Rules don’t apply to Warren Beatty
In 1964, Warren Beatty was meeting a paramour at the Beverly Hills Hotel and was wary of press. Spotting two men in suits, he raised the alarm.
“I was told in confidence that these people were not with the tabloids, but Mr. Hughes,” he says. “And I said, ‘I’m in the next suite to Howard Hughes?’ And they said, ‘We don’t know. He’s hired eight of them, and five of the bungalows.’ ”
Hughes always kept a handful of suites booked — so no one could ever be sure if he was there or not. The arrangement involved his then-wife, actress Jean Peters, his assistants and security detail, and various aspiring starlets who were said to glide through his bedchamber at night, like sushi on a conveyor belt.
“I just kept thinking, ‘What a good setup for a comedy.’”
Beatty, now 80, went on to write, produce and direct last year’s romantic farce Rules Don’t Apply, as well as playing Hughes, in an elegy for a bygone world of moviemaking that often itself felt movie-made.
Alone in having twice been nominated for best actor, best director and best screenplay Oscars for a best picture-nominated film, Beatty declines to sound off about the mix-up leading to La La Land being crowned best picture instead of the actual winner, Moonlight.
“There is something comical about it,” he winces. “But the academy has always been very kind to me, so I don’t want to pontificate about it. You know, they’ve always supported ... Yeah, you’re probably aware of my ...” He stops, sensing trouble. “Well, you say it.” “Your own illustrious filmmaking career?” I venture. “Oh, yes!” he says sunnily. He signed a contract to make his Howard Hughes film in the mid’70s, but another decade passed before he got together with his then-writing partner Bo Goldman.
“Warren Beatty is Howard Hughes,” Goldman said in 2010. “He felt Hughes was the guy who mastered the three Fs — ‘the filmmaking, the flying and the f---ing,’ as Warren called it.”
Beatty, raised a southern Baptist, along with sister Shirley MacLaine, demurs. “And then, ahh, I came to Hollywood,” he laughs.
Fact and fiction became tangled up like legs in bed linen: Joan Collins noted that he would sometimes answer the telephone during sex, a trait shared by his characters in Bugsy and Shampoo.
Then came Annette Bening. The couple celebrated their 25th anniversary last month, and have four children in their teens and early 20s. Settling down “had been on my mind from a very early age,” he says, “though I waited a long time to do it.”
Why? Smiling: “I would say that I wasn’t so much afraid of marriage as afraid of divorce.” Then, deeply serious: “I just got very lucky when I met Annette. What else can I say?”
By some accounts — not Beatty’s — it was only work on the film Bulworth that prevented him from running for president.
He remembers going to the White House in 1981, and Ronald Reagan (an old friend, despite their political differences), said, “... he didn’t believe anyone could be president today without being an actor.”
But when his name was mentioned as a potential Democratic candidate in the 2000 presidential election, he didn’t pounce.
Would his playboy past have been an issue? A recent hair-curler of a biography by Peter Biskind suggested his conquests over the years numbered an eerily specific 12,775 — a total he dismisses as “what one can only call baloney.”