The End of Warren

In August 1990, after Truth or Dare was finished, Madonna showed Warren Beatty and some other friends of hers a rough cut of it in the screening room of Beatty’s home. One friend of Beatty’s who was present recalls that she brought popcorn for everybody — a dozen people — and served it with sodas saying, “I want this to be like an oldfashioned movie.” (For her own enjoyment, Madonna brought a bottle of soy milk along with Cheddar Lites — fat-free cheese crackers.) Then, as the movie got under way and it became clear that Madonna’s salty language would be as it is in real life, Warren said to his friends, “My definition of old-fashioned and her definition of old-fashioned seem somewhat at odds.”

“Oh, Christ, when did you get to be so stuffy?” Madonna asked Warren while the film played on and he winced and grimaced at certain scenes. “Don’t you remember when you were young and free, and rebellious? Don’t you remember when you walked a thin line?”

Beatty smiled wearily. “Barely,” he said.

“My old man,” Madonna said lovingly as she put her head on his shoulder. “He’d rather be home looking at his ‘Hollywood Ladies of the Eighties’ girlie calendar.”

Beatty turned away in dismay while watching Madonna teach her dancers how to give oral sex by using a water bottle as a prop. During another scene, when Madonna calls Warren an “asshole” and hangs up on him, he shook his head with disapproval. Perhaps he was wondering if his girlfriend could tell the difference between her personal life and show business. Certainly, to a man as conscientious about privacy as Warren Beatty, the delineation must have seemed blurred in this documentary.

Later in the film, a conversation between Madonna and Beatty over a room-service meal was caught on camera. “It was completely innocuous,” says the friend of Beatty’s who was present at the screening. “It wasn’t so much what the two of them were saying, it was the way they were saying it. Madonna was being bitchy, as usual, and Warren was tolerant, as usual. You could see him tense up as the scene played out in front of everyone, making him look as if he allowed her to walk all over him. There were other scenes with Warren, too, that I suppose he was unhappy about.

“Afterwards as the credits rolled, there was a lot of applause for Madonna. Warren seemed happy but, if you knew him, you knew he was just acting. She kept prodding him, asking what the problem was. ‘What’s the matter? You didn’t like my movie?’ she kept asking, like a child wanting Daddy’s approval. Finally, he said, ‘You know what? I just have a headache. I’m fine.’ Then, she started rubbing the back of his neck saying things like, ‘My poor daddy, so tense. So much on his mind.’ I thought to myself, my goodness, either she really loves this guy, or she thinks he’s her father.”

The next day, Madonna received a letter by messenger from Warren Beatty’s attorney. In it, the demand was made that certain scenes with Warren be deleted from the final version of the film, or she would be sued. Most of her friends would have predicted a volatile reaction from Madonna. However, there wasn’t one. If there was an argument between Madonna and Warren about the legal threat, no one heard about it.

“She didn’t say anything to anyone about any of it,” said Nikki Harris. “However, I felt a deep sadness in her. But one thing about Madonna that people around her well know is that if she doesn’t bring up a sore subject, you don’t bring it up, either. The fact that she didn’t say a word about the matter said, at least to me, that she was very bothered by it.”

In the end, the scenes in question were excised from the movie.

Later, Madonna complained to writer Don Shewey, “There were phone conversations I thought were really moving and touching and revealing, but Warren didn’t know we were recording. It wasn’t fair, plus it’s a federal offense. He, more than anybody, was reluctant to be filmed. Ultimately, I don’t think he respected what I was doing or took it seriously. He just thought I was fucking around, making a home movie.”

Upon the film’s release (in May 1991), some viewers were amazed that Madonna had left intact another surprising and genuinely candid moment. Because she was having throat problems, she visited a throat specialist. When Madonna was asked if she wanted the consultation filmed, Warren Beatty, also present, observed, “She doesn’t want to live off camera, much less talk.” Upon the movie’s release she explained, “I think what Warren was trying to say is that he is very shy and private and he doesn’t understand my lack of inhibition because he’s the opposite of me. What’s so intimate about my throat? I mean, my God, everyone knows when I’m having an abortion, when I’m getting married, when I’m getting divorced, who I’m breaking up with. My throat is now intimate? Anyway, the cameras didn’t follow me around twenty-four hours a day. They weren’t in the room when I was fucking.”

There were some incidents, however, that Madonna decided should not be seen by her public. For instance, during the three nights of concerts in Boston, she caused so many problems for the staff of the Boston Harbor Hotel, she’s not likely ever to be forgotten there. She and her entourage had taken over thirty rooms on floors nine to eleven, at a cost of $48,000. Making matters difficult for the kitchen staff was that all of her food had to be flown in from Hong Kong.

“She would be absolutely infuriated if she had to wait more than twenty minutes for a specially cooked order,” said Diane Demitri, who worked in guest relations at the hotel at that time. “We didn’t know how to cook those foods, and so the poor chefs were in the kitchen frantically looking up directions in Asian cookbooks while Madonna was phoning down every ten minutes screaming, ‘Where’s my fucking noodles? Where’s my fucking noodles?’”

Madonna also insisted that none of the staff ask her for autographs, or attempt to chat with her if they saw her in an elevator.

“No employee who came into contact with her was allowed to address her or even act as if they recognized her,” said Diane Demitri. “She had registered under the name of Kit Moresby [a character from one of her favorite books, The Sheltering Sky] and, even though you knew it was Madonna when she called for room service, you had to address her by the other name.

“Housekeeping called me one morning and said, ‘Ms. Moresby is upset because she says her bathwater is a funny color.’ I told them to send someone up to her room right away. When he got there, he found ‘Ms. Moresby’ in a white robe, pacing the floor, livid. Sadly, she was right. The pipes had apparently rusted and the water was slightly offcolor. When he apologized, ‘Ms. Moresby’ took the towel that had been wrapped around her head, rolled it into a ball and hurled it at him. ‘How is a woman supposed to bathe in that muck,’ she screamed at him. ‘I have a show to do tonight. Do you know how much stress I am under? Do you know how torturous my life is?’

“After she and her staff checked out of the hotel, everyone breathed a sigh of relief,” said Diane Demitri. “When we went into her suite, she had left on the room service tray a card with her name embossed on it. On it, she wrote, ‘What a dump!’”

*

After Warren Beatty’s warning that he might litigate against Madonna over her documentary, nothing seemed the same between them — not that it had been good between them prior to his threat. He had already begun to distance himself from her and, despite her apparent desire to do so, Madonna was powerless to salvage the relationship. It was actually Warren’s decision that they end it. Madonna had no choice in the matter.

Most of the public seemed unaware of the particulars of the romance between Madonna and Warren, and why it was that she seemed to be so angry whenever asked about him. It was difficult to separate the sensational reports from the truth, and there were so many conflicting tabloid reports that most sensible people simply disregarded all of them.

Madonna spent a couple of days crying over Warren, about how cruel he had been to lead her down this road only to drop her. He again explained that the ring he had given her had been only a friendship ring, not one that signified an engagement.

To Madonna, it may have been like losing a father, as well as a lover, and for no reason she could understand. Warren simply could not commit to a relationship — which is why he stayed single for so long, until Annette Bening finally tamed him. Madonna had her issues, but he had his, too. It could never have worked.

Moreover, Warren Beatty had shown Madonna a side of elite Hollywood she’d never before known, and one that she didn’t yet want to abandon. His was a rarefied, exclusive world, one in which he encouraged standing ovations for his girl from big stars at glamorous cocktail parties. It wasn’t easy letting go of all of that. How she had enjoyed melting into the elite company of his friends, if only a few times during parties at Warren’s. She told intimates that she hated him for having aroused not only emotion in her, but for introducing a new way of life, as well — one in which people carried themselves with grace and dignity rather than with rock and roll arrogance — only then to force her to have to walk away from it. True to her often melodramatic nature, she felt cheated and used. Also true to her personality, Madonna privately said that she was annoyed at herself for not having had the strength to be the one to end it with Warren Beatty before he ended it with her. Everyone in her circle, though, viewed her relationship with Warren for what it had really been: a simple dalliance between two film stars that was not meant to amount to much — one that would probably end up a footnote to the Dick Tracy entry of some dreary book about movies of the 1990s.

After it was all over, Madonna attempted to downplay the significance of her romance with Warren Beatty in press interviews, probably because she was truly hurt by him and does not like to portray herself in the public eye as ever having been sad or vulnerable. For his part, Warren has never said a word about how or why the relationship ended.

“I guess I meant nothing at all to Warren Beatty,” Madonna said sadly to one person on her management team. “He used me and then tossed me aside like a piece of old meat.”

“I don’t know about all of that,” says her friend Erica Bell. “I always wondered how serious she really was about him. They didn’t have much in common, let’s face it. But the heart wants what it wants, I guess. And she wanted him. Was it really that Warren was just a big conquest for her? Could be,” Erica Bell concludes, answering her own question. “I think she went after him because she could, because he was good prey. But then, as it sometimes happens, the hunter got captured by the game.”