published 2005 under ISBN 9781400046065 and ISBN 1400046068.