 Once upon a time, at a cocktail party, someone asked me of all the celebrities I’d met and interviewed, which actor was the biggest womanizer of them all.
Ha, are you kidding? I’ve interviewed a lot of guys in Hollywood who claimed they were studs, and listed outlandish numbers of how many women they had been to bed with, but, as far as I’m concerned, the “stud-horse” of them all, and no doubt the most pathetic in the long run, is Warren Beatty.
 I’m talking, of course, about Warren Beatty, before he married Annette Bening, in 1992, when he was in his 50s. Since then, he has made very few women and very few movies, (or if he has, those of us who often write about such things, don’t know about it, or have decided not to comment because it’s considered “old news”).
But, Beatty, B.B. (Before Bening), was another story. Henry Warren Beaty is now known as Warren Beatty, an American actor, producer, screenwriter, and director. He long had a reputation as a womanizer and playboy, but this reputation seems to have faded since his marriage.
 The Academy Awards honored him with the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award in 2000, while in 2004 he received the Kennedy Center Honor. The Thalberg Award is not so much designed for actors, (although Clint Eastwood won it in 1994); it’s given to directors and producers to recognize a lifetime body of work. Even though Beatty may be most frequently thought of as an actor, his work in other capacities earned him a lion’s share of his Oscar nominations.
He’s been nominated 14 times, and only four of those nominations have been for best actor. He’s won one award – Best Director in 1981 for “Reds.” When the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences decided to honor him with the Thalberg Award, it’s pretty unlikely they were thinking of his reputation as a skirt-chaser.
 Beatty got his start in film under Elia Kazan's direction opposite Natalie Wood in “Splender in the Grass” (1961), though he had previous television experience in “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis” (1959). At age 30, he achieved critical acclaim as producer and star of “Bonnie and Clyde,” (1967), which was nominated for 10 Academy Awards. Subsequent Beatty films include “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” (1971), “The Parallax View,” (1974), “Shampoo,” (1975), and “Heaven Can Wait,” (1978).
His historical epic set at the start of World War I, “Reds,” (1981), won Academy Awards for Best Director, Best Cinematography, and Best Actress in a Supporting Role while losing Best Picture to “Chariots of Fire.” It was nominated for eight other Oscars and joined a handful of films to win Best Director but not Best Picture. Other critically acclaimed works include “Bugsy,” (1991) and “Bulworth,” (1998).
 Beatty's career as a ladies man has been marked by a series of well-publicized romances, flirtations, courtships, affairs and relationships. Translated, that means: Sex. “Gobs of it,” as they say down south. Joan Collins once said Beatty was insatiable. She said he had to have it three or four times a day. He was so busy having sex with her, she said, he had to conduct business on the telephone at the same time. Shirley MacLaine, Beatty’s sister, told reporters she would like to have sex with Warren, to see for herself what all the fuss was about.
I don’t know how good he was in the sack, I never asked any of the women he, reportedly, bedded. But I do know that he put the hustle on Morgan Fairchild on three different occasions, and she turned him down each time, making her probably the only woman in Hollywood who had the gumption to say “No.”
 Morgan was Faye Dunaway’s understudy for the movie “Bonnie and Clyde” the first time Beatty propositioned her. She had secretly been married for a short time, but Beatty didn’t know that, and he emphatically kept re-assuring her that he was the perfect one to “deflower” her.
For the record, the list of Warren’s historic “romances” is lengthy. Take a long look: Diane Keaton, Leslie Caron, Isabelle Adjani, Catherine Deneuve, Inger Stevens, Lana Wood, Linda McCartney, Margaux Hemingway, Natalie Wood, Joan Collins, Cher, Brooke Hayward, Faye Dunaway, Maria Callas, Judy Carne, Daryl Hannah, Susannah York, Liv Ullmann, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Julie Christie, Princess Margaret, Joni Mitchell, Janice Dickinson, Goldie Hawn, Jessica Savitch, Michelle Phillips, Britt Ekland, Mary Tyler Moore, Candice Bergen, Mamie Van Doren, Carol Alt, Connie Chung, Kate Jackson, Lillian Hellman, Diane Sawyer, Barbra Streisand, Elle MacPherson, Carly Simon, Jane Fonda, Justine Bateman, Bianca Jagger, Stephanie Seymour, Diana Ross, Melanie Griffith, Barbara Hershey, and Madonna.
I wouldn’t pretend to have followed Beatty around with a tape recorder or a camera to record all this “kissy-missy” stuff for posterity, but I can shed some light on his dark side in the ‘70s after his film “Shampoo” was released.
 Rather than offering my description, maybe it’s best to let Beatty do that. As the film character George, the hairdresser, in “Shampoo,” he sez: “I go into the shop, and they’re so great lookin’, you know? And I’m doing their hair and they feel great, and they smell great. Or I could be out on the street, you know, and I could just stop at a stoplight, or go into an elevator, or…there’s a beautiful girl. I mean, that’s it, it makes my day. I mean, it makes me feel like I’m gonna live forever.”
When the movie “Shampoo” premiered at the USA Film Festival, Warren also happened to be on hand to talk to critics and members of the audience about the film. I watched him sitting on stage, supposedly intently listening to questions from film buffs in the theater. His eyes moved from patron to patron, row to row, from one side of the theater to another, from the front row to the back row. But he was not looking at the folks asking questions. He was checking out the broads sitting there in their tempting low cut frocks, in their new short skirts with the legs spread wide.
 Occasionally, he would mumble something to the person asking a question. Every answer sounded memorized, as if he had anticipated what people would ask, and he just rattled off the answers automatically, without any concern or sensitivity. Once he paused in an answer, and I thought maybe he was going to say something profound and different. He was talking to a pretty buxom blonde who looked like a young Jayne Mansfield.
What ever he said to her (I only heard his room number), was quickly drowned out by the laughter that followed. But you didn’t have to hear what he said to understand what was happening. If you spotted Warren baby tossing his hotel keys in the lap of the girl with the big gorbanzas, then you pretty much understood what was coming down.
For one brief instant, I wondered if the girl would return the keys to Warren. She didn’t. The Q&A session wound down, and Beatty exited the stage followed by an entourage of media hounds and festival people.
Normally, I would have joined the crowd and followed the horde to one of the media rooms for the customary press conference that would follow. Instead, I kept my eyes trained on the blonde and followed her out an exit to the street where the taxicabs and limos were parked.
When she hailed a cab for Beatty’s hotel, I lied, and asked her, politely, if I might share the ride with her and split the fare. She seemed happy to do that, probably a little embarrassed that she was on her way (she thought) to an eventual little sex session with the great cinema lover!.
I told her watching all those movies had tired me, and I was going back to the hotel and take a nap. (Of course, I wasn’t staying at the hotel, since I lived in the city, but once we arrived at the hotel, I was tempted to dial Warren’s room. The number had been plainly understood when he blatantly invited the girl sitting in the theater to party with him).
I knew that Michelle Phillips (whom I had met previously, when she was a member of the vocal group, The Mamas and the Papas), had accompanied Warren to the festival, and when I didn’t see her tagging around with him, at the theater, I figured, as was his customary ritual, he had left her behind in the hotel on the pretense of resting up for the big event that night.
 That, of course, left him free to womanize with whomever he wanted and make arrangements for secret meetings later. Frankly, I knew what Beatty had on his mind, but I also thought he had lost his mind. And, of course, since I wasn’t privy to the exact relationship he had with Michelle, I didn’t know if they played these little ménage a trios games frequently or not.
I decided to wait in the lobby and see if anything happened. I wasn’t being noisy, it was not any of my business whom Warren had sex with, but I thought it might make a funny column mention, and, as it turned out, it did.
In a few minutes the busty blonde stepped off the elevator and headed for the front desk, (no doubt to leave Warren’s key), then changed her mind and headed for the coffee shop. Enroute, she stopped at a mail chute and deposited Warren’s key as deftly as she would flip on a light switch in the dark.
I followed her into the coffee shop and over to her table. “Oh,” she remarked somewhat surprised, “it’s you again. Fancy seeing you here.”
She invited me to share a table with her, so I ordered some coffee. At first, she seemed a little embarrassed, then later she must have decided she’d like to get what had just happened off her rather amply endowed chest. So, she told me about the “key tossing incident” in the theater, (as if I didn’t see it), and about the confrontation in Warren’s room.
“I don’t know who that girl was up there,” she said, rather frustrated. “I started to leave, I thought I had the wrong room.” I nodded, sympathetically, and grinned. Finally, I gave the chesty young thing my card and wished her well before excusing myself. I had a couple of errands to run and a few phone calls to make before eating a little snack, taking a shower and changing clothes for the big movie premiere for the general public that night.
 Once I returned to my residence, I called Morgan Fairchild and told her what had happened and also that I had tried to talk to Warren at the theater and he had brushed me off. “Why that skunk!” she exclaimed. “Tell you what let’s do. I’ll call my sister Catherine and invite her to come to the premiere. When you get to the theater tonight and meet us, and walk into the lobby with the two of us on your arms, Warren baby will be all over you in a New York minute. Don’t worry about a thing. We’re gonna have a ball.”
I must say when we arrived at the theater and walked into the lobby, it wasn’t five minutes later that Warren made a beeline across the lobby and sequestered us in a corner. “Hey, baby cakes, “he commented, “What’s shaking, baby cakes?” I looked at Morgan and she looked at her sister, who looked at me. We all three laughed and completely ignored Warren, walking right past him to our reserved seats in the VIP section.
“Didn’t I tell you?” observed Morgan, poking me in the ribs, playfully with her elbow. Once the movie was over, and we walked back into the lobby again, I spotted Warren heading for the men’s room, excused myself from Morgan and Catherine and followed him. Standing there side by side at the urinals, with a small divider mounted on the wall between us, Warren ignored me.
“Hey, guy,” I said,” looking straight ahead. “Enjoyed the movie. Oh, by the way, I’ll give you Morgan’s phone number if you’ll give me a good quote.” He turned his head in my direction and shot me the ol’ evil eye, then zipped up his pants and prepared to leave. Then he stopped, suddenly, and turned around. “What’s the number?” he asked me.
I wrote the number of an escort service down on my program, tore it off and gave it to him. He gave me a quote, but I don’t usually repeat it in print or in mixed company.
 I never saw Beatty again and I’m glad. I think maybe he got the message. What a jerk. Finally, in his 50s, Warren got his act together and settled down a bit, marrying Annette Bening, his co-star in the gangster film “Bugsy,” in 1992. They have four children together: Kathlyn (b. 1992), Benjamin (b. 1994), Isabel (b. 1997) and Ella Corinne (b. April 8, 2000).
A longtime activist in various liberal political causes, Beatty has, at various times in the past, been extremely active in the presidential politics of the Democratic Party. In 1968, he hit the campaign trail for the first time, supporting Senator Robert F. Kennedy's bid for his party's presidential nomination.
His involvement in the senator's campaign, which included stump speaking and fundraising, was cut short when Kennedy was shot and killed by Sirhan Sirhan on the same night that he won a crucial primary in California. Four years later, Beatty joined the campaign of Senator George McGovern as an advisor.
 As part of the so-called “Malibu Mafia,” a group of Hollywood celebrities who were part of the candidate's “inner circle,” Beatty gave McGovern's campaign manager Gary Hart advice about the handling of public relations and was instrumental in organizing a series of rock-concerts which raised over $1 million for the senator's campaign.
In 1984, and again in 1988, Beatty was to play a similar role in Hart's own presidential campaigns. Hart, who had, by that time, become a senator himself, had become friends with Beatty during the 1972 campaign and the relationship had grown closer during the intervening decade.
After Hart's second campaign imploded over allegations that he had committed adultery with a former beauty queen named Donna Rice, a mutual friend of the two explained why they were so close: "Gary always wanted to have Warren's life and Warren always wanted to have Gary's. It was a match made in heaven."
 Beatty himself was to become presidential timber during the summer of 1999. After it became clear that the only two contenders for the Democratic Party's nomination were to be Vice President Al Gore and former Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey, Beatty made it generally known that he was dissatisfied with the two choices and began to drop hints that he might be willing to seek the nomination himself.
After meeting with several powerful liberal activists and influential Democratic operatives, including pollster Pat Caddell, who had worked previously for Hart, McGovern, and President Jimmy Carter, and adman Bill Hillsman, who had worked on the campaigns of Senator Paul Wellstone and Governor Jesse Ventura, Beatty announced in September of 1999 that he would not seek the nomination.
However, he continued to be courted by members of a different political party, the Reform Party, who were looking for an alternative to Pat Buchanan, a conservative who had switched parties after losing the Republican Party's presidential nomination for the third time in a row.
 Despite frequent entreaties by Governor Ventura, real-estate magnate Donald Trump, and syndicated columnist Arianna Huffington, Beatty refused to enter the race and Buchanan eventually won the Reform Party's nomination. Later in the campaign, Beatty announced that he was endorsing Ralph Nader for president.
Despite his decision not to seek the presidency in 2000, Beatty intimated that he might still run at a later time, telling reporters that he would do so if he thought he "could make an impact on the debate." Please…I’m holding my breath and I have a pretty good idea what Beatty is holding.
Well, that’s show biz, baby.
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