| PRODUCT DETAILS | | Warren Beatty: A Private Man (Random House Large Print (Cloth/Paper)) |  | |
Warren Beatty: A Private Man (Random House Large Print (Cloth/Paper))
“Whatever you have read or heard about me through articles or gossip, forget it. I am nothing like that Warren Beatty. I am nothing like what you have read.” —Warren Beatty
Warren Beatty guarded his privacy even before he became a movie star, when he burst onto the screen in 1961 as the earnestly handsome all-American boy in Splendor in the Grass. When he started acting, Beatty kept secret the fact that actress Shirley MacLaine, already a star, was his older sister. Over time, he has cultivated a mystique, giving few interviews and instructing others not to talk about him. Until now.
Through years of groundbreaking research, lauded biographer Suzanne Finstad gained unprecedented access to Beatty’s family, close friends, and film colleagues, including such luminaries in the arts and politics as Jane Fonda, Goldie Hawn, Leslie Caron, Robert Towne, Mike Nichols, and Senators John McCain, George McGovern, and Gary Hart. Weaving hundreds of these candid interviews, photographs from private albums, personal letters, diaries, and the previously unpublished papers of the late Natalie Wood and mentors such as directors Elia Kazan and George Stevens, playwrights Clifford Odets and William Inge, and agent Charles Feldman, Warren Beatty unveils the real Beatty—a complex, sensitive visionary torn between the “fairly puritanical, football-playing boy” from Virginia and his Hollywood playboy image.
Finstad paints a rich, fascinating portrait of the secretive film legend, taking us back to the “unrealized genius” parents who molded arguably the most famous brother and sister in Hollywood history, tracing the family influences and events in Beatty’s past that directly inspired McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Shampoo, Heaven Can Wait, Reds, Ishtar, Dick Tracy, Bugsy, Love Affair, and Bulworth, and led to his political activism, culminating in a near-bid for the White House. Finstad constructs the definitive, myth-shattering account of Beatty’s evolution from Hollywood’s enfant terrible to producer of the revolutionary Bonnie and Clyde, launching him as the premier actor/director/writer/producer of his generation, the only person to twice earn Oscar nominations in all five major categories.
Here also is the truth about Beatty the lover, setting the record straight on his storied relationships with such iconic actresses and beauties as Jane Fonda, Joan Collins, Natalie Wood, Leslie Caron, Julie Christie, Goldie Hawn, Michelle Phillips, Diane Keaton, Isabelle Adjani, and Madonna. Finstad’s astute insights illuminate Beatty’s private struggle to attain happiness, his complicated bond with his sister, Shirley, and the deeper reasons why, at fifty-four, the archetypal bachelor married actress Annette Bening.
Stunningly researched, engrossing, and exquisitely detailed, Warren Beatty: A Private Man gives us a new understanding of the enigmatic, fiercely intelligent star who embodies the American dream.
Manufacturer: Random House Large Print
Price Range: $1.98 - $27.95
 Warren Beatty: A Private Man (Random House Large Print (Cloth/Paper))
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| User Reviews |  | Fascinating book, fascinating man
rating: 4
Everything a great bio needs - a compelling subject, exhaustive research, good storytelling - is here. There are flaws, but they are largely outweighed in this excellent book that really made me think.
True, it's a bit repetitive at times, and like so many chronological works, falls into the trap of being front-loaded. The biggest casualty here is Bening - a woman worth a more thorough treatment in the book in the context of what the relationship says about Beatty.
In the end, I disagree with two of the author's main themes (one of the best things about this book is that it's thought provoking): first that Beatty was driven by a fear of failure. I simply can't believe that a man who has failed so spectacularly and so publicly so many times, in his relationships, his business ventures and his political causes, is afraid to fail. In fact, I think it's quite the opposite.
I also don't think Beatty is any more "private" than most of us, and what appear to be the characteristics of a private person are in fact clues into what makes him so successful. Being elusive with the media is not necessarily about privacy - in fact I was surprised at the number of very personal statements cited from media interviews over the years - it's about control.
He does what the most seductive people do so well - he makes every person he encounters, professional or personal, feel like they are special, a theme repeated throughout the book by the many people who have known him. His self-created image only furthers the seduction, as everyone he touches flatters themselves that "he's a very private man; I know him better than you do."
He even achieves this illusion at a very public level by presenting a series of autobiographical films - leaving each person to decide if he's George Roundy or Jay Bulworth or John Reed or Bud Stamper or Joe Pendleton or Dick Tracy, or some complicated combination of all of them. That's not a private man - that's a man who knows how to manipulate his own image, and to get what he wants out of life in the long run, both personally and professionally.
Loved the book, really made me think, will now read others by the same author on this basis.
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Could be better!!!
rating: 1
Gets really boring at times. Jumps all over the place and keeps on repeating......... But otherwise informative.
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Warren Beatty: A Private Man
rating: 5
Is an objective look, at the man who captivated audiences around the world. Beautifully written, honest and poignant, the book takes the reader deep into the lives and backgrounds of a family that spawned not only one star-but Two. Suzanne Finstad's "A Private Man" gives the reader perspective as it takes you through the inner workings of a boy's life as he grows up to be one of Hollywood's most charismatic and influential leading men. Gracefully structured and truly the definitive Warren Beatty biography...A Must Read! J.J. Gillock (Easy Company Productions)
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Smells like Honey
rating: 5
It took me days to finish this book, and I'd say you get your money's worth by halfway through, and the rest is gravy. Oddly enough, however, the book feels a bit topheavy, so that the bulk of it is spent on Beatty's difficult period between meeting William Inge and making LILITH about four years later, and then all of a sudden the last 40 years are rushed through at a clippety clop.
WB isn't quite as entertaining as Suzanne Finstad's previous biorgaphy, the sublime NATASHA, which really did bring Natalie Wood alive again for her fans; and it's likely that the parts of the present book with the most emotional resonance are the years Beatty spent with Natalie, trying to cheer her up after Wagner betrayed her. Finstad does an admirable job of showing us the psychological underpinnings of Beatty's affairs with Joan Collins (almost persuading us that Collins is a real person, not just a glitzy British sex bomb--almost, but not quite), Natalie Wood, Leslie Caron, and Julie Christie. But when she gets down the list to Michelle Phillips, her pretense at analysis ends. She doesn't even try. I wonder if the book wasn't originally twice as long, and she was asked to curtail the later years into a series of briefer chapters. I mean, she could have written 100s of pages on Mary Tyler Moore and Isabelle Adjani, but instead they're reduced to ciphers.
As a boy, Beatty was enraptured by the original cast album of OKLAHOMA! by Rodgers and Hammerstein and Finstad successfully shows us that, subconsciously or not, Beatty succeeded again and again in replicating the Curly-Laurie romance in his own adult life.
It does seem as though Beatty was propelled to stardom by a clutch of gay visionaries including Inge and Tennessee Williams, and crypto gay figures like Joshua Logan, who signed Beatty to a personal contract and had him screen tested kissing Jane Fonda from morning to night. Inge wrote not only SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS, but A LOSS OF ROSES and ALL FALL DOWN for Beatty, and apparently never asked him for a thing in return. The stage production of A LOSS OF ROSES turned out to be a true nightmare of conflicted egos and desperate desires, what with Barbara Baxley threatening to jump off the cliffs of Malibu if replaced by Carol Haney, and Shirley Booth quitting on opening night. Joey Heatherton, the one and only, was also fired, thus setting the scene for a long and poignant second act that never quite came.
Would Joan Collins have been effective in the movie version of DH Lawrence's SONS AND LOVERS? Would Warren have succeeded playing Tony in WEST SIDE STORY? The book gives us crazy dreams of movies that might have been. Afdera Fonda, the former wife of Henry Fonda who dallied with Beatty briefly in 1963, said that he was "naughty, charming and playful. He smelled like honey, and he came and went like a shadow in the night."
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"A biography reader"
rating: 1
I love and collect biographical books. This book was totally disappointing. The entire book was an effort to "elect" Warren to some future office. I had hoped to gain some insight to his personal life and was left entirely with mindless minutiae. A total disappointment for such a large book...little or no new information of any value.
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Warren Beatty: A Private Man (Random House Large Print (Cloth/Paper))
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