That’s the kind of night it was in the ballroom of the Beverly Hills Hilton, where Jack Nicholson looked lost without his shades, Courtney Love hid a hole in her slinky silk with a Beatty 2000 sticker and gadfly Gloria Allred held court with the 150 reporters present for Beatty to promote Cybill Shepherd’s campaign.
The historian Daniel Boorstin saw it coming. In 1961, when Beatty had his breakout role in “Splendor in the Grass,” Boorstin’s cultural study, “The Image,” observed that American politics was now dominated by “pseudo-events” like photo ops, staged interviews and televised debates. “In a democracy,” he warned, “reality tends to conform to the pseudo-event. Nature imitates art… Pseudo-events spawn other pseudo-events in geometric progression.”
Since then, an actor has become president, and candidates from Richard Nixon on “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In” to Bill Clinton on “The Arsenio Hall Show” have acted like entertainers to get elected. But Beatty’s not-quite campaign may be the ultimate pseudo-event. Think of it as political performance art: he’s not really an actor running for president; he’s an actor playing an actor thinking about running for president. In 1992 Ross Perot appeared on “Larry King Live” to run for president; Beatty is running for president to appear on “Larry King Live.”
But the Beatty buzz is more an expression of political belief than personal vanity. An unabashed liberal, Beatty’s been at the edges of presidential politics for three decades. His counsel has often been outlandish: at a Hollywood skull session in the spring of 1992, he told Bill Clinton to shake up his third-place campaign by salting his stump speech with a shouted swear word. (It rhymes with “duck.”)
Clinton demurred, but Beatty took his own advice in “Bulworth,” where a suicidal senator sings obscenity-laced rap songs against racism, income inequality and big money in politics. His half-hour discourse last week was a plainsong but often pithy variation on the same theme, advancing an agenda a step to the left of Al Gore or Bill Bradley: single-payer health care and full public financing of campaigns. He closed with advice for an imaginary “drum majorette” considering a candidacy: “I’d say, ‘Look, drum majorette, there’s no harm in thinking about this, however unlikely it may be’,” Beatty said. " ‘But whatever you do, go ahead and speak up. Speak up for the people nobody speaks up for’."
Another speech is in the works, and Beatty is mulling television interview requests during hours of off-the-record phone conversations from his home on Mulholland Drive. Beatty knows there’s a “temporary vacuum” for his message that will pass when the filing deadlines for Iowa and New Hampshire make it clear that he isn’t a real candidate. Until then, he wants to keep the pressure on Bradley and Gore. Stay tuned.
