Warren Beatty’s Scandals Were Worse Than Anyone Knew

There is a moment in a 2016 interview where Warren Beatty describes the last evening he spent with Marilyn Monroe. He was twenty-five years old. He played piano for her at a producer's party, and afterward they walked along the shore in the moonlight, and he described it later as more soulful than romantic, which is the kind of careful distinction a man makes when he has had seven decades to think about what something meant. Monroe died the following day. Beatty has never elaborated on what he understood in the hours after he heard the news, whether the evening felt, in retrospect, like a farewell neither of them had known they were saying. He left the detail where he placed it, in a single interview, without expansion, and moved on. That is characteristic. Warren Beatty has spent sixty years being one of the most written-about men in Hollywood while telling almost none of his own story, which is a form of control that the public has consistently mistaken for mystery. He is not mysterious. He is private, which is a different thing, and the distinction has cost several people who loved him considerably more than it has ever cost him.