Actor Warren Beatty has been around beautiful, famous women nearly all his life–his older sister is Shirley MacLaine. But his much-discussed relationships with females over the years have been far less than familial–indeed, he ranks perhaps below Errol Flynn but still far above Russell Crowe as one of Hollywood’s most legendary lotharios. But make no mistake: Beatty is more of a serial monogamist than an inveterate womanizer, preferring romantic relationships–albeit many, many relationships–to fanciful flings.
“You love somebody once, you love them forever–only maybe not as much as the next person,” the famously noncommittal actor/writer/director once noted.
Handsome, charming and intellectual, Beatty achieved major movie stardom in 1961’s Splendor In the Grass opposite Natalie Wood, which made him a major sex symbol–the film included the first on-screen French kiss, after all (it must have been a good one, as two years later Wood dated Beatty during her divorce from Robert Wagner). From that point on he became Tinseltown’s reigning bachelor.
In the 1960s, Joan Collins washis first celebrity consort–the two were even engaged for about five minutes. He also dated a 16-year-old Cher in her pre-Sonny days, was named as a co-respondent in the divorce suit filed by Leslie Caron‘s husband and later he hooked up, more seriously, with Oscar winner Julie Christie, whom he romanced while making McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Their relationship lasted through 1973 and the two parted on terms friendly enough to reunite for two post-relationship films, Shampoo and Heaven Can Wait.
Then it was on to a series of short-lived liaisons with ’70s-era sensations such as Britt Ekland (“He could handle women as smoothly as operating an elevator,” she said) Michelle Phillips (who ditched his pal Jack Nicholson for him) and a post-Woody Allen Diane Keaton, who starred in Beatty’s Oscar-winning epic Reds but left him when she couldn’t get cast as his real-life wife.
Over the years, while happily ensconced in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel’s 750-square-foot Veranda Suite (with its private entrance and rooftop terrace), Beatty entertained a multiplicity of famed femmes, allegedly including Goldie Hawn, Candice Bergen, Barbra Streisand, Diane Sawyer, Jane Fonda, Joni Mitchell, Brigitte Bardot, Kate Jackson, Faye Dunaway, Justine Bateman, Connie Chung, Mary Tyler Moore, Isabelle Adjani and Elle MacPherson.
His dalliances may have hit their apex–or nadir–with his 1990s relationship with pop icon Madonna, whom he met while making Dick Tracy. It was a match made for media hype, but it never really sizzled off screen or on–indeed, it’s downright uncomfortable when, ever guarded, he appears with her in the documentary Truth or Dare, bemused at her inability to live her life with the cameras off.
Rumors persist that Carly Simon wrote the tune “You’re So Vain” as a musical put-down to ex-beau Beatty, but his Bulworth co-star–not conquest–Halle Berry held an opposite opinion: “He has the ability to make every woman feel like for the moment he is talking to you that you are the most important, the most beautiful, the most talented, the most sexy woman alive. That is a talent in and of itself.”
At last while making Bugsy in 1991, Beatty met the woman that, for him, matched that description: Annette Bening. “I was looking for someone to make me good. When I met her, I felt relief,” he said of the effect of meeting his leading lady, whom he married in 1992. “She has energy, intelligence, articulation, the best voice in the world, the best face, the best body, and the best appreciation of a joke. I defy anyone to leave the room when she’s laughing.”
He hasn’t left the room yet. Ten years and four kids later, Beatty’s bachelor days are now a fond but distant memory now relegated to Hollywood history–mostly. On a recent anniversary Bening surprised her husband by bringing him back to his old suite at the Beverly Wilshire, telling him “You’ve bedded everyone else in Hollywood in this room–now it’s my turn!”
