Then Again - Diane Keaton [50]
Diane
There was a moment when we first sat down at dinner last night when I looked at you and you seemed to have such an unfair allotment of gifts that it frightened me. Plus you had time on your side too.
You’ve made a lot of money for the movie business and your percentages for the profits haven’t been so huge that you should feel guilty about taking some of the industry’s money and making your own film. I think they’d be happy to do it.
Stop messing around and do it. You’d do it better than anybody. You know more than anybody. Its rough edges would be fascinating. I can set it up early. And either produce or get completely out of your way.
Do it now. It will make you feel much better about movies in general and acting in particular.
From someone who admired you at a distance last night. Who would like to get to know you better.
Warren
He lived in a four-hundred-square-foot penthouse on top of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel stacked to the ceiling with books and scripts, tons of scripts. It was an unassuming bachelor pad sitting on some of the best real estate in Beverly Hills. He owned an art deco house on ten acres at the top of Mulholland Drive, which he was going to restore into the perfect home. Warren and the notion of home were not a match made in heaven. Always curious, he solicited my design ideas by driving me up into Coldwater Canyon. As he pointed out Jack Nicholson’s gate on the right and the panoramic view of L.A. on the left, I heard ringing from what appeared to be a large box. Warren put it to his ear and started talking. It was a car phone, maybe the first.
I listened to him broker a deal with Charlie Bluhdorn, the head of Paramount Pictures, as the smell of stale vitamins from his glove compartment distracted me from the fact that waiting would be my future with “The Pro.” It was impossible to drag him away from a phone, a restaurant, a meeting, a club, you name it. Jack Nicholson’s solution was to make arrangements to meet Warren at noon, knowing he would arrive at two. I didn’t know how to schedule my life like that. Instead, I paced back and forth on the terrace of the Beverly Wilshire or sat waiting on the rented white furniture in his unfinished masterpiece, wondering what happened to the series of failed architects whose drawings and plans were stacked everywhere. How did I ever get to the top of the hill with Warren Beatty anyway? Did he love me, or was I destined to be one of many women who would be driven to the top only to be dropped off at the bottom?
Warren was always working on something but tormented by the prospect of “going to work.” He forced himself to make Heaven Can Wait, his co-directorial debut with Buck Henry. It was a phenomenal success and landed him on the cover of Time magazine, but it didn’t change his approach. He still had hundreds of projects in varying states of preparation with people like Buck, Robert Towne, and Elaine May. There was the Howard Hughes script, the remake of An Affair to Remember, and the one he kept mentioning about a couple of Communists. Warren’s problem was commitment. Dustin Hoffman once said, “If Warren had stayed a virgin, he’d be known as the best director in the world.”
On his arm, I was ushered into the homes of people like Katharine Graham, Jackie Kennedy, Barry Diller, Diane von Furstenberg, Jack Nicholson, Anjelica Huston, Sue Mengers, Diana Vreeland, Gay and Nan Talese. I held my own for a while