Carly: I spent last night with Warren Beatty. Therapist: So did the client I saw before you
WARREN BEATTY’S reputation as a Hollywood lothario hardly needs bolstering – but now Carly Simon has added to the legend.
The singer said that one day in the early 1970s she was telling her therapist about the night before – the first time she had made love with the actor.
The therapist looked uncomfortable and told her she was ‘not the first patient of the day who spent the night with Warren Beatty last night’. It was only 11am.
Miss Simon, now 70, tells the story in her new memoir, Boys In The Trees, in which she recounts growing up in the hippy 1960s and embracing the free love lifestyle.
She confesses that the second verse of her song You’re So Vain is about Beatty, now 78, and says that she found his bravado to be ‘irresistible’ even though she admits: ‘It worked and it shouldn’t have.’
In the early 1970s the Bonnie And Clyde star propositioned her at the Troubadour nightclub in Los Angeles where she was opening for Cat Stevens, another of her lovers.
Miss Simon writes that Beatty arrived at her dressing room and closed the door. He walked up to her, stared into her face and then at her breasts, braless under her shirt, and said: ‘Can I see you?’
Some women may have found this repulsive but she thought: ‘What a glorious specimen of man. He put them all to shame, if looks and charm were what you were after. He homed in like a tracking dog.’
At that point Beatty pulled out a list of what he called ‘the main loves of his life’. Miss Simon writes: ‘Warren’s list was there on a piece of white paper in his pocket so he could take it out and show you.
‘When he showed me, he added my name, (the main one at the top) so I could see that I was right up there above women like Catherine the Great, Marie Curie, Maria Tallchief [prima ballerina] and Lillian Hellman [playwright].’ The couple made love a month later when Beatty called saying he would be flying from New York to LA and arriving at 12.30am. He would have to be gone by 5.30am for an early morning film shoot.
Miss Simon invited him over and writes that he was ‘such a professional’ in bed. ‘Warren seemed to have just created a brand-new manual on how to make love.’
The next day she went to see her therapist and was regaling him with stories of her ‘superman’ lover when he told her: ‘Under the circumstances, I can’t withhold this ...You are not my first patient of the day who spent the night with Warren Beatty last night.’
In the book she confirms that the second verse of You’re So Vain – which includes the line ‘You had me several years ago when I was still quite naive’ – was about Beatty.
The rest of the song was about two other people and while she does not reveal who they were, Mick Jagger is a likely candidate.
Miss Simon writes that they met in 1972 at a Hollywood party. At the time he was married to Bianca Jagger and Miss Simon had been seeing singer James Taylor for six months. Nonetheless, Miss Simon and Jagger had an instant attraction.
They met again when Jagger did back-up vocals for You’re So Vain and they began a clandestine affair. But she loved Taylor more and when he proposed she accepted.
The night before the wedding, she writes, Bianca Jagger called her fiance and told him about her affair with Jagger. Fortunately because of a bad connection and her accent Taylor could not understand what she was saying.