Warren Beatty is so vain, he thought Carly Simon's song was about him. Simon has steadfastly refused to confirm or deny, but Hollywood's super stud certainly ranks as prime suspect - and phoned to thank her for it. Of course, Simon is a mere footnote in a list of romantic attachments that runs from Adjani (Isabelle) to Wood (Natalie), by way of Brigitte Bardot, Cher, Julie Christie, Joan Collins... Woody Allen once fantasised about being reincarnated as Beatty's fingertips. Beatty repaid the compliment by seducing Diane Keaton.
Even in his current role as Mr Annette Bening, father of four, he is not one to apologise for his promiscuous past. But Beatty may resent the way his sexual exploits have overshadowed his movies and probably ruled out the career in politics he always craved...
Then again, that might be a convenient excuse for a competitive over-achiever, a control freak who also claims to being a world-class procrastinator and commitment- phobe: a movie star who has appeared in a grand total of just six movies over the last quarter of a century.
He wasn't exactly churning them out in his '70s heyday, either - seven in 10 years - a trend that started as early as 1962, when a 25-year-old Beatty already had the balls to turn down a role President John F Kennedy suggested he would be perfect for: the young JFK. As it turned out, the movie was a clunker and Beatty was proved right.
That wouldn't always be the case. Over the years he also passed on such hits as Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, The Godfather, Last Tango In Paris, The Sting, Superman, Misery and Wall Street. He talked Quentin Tarantino out of casting him in the title role of Kill Bill. 'I only make the movies I want to make,' he would explain with a shrug.
For a long time, playing hard to get was Beatty's stock in trade, professionally anyway, and letting slip about the ones that got away only enhanced his mythic status as the star on top of everyone's Christmas list.
But why would someone like Quentin Tarantino be so keen to land an old slinger like Beatty in the first place? Hard to believe now, but Warren was the original poster boy for New Hollywood. Decades before the word 'indie' came into play, Beatty balked at the pretty boy roles that were coming his way and decided to take control of his own career.
First, he snapped up a screenplay two unknown writers had offered to François Truffaut on spec. Then he begged Jack Warner to bankroll it. The studio weren't enthusiastic but the deal was structured so Warner wouldn't lose money. Beatty put the entire package together and when the movie was done, he fought tooth and nail to get it out there intact. No easy matter: Jack Warner hated the picture, and most of his executives agreed with him. Shockingly violent and disturbingly amoral, Bonnie And Clyde wasn't just a bad film; it was malignant.
The New York Times savaged the film: 'A cheap piece of bald-faced slapstick,' raged critic Bosley Crowther. Newsweek called it 'a squalid shoot-'em-up for the moron trade'. Warner effectively buried it.
Then the British critics started talking it up as a masterpiece. In the US, Pauline Kael led the fight back with the 9,000-word rave that made her reputation. First Newsweek, then Time reversed their original put-downs. Now Bonnie And Clyde was the best picture of the year and the most important: a watershed movie.
Beatty insisted the studio re-release the picture. Second time around it was a cultural phenomenon and the 10 Oscar nominations announced on the day of the re-release sealed the deal. It was Warren's triumph. And because Warner had such little faith in the film, he'd given Beatty 40 per cent of the gross in place of a producer's fee. With box-office standing in excess of $30 million by mid-1968, it was little wonder Jack Nicholson dubbed him 'The Pro'.
And on top of it all, he was the star of the show. He'd been a star, in fact, from the very first time they put a movie camera on him. Is there any other actor who has only ever played leads?
Beatty arrived in New York in 1957. Refusing to trade on big sister Shirley MacLaine's success, he studied with the legendary Method guru Stella Adler and became a protégé of playwright William Inge.
His first film was Splendor In The Grass (1961). Cast by Elia Kazan, Beatty was immediately put on a platform beside the director's previous discoveries, Marlon Brando and James Dean. Sensual and cerebral, he was better-looking than either of them. He knew it, too: Kazan said he had all the mirrors in the make-up room covered up to stop Warren from staring at himself all day.
On screen, Beatty's feigned diffidence has always been the key. Soft-spoken and deliberately vague, he understood he was too handsome to come on strong. In that respect, he's a little like George Roundy, the hairdresser hero in his second film as producer, Shampoo (1975): George being all too happy to let Jack Warden's character assume he's gay if that means he doesn't suspect he's jumping in the sack with his wife (Lee Grant), his mistress (Julie Christie) and his daughter (Carrie Fisher).
In interviews Beatty's evasive enough to drive journalists to tears. Silences last for as long as you let them ('You could mount a Broadway musical in his pauses,' wrote a wag from Rolling Stone). He learned from agent Charlie Feldman never to sign contracts, and legend has it he never paid his agents their 10 per cent either. Being in business with Beatty was allegedly reward enough.
The befuddled boyish charm worked on studio bosses too. Take Charlie Bluhdorn of Paramount Pictures. Bluhdorn offered him $25 million to do anything but Reds, but Beatty made ‘Commie Dearest' anyway, his lament for the lost Socialist ideal. And he made it in high style, treating the entire crew to first class train tickets to travel 60 miles and routinely shooting more than 30 takes. The budget spiraled north, with Beatty adding insult to injury when he refused to promote the film. It failed to break even.
It did, however, win Beatty the Best Director prize, his first (and only) win after six nominations. But that vindication only seemed to paralyse his creative instincts. Variety editor Peter Bart called Beatty 'the King of the Pitch', but what does he have to show for it?
There was much speculation concerning a biopic about a private millionaire and moviemaker (Howard Hughes) but Beatty's movie didn't get off the ground. It was six years later when he starred with Dustin Hoffman in an update on the old Bob Hope/Bing Crosby Road pictures: Ishtar (1987).
The first half hour is actually pretty funny. The rest is history. The critics crucified it and the studio essentially wrote off its $40 million investment. Beatty was 50 years old and it was beginning to look like the audience wasn't there for him anymore.
Still, he remained a legend, at least in Hollywood, and after smartly hooking his star to Madonna's, he managed to produce two more pet projects. Dick Tracy (1990) was a $100-million blockbuster, but the experience was so bruising for Disney chief Jeffrey Katzenberg that he issued a notorious internal memo about the dangers of 'losing control of your own destiny': 'The number of hours [Tracy] required, the amount of anxiety it generated and the amount of dollars that needed to be expended were disproportionate to the amount of success achieved.'
TriStar boss Mike Medavoy hadn't read his colleague's mission statement when he got involved with the gangster romance Bugsy (1991), an artful prestige picture which ended up losing a lot of money after the producer-star insisted on spending more and more on marketing a movie the public didn't want to see.
Bulworth isn't Beatty's best film, but it's his most reckless, his funniest, his most outspoken. Maybe it took the ultimate insider to get away with such a biting broadside against the system. A commercial failure (naturally), it was Beatty's unelectable alternative manifesto and should probably be considered his last word.
But that is to ignore Town And Country (2001), a decadent sex farce nominally directed by Britain's Peter Chelsom but starring Warren as an ageing roué and such cronies as Diane Keaton, Goldie Hawn and Garry Shandling. Three years in the making, it doubled its budget to $85 million, missed 17 projected release dates and all in all made Ishtar look like a businesslike proposition. Was Beatty to blame? He hired a PR firm and a lawyer to put a lid on any idle speculation, while Chelsom muttered darkly about mind-games and manipulation. We couldn't possibly comment, but it's clear that getting into bed with Warren Beatty doesn't quite have the same appeal it once did in Hollywood.