DOn a warm summer night in 1959, Warren Beatty was dining with Jane Fonda at La Scala in Beverly Hills when he spotted Joan Collins at a nearby table. A wonderful brunette, younger and slimmer copy of Elizabeth Taylor, with a British accent. It was known as The British Open, in reference to the parade of her well-known male conquests. Unlucky in her love, she pecked at her cannelloni without appetite, until she noticed the young man with insolent charm who was looking at her, implacable. She’s not even old enough to have a driver’s license, she fantasized, staring back at him. She raised a glass and smiled. “This boy looking at her, her partner told her, is Shirley MacLaine’s brother. Warren I don’t know what.” She looked at him again. She was struck by her groomed looks, Clark Kent-like beauty, and sensuous mouth framed by dimples. Everything was perfect except for the acne and Jane Fonda, who only had eyes for him.
Exhausted, Joan Collins got out of bed and said, “I don’t think I can take it any longer.”
Stories like this dot Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America, by journalist Peter Biskind, a biography that portrays one of Hollywood’s greatest sex heroes. In it, it is said that Beatty, curiously, woke up late to the pleasures of the flesh. A native of Richmond, Virginia, and raised in the Baptist faith, he would not lose his virginity until he was 19 years and 10 months old.
Very soon, however, no woman would escape his radar: actresses, models, TV stars, studio heads, journalists, wardrobe managers or his friends’ daughters. Where did this passion come from? It’s hard to say. It could be said that in her youth she lived through an immersion in a sea of oestrogens. “My childhood was positively influenced by women: my mother, my sister, my aunts, great aunts, cousins… I’m lucky that they haven’t finished me.” Despite his reputation as a heartthrob, women adored him. Not surprisingly, he adored them too. He always found in them a detail object of his admiration: the fall of the chin, the golden reflections in the iris of one eye… «Women, as he used to say, are like a jar of olives. You can eat one and then close the jar, or you can eat them all.
At first glance, Jane Fonda believed that Warren was gay. “He was so handsome! -remember-. All his friends were gay and bright, and he liked to play the piano in a piano bar: I thought there wasn’t much chance that he was straight. See if she was stupid ». During the filming of parrish [1961], Delmer Daves asked Warren to cover Jane with kisses. Seeing that the young actor barely “grazed his cheek, the filmmaker apostrophized: ‘Are you afraid or what? Get a good grip, kid, don’t be shy. Beatty kissed Fonda so fiercely that Daves had to intervene: “Cut! Stop! Warren, we’re short on film. That will do it!”
Biskind recounts that Beatty made love to Joan Collins incessantly during the year and a half they lived together. One Sunday, exhausted, she got out of bed screaming, “I don’t think she can take it any longer!” “Not for ever, it must be because of all those vitamins that she gobbles up herself,” he confessed. She’s going to rip my skin off.” “Does she really make love seven times a day?” a skeptical questioner asked. «Maybe he does. I just lie down.”
One Saturday afternoon, just before she left for a shoot in Rome, he surprised her. She called his attention to a can of minced liver in the fridge. Inside was a gold, diamond and pearl ring. “Magnificent! Why is that?” she exclaimed. “It’s the engagement ring, idiot. Since we’re going to be apart, I thought we should… You know… get engaged.’ When he left for Rome, he began to harass her with phone calls, letters and telegrams in which he declared his eternal love for her. He instigated her to come back to see him. He was convinced, she says, that she was cheating on him. They had a strong argument, she fantasized about the fact that if he was so jealous, it was probably because of her relationship with Natalie Wood. [compañera de reparto de Beatty en Esplendor en la hierba (1961)]. In addition, he thought of his «boyfriend with glasses, pale and full of pimples», and how he liked the Italians he saw every day.
By divine coincidence, and blessed bread for journalists, Beatty and Collins separated at the same time as Wood and Robert Wagner, her husband. That summer, Beatty and Wood were the new couple of the year.
“He felt compelled to seduce every woman he saw. If he took the elevator with one of her, he had to win her over before leaving », Terry Gilliam
Splendor in the Grass was an immediate success, Beatty became a star; 1962 and 1963 passed between a kind of mist. «It was a succession of very good moments, of good meals, of pretty girls and of vain amusements consumed without moderation. He was turning me into an adult. Not by a long shot would it occur to me to give up enjoying my 20 years,” the actor confessed. “Warren devoured industrial quantities of women,” said Wood, “but he did it with charm.” They parted ways, met again, and fell apart again.
In February 1964, Warren met Leslie Caron, the star of An American in Paris. […] She was married, but Beatty didn’t care. “Once he fell in love with a woman – she remembers – she never stopped, he wanted to control her completely, her habits, her makeup, her work. We did not separate for a moment for two years.
The 1960s were not yet over when Beatty’s career was ruined. Her romance with Leslie Caron turned into a nightmare, plagued by court appearances and bad press. “The only problem with this gorgeous guy,” explains filmmaker Terry Gilliam, “was that he felt compelled to seduce every woman he saw, whether she was fat, ugly or old. If he took the elevator with a woman, he had to seduce her before she got to her floor.”
Caron must have gauged the seriousness of the situation. Like Joan Collins, he found all of her attention to be a double-edged blessing. She one morning he called her at five o’clock to say: «Are you sleeping? Aren’t you thinking of me? Sleeping with Beatty was a rite of passage for the new stars that followed one another in her room at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, where she was working on the script for Bonnie and Clyde. Photographer Michael Childers, who was staying one floor below, told Biskind: “Revolving doors, her little girlfriends going up one elevator and down another… It was the Warren Beatty show…”
Julie Christie was his most demanding conquest. Engaged to an artist, she showed no enthusiasm for courting her. But he convinced her to let him visit her in San Francisco. «When I stood in a limousine in front of her dump, she made me feel the same effect as a circular saw in the face: she was horrified, and she made me pass black.» The two were at the antipodes of each other. She would feel more comfortable milking a cow than at a Hollywood party, exchanging words without interest. And her image of Warren was that of a self-tanner-loving, gold-chain-loving playboy. But he took her out to dinner and managed to disarm her with her seduction game.
“The moment Warren’s eyes fell on me I knew I had fallen. No man has ever made me so happy.” Britt Ekland
“There was something magical about them,” recalls photographer Michael Childers. I have met 16 other of her friends, but with Julie it was special. He always wanted to marry her. But she was very independent. Before the feminist movements, she embodied the new young, free, rich, passionate, politicized, hippie girl. She hated Hollywood.” When Julie was away, Warren spent her time on the phone with other women. He murmured in a falsely intimate and fawning voice, asking them where they were and what they were going to do next. He told them that yes, he loved Julie, but that he wanted to see them despite everything. This was his modus operandi, as he would later explain: “You get a lot of slaps, but you also get a lot of kisses.”
“The moment Warren’s eyes fell on me,” says former Bond girl Britt Ekland, “I knew I had fallen: something physical was going to happen between us. I loved him madly. No man made me happier.” Describing her talents in bed, she launched this famous sentence: «He knew how to give himself to women. It was as simple for him as calling the elevator. He knew how to touch the button to make us go up ». One voice is out of tune, however, in this praise concert: Jennifer Lee, then a beauty in her twenties. “Warren was not an exceptional lover. It was as if his reputation had weighed him down. His need to be great in bed took precedence over his mate’s needs. Sometimes I had to pretend, it was inevitable.”
Beatty claimed that he could not sleep without making love. She would fall at night and disappear in search of a phone. Biskind has gone to the trouble of making a simple calculation that reveals that if he had only had one lover per night – often several – over the 35-year period until he met Annette Benning, we would have had 12,775 conquests. . About.
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Warren Beatty and his most indiscreet biography: the man who does love women | XLWeekly