When you’re a legendary Hollywood sex symbol, not all contributions to the mythology are welcome. It’s like being a really prolific Uber driver: Every star counts, so it’s important to maintain that good rating. And according to a new biography of late former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Warren Beatty’s star rating just dropped a skosh.
In the upcoming biography Jackie: Public, Private, Secret, due out in July, author J. Randy Taraborrelli sheds light on an alleged brief romance between the two in the mid-’70s, when Jackie was working as a book editor and liaising with potential celebrity memoir writers. According to an excerpt provided to People, one of these writers was Beatty, with whom she eventually allegedly shared a romantic relationship.
According to the book, the two saw each other for a few months, and Jackie later told those close to her that Beatty was self-absorbed and career-obsessed. Not her thing. The most devastating blow, however, is what she allegedly told a friend who asked how Beatty was in bed: “Oh, he’s fine. Men can only do so much, anyway.”
As anyone who’s ever had a performance review of any sort can confirm, “fine” is a dagger. “Fine” is a hand wave. “Fine” is an afterthought, Don Draper’s “I don’t think about you at all” in one little word—the most underrated of the four-letter words for all the ego-crushing impact it can carry.
Compare Jackie’s assessment to that of another of Beatty’s encounters, Diane Keaton, who dated Beatty: “A collector’s item, a rare bird…Warren was stunning.” In the same 2016 Vanity Fair profile that includes Keaton’s assessment, an unnamed source calls him “a samurai of sex,” and an alphabetical list of rumored paramours (with writer Sam Kashner’s in-text apologies to any left off the list) includes Isabelle Adjani, Brigitte Bardot, Leslie Caron, Cher, Julie Christie, Joan Collins, Britt Ekland, Goldie Hawn, Keaton, Elle Macpherson, Madonna, Michelle Phillips, Vanessa Redgrave, Diana Ross, Barbra Streisand, and Liv Ullmann.
Fine.
In the same VF article, Kashner mentions seeing a photo of Jackie while dining with Beatty. “‘Not true,’ he said about Jackie, before I could even ask,” he writes.
Biographer Taraborrelli, however, told People, “When it was over, Jackie said it lasted two weeks longer than it should have.”
This wasn’t the only less-than-stellar appraisal of Beatty’s bedroom bravado. Cher, who told Playboy in 1988 that she was underage when the actor bedded her, said, “When I was 16 years old, I fucked Warren Beatty,” according to Vanity Fair contributor Peter Biskind’s book Star: The Life and Wild Times of Warren Beatty. “Of course, I’m one of a long list. I did it because my girlfriends were so crazy about him, and so was my mother. I saw Warren, he picked me up, and I did it. And what a disappointment! Not that he wasn’t technically good, or could be good, but I didn’t feel anything. So, for me, I felt, There’s no reason for you to do that again.”
Beatty, now 86 years old, has been married to fellow actor Annette Bening since 1992. In 2022, a lawsuit was filed against him alleging that he’d sexually assaulted Kristina Charlotte Hirsch multiple times in 1973, when she was 14 or 15, grooming and coercing her for sex. (Neither Beatty nor his reps have publicly commented on case.)
Vanity Fair has reached out to Beatty for comment.
Kase Wickman
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