Star (eBook)

'He was insatiable. Three, four, five times a day, every day, was not unusual for him. I felt like an oyster in a slot machine.'

--Joan Collins

ON A HOT summer night, in 1959, Warren Beatty and Jane Fonda were having dinner at La Scala, on Little Santa Monica in Beverly Hills, when Beatty spied Joan Collins at a nearby table. Collins, a striking brunette, was a younger, svelter, later-model Elizabeth Taylor, with a British accent to boot. She had been dubbed 'the British Open,' for her parade of well-heeled boyfriends. But Collins was no bimbo--she had a biting wit, which she would occasionally exercise at Beatty's expense, as she would prove nineteen years later in her autobiography, Past Imperfect. Then twenty-six, she was four years his senior, and had been in Hollywood for five years, having appeared in a number of low-rent pictures, including Land of the Pharaohs, a sword and sandal epic wherein she lay recumbent while cradling a diamond (paste, of course) in her navel. At the time, she was training with Candy Barr to play a stripper in Seven Thieves, and hoping to wrest the lead in Cleopatra away from Taylor.

As Collins tells it, she was brooding about her lengthy and increasingly unhappy affair with a handsome producer, George Englund, then married to Cloris Leachman, and forking cannelloni into her mouth (she was always a big eater and had to fight her weight), when she noticed the indecently pretty young man boldly eyeing her from a nearby table. He was twenty-two at the time, but he looked like he was barely old enough to drive.

Although he was precocious--dating senior girls when he was a freshman at Washington and Lee High School in Arlington, Virginia--sexually speaking, Beatty was a late bloomer. Born in Richmond, the 'Cradle of the Confederacy,' and raised a Baptist among Baptists, he had been a virgin until he was 19 and ten months, and had had only one or two relationships he considered 'serious.' Since he dropped out of Northwestern University in 1956, he hadn't had any. But he had discovered in himself a raging lust for women. He realized, too, that women were drawn to him. It was as if he heard them calling out to him where other men were deaf, the way canines respond to whistles inaudible to humans. Says writer Peter Feibleman, who would help polish some of his scripts in coming years, 'Hollywood was candy land for him. I once asked him, 'Why is it that every time I put my weenie in something, yours has already been there?' He just had a tremendous appetite.' A few years off, when his career was prospering and his horizons broader, no female would be beneath his notice--stars, starlets, and models, of course, but also TV newscasters, studio executives, journalists, hatcheck girls, waitresses, dental hygienists, even daughters of friends--any woman, in other words, who crossed his path, and many who didn't, the innocent bystanders grazing the stacks in a library, stopped at a traffic light in the next car, pulling bread off a shelf in a supermarket, or sitting, like Collins, at a nearby table. As Clint Eastwood is reputed to have said, 'No matter how hot a girl is, there's always someone who's tired of fucking her,' and that person always seemed to be named Warren on-to-the-next Beatty.

What accounted for this passion, outside of motive, means, and opportunity, is hard to say. To hear...