Warren Beatty pulled again

She returned his gaze with equal boldness. He raised a glass and smiled. Her dinner partner remarked: “That boy who’s looking at you is Shirley MacLaine’s brother, Warren something or other.”

She took a second look. He was wearing a blue Brooks Brothers shirt and a tweed jacket. She was struck by his clean-cut, Clark Kent good looks, Kirk Douglas dimple and sensual mouth. There was nothing wrong but the acne that marred his face, and Fonda, his date, who was giving him her full attention.

Sexually, Beatty was a late bloomer. Born in Richmond, Virginia, and raised a Baptist, he had been a virgin until 19 and 10 months, and had had only one or two relationships he considered “serious”. But he had discovered in himself a raging lust for women. He realised, too, that women were drawn to him. It was as if he heard them calling out to him when other men were deaf, the way canines respond to whistles inaudible to humans.

A few years later, when his career was prospering and his horizons broader, no female would be beneath his notice — stars, starlets and models, of course, but also newscasters, studio executives, journalists, hat-check girls, waitresses, dental hygienists, even daughters of friends — any woman who crossed his path.

As Clint Eastwood is reputed to have said, “No matter how hot a girl is, there’s always someone who’s tired of f****** her”, and that person always seemed to be named Warren On-to-the-Next Beatty.

What accounted for this passion is hard to say. To hear him tell it, his juvenile immersion in a sea of oestrogen was formative. “My childhood was very strongly and very positively affected by women,” he said. “My mother, my sister, my aunts, my great-aunts, cousins, all of whom were women — and I was fortunately not smothered by them.”

Indeed, with Beatty, it wasn’t just lust. He had a romantic streak; he wanted to make a connection, to fall in love. Collins was ground zero, as it were, for his seduction of the whole town.

Beatty was a people collector who during his career knew absolutely everyone, both in Hollywood and outside. He knew the film moguls, the agents, the directors and the actors. He knew political figures from Jack and Bobby Kennedy to Ronald Reagan.

And then there were the women. He courted Natalie Wood, Leslie Caron, Julie Christie and Diane Keaton, to name a few — a very few. Despite his slash-and-burn love life, women adored him. And no wonder: he loved them in return. Of course he preferred intelligence, good looks and a hot body, but at a pinch, for a casual encounter, almost any female would do. He could always find at least one characteristic to admire — the slant of a cheekbone, the golden flecks in the iris of an eye, the highlights on a head of hair and so on. He used to say: “Women are like a jar of olives. You can eat one, close it up; or you can eat them all.”

Not that the young Beatty was above playing up to influential gay men to achieve his ambitions. At the start of his career he was spotted on stage by Joshua Logan, a giant of the theatre, and William Inge, one of the big American playwrights of the 1950s. “Inge was in love with Warren Beatty on sight,” Logan observed. “Warren’s career was assured. ‘I absolutely must have him,’ Bill said.”

Wags used to refer to Inge as Beatty’s “fairy godfather”. He was looking for an actor to play the lead in a script he was writing for the Hollywood director Elia Kazan called Splendour in the Grass, and decided that the young man would be just the thing.

From the actor’s point of view, there was no smarter career move than to attach himself to a writer such as Inge, with his influential connections, but it is doubtful that they had an intimate relationship.

Logan introduced Beatty to Fonda, who thought he was gay at first. “He was so cute,” she recalls, “and all his men friends were gay, and brilliant. And he liked to play piano in a piano bar — I mean, what were the odds he was straight? Shows you how dumb I was.”

Shooting a screen test with them for a teen picture, Logan wanted Beatty to smother Fonda with passionate kisses. When the young actor merely pecked at her cheek, Logan said: “Look, are you afraid of Jane or something? Grab her, boy; grab her. Don’t be shy.” Beatty leapt upon Fonda, kissing her with such ferocity that Logan had to yell: “Cut! Stop! Hey, Warren, we’re all out of film. That’s enough!”

The actor recalls: “Oh my God. We kissed until we had practically eaten each other’s head off.”

Soon after he met Collins, he followed her home from a party and stayed the night. This was the beginning of an intense, nearly 1½-year affair, during which he took over her life, urging Collins to stop smoking and take vitamins.

He made love to her relentlessly. For Collins it was too much of a good thing. One Sunday morning, exhausted, she stumbled out of bed and said: “I don’t think I can last much longer. He never stops — it must be all those vitamins he takes . . . In a few years I’ll be worn out.”

Later, a sceptic asked her if they really had sex seven times a day. She replied: “Maybe he did, but I just lay there.”

At the beginning of April 1960, just after he had turned 23, she realised she was pregnant. “Pregnant?” Beatty exclaimed incredulously, she recalled, “in his little boy voice. How did that happen?”

“The butler did it. Or maybe it’s an immaculate conception.” ‘This is terrible. Terrible!’” Not only was he broke; he didn’t want to be tied down. For an actress Collins’s age — she was worried she was already over the hill at 27 — motherhood was career suicide.

Abortion, though illegal, was the only option: Beatty accompanied her to a doctor’s office in New Jersey. The deed done, they tried to put the episode behind them.

Splendour in the Grass told the story of star-crossed lovers from a Kansas oil town. Playing opposite Beatty was Natalie Wood, the former child star, who was having a difficult time making the transition to adult roles.

Collins haunted the set, alert for the spark she feared might ignite an affair between Beatty and Wood. So did Wood’s husband, the actor Robert Wagner. Beatty has always denied that they began their affair on the set. “It’s utterly untrue. In fact it was a fairly distant relationship.”

With the set a hothouse of marital dysfunction, Beatty scored a run for family values by springing a surprise on Collins. One Saturday afternoon, on the eve of her departure to Rome to appear in a biblical epic, he directed her attention to a carton of chopped liver in the fridge. Buried inside was a ring, gold with diamonds and pearls.

“Absolutely beautiful,” she exclaimed. “What’s it for?”

“It’s your engagement ring, dummy. I figured, since you’re going away soon and we’ll be separated, we should, um, well, um, you know . . . get — well, engaged.”

She wondered if he had bought it out of guilt over the abortion. He replied: “No, Butterfly, I’m not — you know I don’t do anything unless I want to . . . and . . . um . . . well . . . um . . . I guess I want to.” They set the date for January 1961.

When Collins finally left for Rome, she says, Beatty overwhelmed her with calls, telegrams and letters of eternal love. He pressed her to visit. Finally she flew to New York for a few days. She says he was convinced she was faithless, and nothing she said would dissuade him. They fought bitterly and she began to wonder if he was so jealous because he and Wood were having an affair.

As she thought about her “pimply, bespectacled, white-faced” fiancé, as she put it, the Italian men she ran into every day looked better and better.

The gossip columnists couldn’t believe their good luck when Beatty and Collins separated at the same time as Wood and Wagner, and Beatty took up with Wood as she was completing work on West Side Story. That summer Beatty and Wood became the new “it” couple.

Splendour made Beatty an instant star; 1962 and 1963 passed in a blur. As Beatty described them, they “blended into a series of very good times, good food, a lot of good-looking girls and a lot of aimless fun . . . I was becoming an adult. I didn’t want to pass up really tasting my early twenties in order to churn up momentum”.

While Beatty dithered over his next project, his relationship with Wood was winding down. They broke up, they got together, they broke up, they got together. As MacLaine once quipped, he was a guy who couldn’t commit to dinner. Wood said: “Warren goes through women on an industrial scale, he does it with charm.”

In February 1964, Beatty met Leslie Caron, the star of An American in Paris, Lili and particularly Gigi. He had seen all her films and had a crush on her. She was married to Peter Hall, the director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, with whom she had two young children. Still, husbands were never much of an impediment to Beatty, and the two embarked on an affair.

Caron recalled: “Seduction was his greatest asset. Once he was interested in a woman, he would never let go. He enveloped her with his every thought. He wanted total control of her, her clothes, her make-up, her work. He took notice of everything.” She added: “We practically did not leave each other for the next two years.”

By mid-decade, Beatty’s once promising career had crumbled and his romance with Caron had turned into a nightmare of litigation and bad press. “It was a very upsetting period, the first year or two years of being famous,” Beatty observed. “Very, very upsetting.”

To be with Caron he relocated to London. The director and Monty Python member Terry Gilliam met him there some time later.

“He was great,” Gilliam says. “His main problem was that he had to charm every woman that he saw, whether she was fat, ugly, tall or old. If he got into a lift with a woman, he had to seduce her by the time they reached her floor. He can’t stop himself.”

At the royal premiere of Born Free with Caron, he encountered Julie Christie for the first time. She was up for a best actress Oscar for John Schlesinger’s Darling (1965) and had appeared the same year in David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago. In the full bloom of her success, she had become the very embodiment of “swinging London”.

Beatty wanted her for Bonnie and Clyde, the mould-breaking film he was planning to make, but concluded she was too English. He ran into her again at the Oscars, where, wearing a shocking miniskirt, Christie won best actress for Darling, and once more at Pinewood Studios.

Caron must have seen the writing on the wall. Like Joan Collins, she found his attentions to be a mixed blessing. One morning he called at 5am, waking her. According to her, he said: “You’re sleeping! You’re not thinking about me!”

Worse was the cheating. “His role model was Casanova, really; he wanted to be admired by the whole world,” she said.

She told a reporter: “I will not tolerate unfaithfulness. That’s why I left Warren. He was unfaithful. So it was over.”

Working on the script for Bonnie and Clyde, Beatty lived in a penthouse in the Beverly Wilshire hotel. It was a small suite, consisting of two rooms furnished with a piano, surrounded by a disorder of books, scripts, records, half-eaten sandwiches and a slew of room-service trays piled against the door.

Having sex with Beatty was a rite of passage for aspiring starlets, who filed through the penthouse. Schlesinger and Michael Childers, his boyfriend, had taken a suite on the floor below. “I’d watch the Warren Beatty show, the revolving doors, all the girlfriends going up one elevator and coming down in another elevator at the end of the hall,” Childers recalls.

One day Beatty was having a lively conversation with his Bonnie and Clyde writers in the lobby of an office building. He was animated, focused, engrossed in the subject, but suddenly, as if a switch had been thrown, he tuned out. Following his gaze, they were barely able to make out a tiny figure at the other end of the lobby, 40ft away.

The figure resolved itself into a girl carrying a portfolio. Beatty walked slowly towards her, looking over the top of his glasses, pointing his finger at her, a cobra and its prey, with the writers in his wake. The girl seemed mesmerised and started edging away, until her back was flat against a wall. He stopped in front of her. Her eyes welled up with tears. He said: “Hi, I’m Warren Beatty.”

She replied: “I know,” and started to weep. Solicitously, he put his arm around her shoulder and took her off to a corner, writing down her phone number. By the time the three men got back to the lift, he was all business again, resuming the conversation where they had left off without missing a beat.

Several sources say that Beatty was so focused on Bonnie and Clyde, which he both starred in and produced, that he swore off women, or nearly so, over the course of it. He certainly had little patience for the demanding behaviour of Faye Dunaway, his eventual choice as Bonnie.

But Beatty had by no means forgotten Christie, who had agreed to come to Hollywood to film Petulia with Richard Lester, an American who did hip films such as The Knack . . . and How to Get It, as well as A Hard Day’s Night and Help!.

Early in the summer she flew to San Francisco. Beatty was soon on her case.Christie was engaged to marry a British artist named Don Bessant and met Beatty’s advances without enthusiasm. The more he flattered her, the more she withdrew. His reputation didn’t help. But Beatty finally persuaded her to let him visit her.

“I got to San Francisco and tried to rent a car, but I realised that my driver’s licence was expired, and they wouldn’t let me,” he recalls. “I hired a limo. This was at the height of the Sixties. I showed up at this hovel she was living in and I didn’t realise the buzz-saw I was driving into. She was appalled. She gave me a hard time about everything.”

The two were very different. She, as Goldie Hawn once remarked, would have been more comfortable milking a cow than making small talk at a Hollywood party, while he, Christie assumed, was one of those Hollywood fake-tan, gold-chain playboys. He took her to dinner and disarmed her with his intelligence and charm.

Bonnie and Clyde played a part in this seduction. The film — which made heroes of a pair of rural bank robbers — marked a huge shift in mass culture, away from the proper moral and aesthetic conservatism of the Eisenhower era towards the anything-goes, let-it-all-hang-out counterculture of the 1960s.

The movie became a phenomenal hit, receiving 10 Oscar nominations. Beatty called Christie, inviting her to be his date at the Oscars. She flew to Hollywood, shared his penthouse at the Beverly Wilshire and stayed on after the ceremony was over.

Eventually they moved into the beach house rented by Schlesinger and Childers.

“The Julie and Warren thing was magical,” Childers recalls. “He was demented about her. I knew 16 other girls he dated, but Julie was special.

“They couldn’t keep their hands off each other. It was hot. He told me he always wanted to marry her. But she was a very independent lady and never wanted marriage. This was before women’s lib, but she was the epitome of the new, free girl. Rich — rich in life, passionate, political, a hippie. She really loved her pot. And she hated Hollywood, hated the bullshit, the parties, the premieres. She said, ‘I give the best performance I can, and that’s all I’m gonna do.’ She didn’t like Warren’s whole quest for power.”

Despite his slash-and-burn love life, women adored him. And no wonder: he loved them in return

When Christie was elsewhere, Beatty was on the phone with women. Never identifying himself, speaking in a soft, insinuating voice rarely raised above a whisper, flattering in its assumption of intimacy, he asked them where they were, with whom, where they were going next and would they be sure to call him when they got there. He told them that, yes, he was in love with Julie, but he wanted to see them anyway. He later explained his MO: “You get slapped a lot,” he said, “but you get f***** a lot, too.”

“Julie’s smart, and she knew there were other girls around,” says Childers. “That was part of the turf. But it used to piss her off. You could always tell when there’d been a falling-out. She was a screamer, volatile. They’d break up; she wouldn’t see him. The phone would ring and she’d say, ‘If that’s Warren, tell him I’m not here.’ Six days later they’d be back together.” For the first time it seemed he had met his match.

While Christie was making The Go- Between in England, Beatty visited her and met Britt Ekland at a dinner party for Roman Polanski in London. As she described the encounter: “Warren’s gaze descended on me and the moment our eyes met I knew we committed physically.”

She fell “madly” in love with him. “No man had made me happier than Warren,” she said. Describing his technique in bed, she famously wrote: “Warren could handle women as smoothly as operating an elevator. He knew exactly where to locate the top button. One flick and we were on our way.” She thought he loved her too, but was disabused by overhearing too many “whispered phone calls to Julie”.

One lover was less impressed. Jennifer Lee, then in her early twenties, was a statuesque beauty who seems to have had sex with every man in the movie and music worlds before she married Richard Pryor. Of all the bimbographies that litter this period, hers, called Tarnished Angel and based on her diaries, is one of the best.

In the spring of 1971, living in New York City, she was doing some acting and modelling when Nancy Allen, future wife of Brian De Palma, introduced her to Beatty. They dropped in on him at the Carlyle hotel. He opened the door wearing a bathrobe, and welcomed them with: “I just got out of the shower.”

As Lee wrote, although he was 33 — old, to her — “he’s very warm and sweet and adorable . . . like a young boy, with a strong, tight body and lots of energy.” Allen made her excuses and left. Lee thought to herself: I know what he had in mind for the three of us, and now there’s just us chickens. Do I want to be alone with this knockout?

She said: “Maybe I should go home too.”

“Aww, come on. I’m not going to bite you.”

“Nancy’s messed up your plans, huh?”

“Yeah, but I always have a back-up. I don’t think I’ll use it tonight. We’ll save that for later.”

When the phone rang, it was Christie, whom Lee referred to as the “ball-and-chain main squeeze”. He politely excused himself and took the call in the bathroom.

Beatty and Lee became friends. She knew he was seeing a great many women but consoled herself that she was at the front of the line. Of his skills in bed, she recalls: “For all his reputation, he’s not a particularly great lover. (He’s not that well endowed.) In fact, it’s almost as if his reputation gets in the way. His need to be ‘great’ in bed transcends any true consideration of his partner’s needs, so it all boils down to his experience, his conquest. When he tries to relate intimately it’s too hard — it’s like crossing a line into serious narcissism.

“He likes to give directions, not only about positions, but about how you should feel and react. The pressure to have the biggest, most earth-shattering orgasms can get a little relentless. I’ve definitely had to fake a few.”

If Ekland and others are to be believed, Lee was in a minority.

How many women were there? Easier to count the stars in the sky. Beatty used to say that he couldn’t get to sleep at night without having sex. It was part of his routine, like flossing. This was who he was. As the evening progressed, he would disappear with his little black book, looking for a phone. Simple arithmetic tells us that if he had no more than one partner a night — and often there were several — over a period of, say, 3½ decades from the mid-1950s, when he arrived in New York, to 1991, when he met Annette Bening, whom he married, and allowing for the stretches when he was with the same woman, more or less, we can arrive at a figure of 12,775 women, give or take.

There were so many women that it’s hard to characterise his sexual preferences from how he behaved with any particular one. There was nothing particularly outré about Beatty’s sexual practices; he enjoyed oral sex, both giving and getting. Doubles and triples — ie, more than one woman at a time — were de rigueur in those days, although some women weren’t thrilled by the idea. He was not averse to spanking, in which he played the spanker, not the spankee.

One woman, who had a lengthy affair with him, when asked if he employed tricks to distract himself during the long, gruelling sessions in which he worked his magic — reviewing alternate takes in his head; going over deal points? — just laughed and said: “That’s where he lives.”

She invoked Aesop’s fable about the scorpion that stung the frog that carried it across the river. When asked why, the scorpion said: “It’s my nature.” In Beatty’s case, she explained: “He’s Mr Withholding. That’s where he lives. He’s lucky he can come at all.” The immortal words of Dr Strangelove’s General Jack D Ripper spring to mind: “I do not avoid women, Mandrake . . . I do deny them my essence.”

Even elderly women caught his eye

Despite his activism on behalf of Democratic party issues, Warren Beatty maintained friendships with many prominent Republicans whose views he abhorred. He even met General Douglas MacArthur’s wife.

He recalls: “One night I got a message at my hotel: ‘Mrs Douglas MacArthur would like to have dinner with you.’ I called the number, and it was John Kluge. He said, ‘I’m having a little birthday celebration for Mrs MacArthur and she would like you to come.’

“‘Mrs Douglas MacArthur?’

“‘Yes, she’s a wonderful woman.’

“I came to the dinner. I was seated next to Mrs MacArthur, who was an extremely beautiful woman of 92, I think. We got along very well. By dessert, we seemed to be old friends. I said, ‘Let me ask you a question.’

“‘What?’

“‘I’m just so interested. I can’t help asking you this question.’

“‘What’s that?’

“‘When you were with your husband in moments of extreme intimacy . . .’

“‘You mean when we were f******?’

“‘Yes. What did you call him?’

“‘What did I call him when we were doing that?’

“‘Yes.’

“‘General’.”

Beatty liked older women — in fact, very old women. In the mid-1990s, he would work ferociously to get Katharine Hepburn into Love Affair. He was good friends with Diana Vreeland, the former editor of Vogue, when she was in her seventies. Ditto Lillian Hellman, the playwright, who was certainly no beauty.

“I met Lillian at the opening night of Barefoot in the Park in 1964 at a party,” he recalls. “She was a compulsive smoker. Julie Christie and I spent Christmas with her years later. As a present I gave her a box of the biggest Nicaraguan cigars I could find. They were huge, about half a foot long. I also gave her an incredibly elaborate box that contained every kind of snuff known to man. And then I gave her a course to stop smoking.

“In two weeks she smoked all the cigars, sniffed all the snuff and never went to the course once. She just could not stop smoking.”

Peter Feibleman, a longtime friend of the playwright, brought her out to Los Angeles when she was in her late sixties. “Lillian hated actors, hated theatre people,” he recalls. “She liked Maureen Stapleton, that’s about it, and Warren. He took her to dinner — to a fancy restaurant where she dropped her teeth into her spaghetti. She was almost dead. When he got back, he said, ‘She’s a fascinating woman. I’d rather have dinner with her than with any woman I know.’”

Years later, Feibleman also introduced Beatty to Kitty Carlisle Hart when she was about 90. “I made the mistake of thinking, poor little old lady,” he says. “But that flirtation was visible across the street. There was no little old lady, and there was no man doing anybody a gracious favour. They liked each other on a sensual level. Yes, he does love older women.”

In September 1968, about a month after Soviet troops had invaded Czechoslovakia, Beatty and Christie flew to the USSR to explore the possibility of making a film there about John Reed, the American communist who was revered by the Bolsheviks. He heard that there was a woman who claimed to have had an affair with Reed. Beatty said: “Can I meet her?”

Eleonora Drapkina was about 80. Her mother had been close to Nadya Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife, and there is a photo of Eleonora aged 15, standing next to Lenin. Drapkina examined Beatty with interest, and told him he was the worst-dressed millionaire she’d ever met. He asked her: “Did you have a romance with John Reed?”

“A romance? I f***** him!”

“Were you ever in a labour camp?”

“Oh yes.”

“Where was it?”

“Ummm. North of Minsk.”

“How long were you there?”

“Oh, 16 years.”

“How do you feel about Stalin?”

“Only hate. But of course the revolution was in its early stages.”

He recalls: “It was at that moment I thought, I have to make a movie about that kind of passion. I’m going to make it without the Russians. I felt some sort of need to protect this poor American who was buried in the Kremlin wall. His ideals were not solely the property of the Soviets.”

Jeremy Pikser, a researcher on Reds, as the film would be known, adds: “Old women are Warren’s biggest fetish. I don’t think he actually had sex with old women, but he has a major soft spot for them. From the moment he met this old woman who said she’d f***** Jack Reed, he wanted to make a film about him.”

© Peter Biskind 2010 Extracted from Star by Peter Biskind, published by Simon & Schuster UK at £17.99. Copies can be ordered for £16.19, including postage, from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0845 271 2135