If Warren Beatty ever stops toying with us and really runs for president, his 9-year-old daughter, Kathlyn, could become a key political adviser. Beatty said she helped him organize the speech he gave Sunday at a conference sponsored by Southern California Americans for Democratic Action.
Afterward, as he ducked into an elevator, Beatty invited us along. Ensconced in his suite at the Wilshire Grand Hotel, he bent our ear talking politics.
It was classic Beatty, which is to say he controlled the interview. He wouldn't discuss rumors that he and wife Annette Bening plan to spend the July 4 weekend with Sen. John McCain and his wife, Cindy. But Beatty did say he's a strong supporter of "friend" McCain's campaign finance reform bill.
"It's a good first step. Let's get rid of soft money," Beatty said. "It's really a terrible genie that has been let out of the bottle." He called campaign finance reform "the transcendent issue of American politics," pointing out that campaign contributions "now have a higher return" than any other investment.
Taking Wing
Writer and co-producer Lawrence O'Donnell Jr. is leaving "The West Wing" to work on other projects, including creating his own dramatic series about Washington and a CBS midseason replacement about the Supreme Court.
"It's a little bit like leaving a school that I loved, but it's time to graduate," O'Donnell told us. "I did two years on the hottest, best show on TV, and I think I did everything I could do there."
The witty and sarcastic O'Donnell, who lives in Santa Monica, will continue as MSNBC's chief political analyst and as a panelist on "The McLaughlin Group."
While he isn't revealing details about his new Washington series just yet, O'Donnell credits "The West Wing" for creating a "hot" market for political dramas. He spoke more freely about the CBS project, "First Monday," which stars James Garner as the chief justice, and Charles Durning and Joe Mantegna as other Supremes.
O'Donnell comes from a family of Boston lawyers, and a few years after graduating from Harvard, he wrote a book about one of his father's cases. "Deadly Force" was adapted as a CBS television movie in 1986, and O'Donnell got his first taste of Hollywood. A writers strike a couple of years later detoured him to Washington, where he worked as a senior adviser to New York Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then as chief of staff for the Senate's Environment and Public Works committee and the Finance committee.
