Warren peace with Beatty

10 April 2012

Would somebody please give Warren Beatty's phone number to Russell Crowe. The stark contrast at the recent Bafta awards between the vile bullying of Hollywood's reigning bad boy and the sweet, self-deprecating charms of the ageing king of Tinseltown showed just how much the world has coarsened in the past couple of decades.

Warren Beatty may have been a very bad boy himself - even into his fifties - but his worst habits, until tamed by his lovely and clearly remarkable wife Annette Bening, were to be overly smitten with Hollywood's most delightful leading ladies. In fact he seemed hopelessly addicted to the allure of fresh flesh.

Now, as they near the 10th anniversary of a marriage most people thought would only last a few weeks, Warren Beatty and Annette Bening seem to offer their respective sexes everything they most want to hear about romance.

Bening proves that a woman can snare a recalcitrant bad boy and get him to change his naughty ways.

Beatty shows that a man can spend most of his life playing the field yet still find love and have children as he moves into his pensionable years. He can have his crumpet and eat it too.

As a man it is hard to imagine a life more enviable than Beatty's.

He was blessed with idiotically good looks, a top-class brain and an irresistibly seductive pillow-talk, often whispered into a phone very late at night. That winning combination enabled him to bed most of the most beautiful women in the world. Here's just a partial list: Natalie Wood; Cher, when she was just 16; Julie Christie; Elle Macpherson; Faye Dunaway; Jane Fonda; Goldie Hawn; Candace Bergen; Joni Mitchell; Britt Ekland; Michelle Phillips; Diane Keaton; Carly Simon, who is supposed to have written the song You're So Vain about him; Isabelle Adjani and, of course, Madonna. And there are dozens more, some famous, some just beautiful.

For three decades Beatty, who will be 65 at the end of this month, revelled guiltlessly in this hedonistic bachelorhood, a life he shared with his great pal Jack Nicholson and which he satirised so well in the film Shampoo, in which he plays a bed-hopping hairdresser who is terrified of commitment. From 1972 until 1986, when he moved into the Hollywood Hills house he now shares with Bening and their four children, the legendary Lothario even kept a 750 sq ft love nest - called the Verandah Suite - in the swanky Beverly Wilshire Hotel in LA, where many of his conquests were made. After their marriage, Bening rented the $2,000-a-night suite as a surprise for him: "You've f***ed everyone else in Hollywood in this room," she told him. "Now it's my turn."

It was his difficult relationship with Madonna that convinced Beatty, then in his mid-fifties and always acutely self-aware, that he was in danger of becoming utterly ridiculous.

"Being adolescent never got boring to me," Beatty admits. "But I came to the conclusion, not a moment too soon, that I stood a good chance of reaching the end of my days as a solitary, eccentric fool."

AT which moment, like manna from heaven, appeared Annette Bening. Beatty was inter-viewing Bening, who was then 32 and had recently broken off a relationship with actor Ed Begley Jnr, in 1990 for a part in his film Bugsy.

Meeting for lunch in San Pietro, a pizza restaurant in a mini-mall near his office in Beverly Hills, Beatty says that he knew within minutes that she was the one. Long past due to settle down, "I was looking for someone to make me good" is how Beatty puts it. Now Beatty often speaks of his life as having two parts, BA and WB, Before Annette and With Annette.

"I didn't go into that meeting with Warren thinking it would lead to anything personal," says Bening. "I was thinking about the job. I didn't feel I would spend the rest of my life with him."

The relationship wasn't consummated until the very end of the film. When they had just one more scene to shoot, Beatty invited Bening out for dinner. Over the meal he asked if she wanted children. When she said she did, Beatty said: "Well, I would like to do that right away. And we did."

A close friend of Bening's later confided that she was desperate to have children. "If Warren had said no, she would have moved on," said the friend.

Yet surely Bening, who is now 43, must have had serious reservations about getting involved with Beatty, given his reputation? Even Beatty has admitted: "I wouldn't have had the guts to enter into a relationship with me."

But Bening, who was married once before, shrugs it off. "All romances are a leap of faith. You either trust your instincts or you don't." And nearly 10 years and four children later, it seems she was right.

So what's life like in that unlikely idyll of domestic bliss, the Bening-Beatty home, the large, Mediterranean- style, one-time bachelor mansion that sits atop the Hollywood Hills along the famous Mulholland Drive, just above Beverly Hills?

Although they have four assistants to take care of various aspects of their lives, including a nanny and a cook, the couple share most of the chores of looking after their children, Kathlyn, who is now 10, Benjamin, seven, Isabel, three, and Ella, nearly two.

Bening, it seems, is the disciplinarian; Beatty, not surprisingly, the dotingly indulgent dad. Bening admits that for her the biggest problem about being a mother has been "how to raise children without being trapped in domesticity". Luckily Beatty has encouraged her to pursue her film career.

The couple admit that their different schedules - Bening is much more of a day person - is one of the few things that has caused problems between them.

Beatty, who is very much the night owl and still likes to indulge his habit of telephoning people out of the blue in the early hours of the morning, often goes back to sleep for a couple of hours after driving the children to school. The family always has dinner together - sometimes Beatty cooks and has perfected an egg, cheese and milk dish that is bland enough for the children to like - at 6.30pm.

One thing they don't argue about is who holds the TV remote in bed. "I do," says Beatty without hesitation. As befits a man who once held dreams of running for president and directed the political satire Bulworth, Beatty likes to watch rather dry public affairs and political cable programmes late into the night. He also reads heavily, usually politics and current affairs.

During the day, Beatty, who will next be seen in Quentin Tarantino's film noir Kill Bill later this year, usually wanders off to his office, which is in the Beverly Glen Center, a nearby mini-mall shopping strip. He can often be found having lunch in Sushico, a sushi restaurant in which he is an investor. After lunch he sometimes goes to Starbucks for a latte and, occasionally, a biscotti, one of his few gastronomic indulgences.

Bening uses whatever spare time she has away from the children or the films she has made, including her Oscar-nominated part in American Beauty, to keep in trim. She put on 30lb with her first child and has worked hard to keep the weight off ever since. She loves running and practises yoga whenever she can. Unlike many Hollywood celebrities who have personal yoga instructors come to their homes, Bening practises in public classes. She especially likes Iyengar yoga, which is slow and specific.

"You use the body as a metaphor for the principles you want to practise in life," she explains.

It hasn't all been roses, the couple admit, although it got easier when they each came to appreciate their differences rather than fight over them. Beatty is the more rational and careful of the two, Bening more impulsive.

"We are very different," says Bening, "but you don't have to be alike to get along."

"And," says Beatty, "we're fortunate to have a big house."

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