New Faces: The Rise of Geyger Krocp

LAURENCE HARVEY

RICHARD WIDMARK

MARLON BRANDO

HENRY FONDA

GLENN FORD

GEYGER KROCP

PAUL NEWMAN

So reads the directory of stars in a dressing-room building on the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lot in Hollywood. Visitors ask the obvious questions: “Geyger who? Does he really count?” The answer, curiously enough, is yes. “Geyger Krocp” is Actor Warren Beatty’s wry, demonstrative method of calling attention to his own relative anonymity.

Only 24, Beatty has not yet been seen by the public in a motion picture, but he is the lead in Director Elia Kazan’s soon-to-be-released Splendor in the Grass (an original screenplay by Broadway’s William Inge) ; and opposite Vivien Leigh, he has just made The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, an adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ only novel, directed by José Quintero. Top directors, in short, consider him the best of the new young leading men. With a facial and vocal suggestion of Montgomery Clift and mannerisms of James Dean, he is the latest incumbent in the line of arrogant, attractive, hostile, moody, sensitive, selfconscious, bright, defensive, ambitious, stuttering, self-seeking, and extremely talented actors who become myths before they are 30.

Out of Nowhere. The younger brother of Actress Shirley MacLaine, Warren Beatty has come up without his sister’s help. Intelligent, tall, and slouchingly hand some, with dark, windy hair, Warren shows little of Shirley’s wild effusiveness, and he has yet to demonstrate that he is as good a performer—but he is the better looking of the two, and he knows it. He has a firm but nonchalant acting style (“Method? No, I just act”) that belies his vanity. During the shooting of Splendor in the Grass, he whipped out a pocket comb every time the camera made a pass at him, irritating Director Kazan to the flash point.

Sprinkling his conversation with odd and irrelevant comments—”Did you know,” he will say out of nowhere, “that in London every 20 minutes a man is hit by a car?”—he is startlingly candid: “I love to talk about myself.” Every few sentences he drops a four-letter word, as if to see if it will bounce. But he is obviously trying hard to be liked and to be straightforward in a Hollywood milieu where he recognizes that “you can make an entire career out of baloney.”

Rat Watcher. Son of a Virginia real estate man, Warren Beatty (pronounced baity) was born in Richmond and raised in Arlington, where he was the president of his high school class (“I was a cheerful hypocrite”) and center on the football team. Ten colleges offered him football scholarships, but he rejected them all, happy to give up the game. “I hated every minute of it,” he remembers, “worrying all the time that I might get my nose splashed over my face, or my teeth kicked in.” During high school days, he got his first, unpromising brush with the acting profession—as a rat watcher at the National Theater in Washington. “I was supposed to stand in the alley and keep the rats from going in the stage door,” he explains. “I never saw any rats, except onstage.”

After six months at Northwestern University, Beatty was bored, quit college and went to New York, where he found even more boredom working as a sandhog on the new tube of the Lincoln Tunnel. Shifting to show business, he played tinkly-tonk cocktail-hour piano in a bin on 58th Street, saved enough money to take a six months’ course at Stella Adler’s acting school. Scoring minor successes on television (Studio One, Playhouse 90), he eventually won a screen test with Director Joshua Logan, who asked him to demonstrate his kissing talents, using Actress Jane Fonda as a prop. Beatty fastened himself to her like a hyperthyroid lamprey, ignoring cries of “Cut!” “Stop!” and “That’s enough, that’s enough!” winning Logan’s unqualified admiration. “This boy,” says Logan, “is the sexiest thing around.”

Parallelogram. Beatty actually got his first major acting job in William Inge’s A Loss of Roses on Broadway two years ago, earning critical praise for his own performance in a play that sank without bubbles. Although his movie stardom has not yet been tested at the box office, he has already reached a position from which he can choose his roles. Now working with Eva Marie Saint in Producer John Houseman’s All Fall Down (from James Leo Herlihy’s novel), he may do The Leopard with Sir Laurence Olivier.

Beatty sees little of his sister. “I’m crazy about him,” says Shirley, “but he doesn’t seem to want to communicate with me.” Says Warren: “Our lives have been absolutely separate, but there’s not a big hostile thing.” Independently, he lives his own young-Hollywood life with his own little mouse pack. His long romance with English Actress Joan Collins entered the requiem phase last week with her announcement that their engagement is broken. Meanwhile, squaring out a complicated parallelogram, Actress Collins is dating Actor Robert Wagner, and Wagner’s estranged wife, Actress Natalie Wood, is currently decorating the swimming pool at Warren Beatty’s rented pink-stucco home in the hills above Sunset Strip.