A Playboy Meets Miss Right

By Martha Duffy

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.

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."

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.

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.

( 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."

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."

With reporting by Martha Smilgis/Los Angeles