It Could Be Beatty’s Greatest Role Yet

Call it the ultimate comeback. For years, people in Hollywood have been saying that Warren Beatty’s career as a movie star is over. His last romantic vehicle, “Love Affair,” was a box-office disaster. Despite rave reviews, “Bulworth” was a commercial dud too. “Town and Country,” due next year, already has bad buzz about budget overruns and re-shoots.

And yet, improbably, at age 62, Beatty seems to have found the role everyone wants to see him play: presidential candidate. In the two months since Arianna Huffington floated the idea in her syndicated column, Beatty has become a Washington media darling. Polls had him instantly attracting 25% of the Democratic vote. And even though he ducked interview attempts--when I called him one day, he said slyly, “The answer is no,” before I asked a question--he attracted speculative stories everywhere from the online magazines Salon and Slate to the Wall Street Journal, culminating in front-page coverage this week in both this paper and the New York Times.

The full-court media blitz came to a head Wednesday night at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, where Beatty was on hand to receive the Eleanor Roosevelt Award from the Southern California branch of Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), a longtime liberal political organization.

At a time when announced presidential candidates outside of front-runners Bill Bradley and Al Gore are lucky to attract a stringer from the Omaha Herald, Beatty was greeted in the hotel lobby by a phalanx of flashbulb-popping photographers (“Warren! Over here, Warren!”) and news crews from every TV outlet imaginable, including press reps from seven foreign countries.

Now other amateurs talk about getting into the game. In the November issue of Talk, Arnold Schwarzenegger said he’s considering a 2002 run for governor of California. He’s made it clear that even GOP celebrities handle “gotcha” questions better than George W. Bush. Asked about his steroid use, Schwarzenegger replied: “I inhaled, exhaled, everything.” Case closed.

The Beatty dinner was abuzz with news of other candidacies. Donald Trump was mulling a primary run, Cybill Shepherd was hinting at a presidential bid on an abortion-rights platform. Who’s next? Charlie Sheen on a legalize-prostitution ticket?

The inside-Hollywood betting line remains that the chance of Beatty making a presidential bid is 1 in 1,000, and he said nothing Wednesday to shorten the odds. But Beatty’s presence transformed the ADA awards dinner into a Golden Globes-style media carnival. Beatty pals Jack Nicholson and Garry Shandling ran the paparazzi gauntlet, flashbulbs reflecting off Nicholson’s shades. Courtney Love posed for photos on the arm of PMK doyenne Pat Kingsley. Dustin Hoffman and Faye Dunaway stopped to schmooze reporters while Mike Ovitz huddled with Penny Marshall.

One onlooker, eyeing Beatty as he smiled for photos, was stumped when asked if he could name Beatty’s views on any social issue. “But he looks good for a guy his age,” he said. “I’d check out what he has to say.” Another onlooker had different views: “I like Shandling,” she said. “That show was so funny. I’d vote for him in a minute.”

While the ballroom was dotted with real-life politicians like Tom Hayden and former Sen. Alan Cranston, the event was echt-Hollywood. If you had been watching on C-SPAN, you would have thought you had mistakenly clicked on to E!. In a video tribute before Beatty’s speech, Shandling advised Beatty that “if you get elected, make sure you get your name above the title of the country.” Marshall said she had had 13,000 phone conversations with Beatty over the years, and in each one, he’d asked her: “Penny, what are you wearing?” Hoffman impishly recounted how Beatty as a brash 9-year-old boy got Eleanor Roosevelt’s home phone number and made an admiring call to the first lady, eventually asking her, “Eleanor, what are you wearing?”

Beatty’s speech was anything but anticlimactic.

After a few in-jokes about his image--squinting into the spotlights, Beatty said, “I had in mind a different kind of lighting, could we get the candles going again?”--he launched into a feisty liberal stem-winder that won repeated applause from the feisty liberal crowd. Even if it was clear Beatty planned on sticking to his day job, he’d persuaded skeptics that he could be a political force.

“You could tell he really believes he could make the Democratic party be true to its ideals,” said 20th Century Fox executive Tom Sherak, who despite his Republican leanings sent Beatty a $100 campaign check, which Beatty has yet to cash. “He has the ear of the press and the press has the ear of the people, so he has a lot of implicit power.”

Watching him work the crowd, it was easy to see the parallels between Beatty and another aging actor-turned-president. Like Ronald Reagan, Beatty is a true believer, a diehard liberal in the same passionate way Reagan was a diehard conservative. And like Reagan, he’s a masterful communicator, as good at seducing cold-eyed studio bosses as he was at seducing starlets.

“Warren is a brilliant manipulator of his perception to the public,” says producer Hal Lieberman, a onetime Beatty personal assistant and president of production at Universal Pictures. “He looks good compared to the competition. The other candidates are so much a part of a sullied political machine, while Warren feels fresh and uncompromised. He’s lived his life so out in the open that he doesn’t have any skeletons in his closet.”

Of course, Beatty is still a political virgin who’s enjoying a free ride from the notoriously fickle Washington press corps. If he ever threw his hat into the ring, the same media types now touting him as a refreshing alternative would just as eagerly tar him as a limousine liberal. Who wants to have George Will in your face, asking: If you really believe in reforming the nation’s hapless public education system, Warren, why are your kids in private schools?

If nothing else, Beatty’s flirtation with real-life politics--and our flirtation with him--serves as a bracing reminder of the transforming power of today’s media culture. At 25, he was just another pretty face. At 45, he was a legendary Lothario. Now, happily married and the father of three (soon to be four), he’s more than just a graying Hollywood eminence--he’s seen as credible presidential timber.

Writer and producer Aaron Sorkin, who did an uncredited polish on “Bulworth” before he created NBC’s “The West Wing,” said, “The thing Warren has that none of the real candidates have is the same thing he had in ‘Bulworth.’ He’s a guy with nothing to lose. As long as he’s not running, you know he’s not trying to sell you something.”