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- <text id=91TT2737>
- <title>
- Dec. 09, 1991: A Playboy Meets Miss Right
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1991
- Dec. 09, 1991 One Nation, Under God
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- CINEMA, Page 90
- A Playboy Meets Miss Right
- </hdr><body>
- <p> For three decades he was Hollywood's ideal bachelor, a
- handsome, self-assured man who retained just enough boyish
- shyness to melt a woman's heart. There was always a pretty
- actress on his arm and usually one of some consequence, like
- Leslie Caron, Diane Keaton, Julie Christie, Madonna. Often
- boulevardiers get a bit threadbare in their 50s, but Beatty, 54,
- kept finding the beauties. Then last summer came the shocking
- announcement. No, he wasn't marrying (at least not yet), but he
- was having a child with intelligent, glamorous Annette Bening.
- </p>
- <p> True love at last? Not that he'll let on. "I always feel
- a little better about a room when she's come into it" is hardly
- an expression of passion. But Beatty acknowledges that within
- 30 seconds of meeting Bening, when she entered a restaurant
- called Santo Pietro's in the Beverly Glen Centre, "I knew she
- would change my life."
- </p>
- <p> He saw her first in Valmont (1989), in which her glossy
- beauty and Gioconda smile provided the film's finest moments.
- Raised in Kansas and Southern California, Bening, 33, caught the
- theater bug in college. The Broadway hit Coastal Disturbances
- (1987) launched her career, and soon films were beckoning too.
- Now, after the critical success of The Grifters, she gets the
- top dramatic scripts.
- </p>
- <p> On the Bugsy set, the lovers were so discreet that
- director Barry Levinson swears he was unaware of their
- relationship. Says Beatty: "We didn't want to place a burden on
- the people we were working with." Since the movie wrapped, they
- have awaited their child, who will be a girl, living quietly in
- Beatty's 37-acre aerie at the very tip-top of Mulholland Drive.
- Santo Pietro's is a half mile away, and it is no routine Italian
- joint. The Beverly Glen Centre has perhaps the greatest
- celebrity concentration in town. Beatty is a regular, as is Jack
- Nicholson, who lives across the road from him. Marlon Brando
- lives nearby too, but he does not cruise malls.
- </p>
- <p> Beatty is "ecstatic" about becoming a father and has even
- embraced the Lamaze method (the child is due in three weeks).
- Bening burbles that Beatty will be "an attentive, caring
- father." He enjoys the tabloid stories his new domesticity has
- inspired: "I've invented a birthing tank, we've enrolled our
- daughter in an English boarding school, I've been visiting sick
- babies."
- </p>
- <p> All right, Warren. What both the tabs and the fans want to
- know is simple: Are you going to get married? The master of
- deflection speaks: "We are both in active agreement on the
- subject at this time." Well, maybe the mother-to-be is a little
- more candid? No, it turns out she's a quick study of
- double-talk. "We're in synch on that subject" is her reply. What
- name have they picked for their daughter? Says Bening: "It's our
- one real secret."
- </p>
- <p> By Martha Duffy. Reported by Martha Smilgis/Los Angeles
- </p>
-
- </body></article>
- </text>
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