[In the following excerpt, Michener favorably reviews Towne's collaboration with Warren Beatty on Shampoo, suggesting that "many people will view Shampoo as 'Warren Beatty's film,' not just because he is listed as producer, co-author and star, but because his public persona is … in many ways its central subject and joke."]

Warren Beatty, a rich, complicated man with a reputation as Hollywood's most active Don Juan, has made a rich, complicated comedy about the perils of Don Juan-ing called Shampoo. To imply that Beatty alone is responsible for its success is unfair to his sharp-eared co-screenwriter, Robert Towne, his sensitive director, Hal Ashby, and his brilliant co-stars, Julie Christie, Goldie Hawn, Jack Warden and Lee Grant. But many people will view Shampoo as "Warren Beatty's film," not just because he is listed as producer, co-author and star, but because his public persona is, as Marlon Brando's was in Last Tango in Paris, in many ways its central subject—and joke.

Beatty's fictional alter ego is a hairdresser named George who practices his art in that citadel of hairdressing, Beverly Hills. His subjects are women who are preparing themselves for one of America's favorite social rituals, an election-night party—in this instance, Nov. 5, 1968, the year that both mini-skirts and Richard Nixon were "in." George worries, in one of the film's funniest moments of self-meditation: "I've been cutting too much hair lately; I'm losing my concept." But his energy is mostly directed outward, since it is the core of Beatty's joke that, contrary to popular folklore, his hairdresser is a helplessly heterosexual stud, entangled not only in wet hair but in postadolescent wet dreams—and having no trouble at making them come true.

From its opening sequence, which finds him in coitus interruptus with the most voracious of his clients (Lee Grant), it is clear that his dreams have become waking nightmares. His nominal girlfriend (Goldie Hawn), an insomniac actress who is kept awake by "gunshots in the canyons," is pressing him for a greater show of feeling ("After work," he grumbles). A former girlfriend (Julie Christie), who is being kept by the Republican fat-cat husband of Lee Grant (Jack Warden), turns up unpropitiously. George hops from body to body on his motorcycle, but by the time the bodies start colliding on election night it is also clear that we are in an updated Don Juan fable that can end only in comeuppance for the hopper.

But in the meantime, Shampoo has become something much more: a satirical account of human disaster that is far more devastating than that other study of disaster in Los Angeles, Earthquake. "I don't take up your time, don't take up my time," goes the love song of Lee Grant. "I wish my son knew what to do … anything … as long as it's something," complains Jack Warden. "Are you married?" Goldie Hawn asks a young director. "Sometimes," he answers. Before an urgent copulation in a Louis XVI bedroom, it is necessary to turn on Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass.

Shampoo achieves a fine comic distance by setting itself so specifically in "the past," but it doesn't—to its credit—try to get us, in the present, off the hook. And how could it? For as its ending implies, George the hairdresser is still alive, a bit older—and burning up energy in the midst of the energy crisis.

Which is a good description of Warren Beatty, who has been involved with Shampoo ever since his initial producing effort in 1967, the resoundingly successful Bonnie and Clyde. "Robert Towne and I independently came up with the idea of doing a modern version of The Country Wife, the Restoration comedy about a compulsive Don Juan," says Beatty. "It seemed like a good idea to make the character a hairdresser—to upset the conventional idea that all hairdressers are homosexual as well as the Freudian assumption that all Don Juans are latently homosexual."

Other movies and a two-year sabbatical from films to work full-time for George McGovern's Presidential candidacy intervened. But about a year ago, he and Towne holed up for eleven days and turned out a final script. "I just wanted to get the subject out of my system," says Beatty—which suggests that George is closer to Beatty himself than most of his previous characters were. "People can make what they want of it," he says. "There's a lot of me in every character I play. And I think that all of us have to close out that promiscuous phase in our lives. But, in a lot of important ways, George is simply not me."