"As you get older," he says, "the most valuable thing we have is time. I think that what is actually happening in life becomes increasingly more important to you, and more involving, than what you are pretending is happening in front of a camera."
He is talking, predominantly, about his kids. Beatty refers to his children -- Kathlyn, 12, Ben, 10, Isabel, 7, and Ella, 4 -- as "four small Eastern European countries," each endlessly fascinating. The stories come easily, these tales about how smart Kathlyn is and the Boy Scout camping trips he takes with Ben and how Isabel is such a precocious reader.
"As you get older, the most valuable thing we have is time," says father of four Warren Beatty, who chooses projects -- cinematic or otherwise -- with great care.
(Jonathan Alcorn For The Washington Post)
|
ABOUT THE HONORS
Every year since 1978
the Kennedy Center has saluted a handful of national icons for their "lifetime contributions to American culture through the performing arts." This year's honorees are to be celebrated tonight with a gala performance and dinner at the Kennedy Center Opera House. The show will be broadcast Dec. 21 at 9 p.m. on Channel 9.
|
| |
|
A very precocious reader, it turns out. The other day, Beatty says, father and daughter were in the car and Isabel lobbed this question from the back seat:
"Daddy, what's the meanest thing anyone's ever written about you?"
Before he can answer, Isabel provides a suggestion.
"Daddy," she asks, "were you once a brash and rumpled star?"
A brash and rumpled star? Yes, that would be one twenty-something Warren Beatty, the iconic Hollywood sex symbol. That would be the man described in a 1962 edition of the Saturday Evening Post (subhead: "Newcomer Warren Beatty demands superstar treatment from Hollywood. And what Warren wants, Warren gets").
That would be the Warren Beatty Isabel doesn't know, the one who, pre-Bening, was notorious for his relationships with his co-stars -- Natalie Wood, Julie Christie, Madonna . . . the list goes on. And that presents a dilemma: How, exactly, does Beatty plan to reconcile the daddy his children know with his Lothario legend? There's a lot of stuff out there about him, after all. And much of it, Beatty admits, lowering his voice to an exaggerated whisper, "is about sex."
Isabel, it turns out, found the Saturday Evening Post in Daddy's home office and read it. The office is home to hundreds of pictures of his children, but also to Beatty's collection of his own memorabilia -- books, magazine articles, you name it. There is a method to this. As his kids learn more about his past -- and very public -- life, he'd like to be there to parse the details.
"I try not to withhold information from my children," he says. "I try to accompany information. I try to interpret information. I try to add my two cents. Needless to say, they're not on the Internet, except for children's sites."
It has been 13 years since Beatty fell for Bening and settled down, but the old images linger. Overpower, in some ways. There is an interview Dustin Hoffman did back in the 1980s, when he and Beatty were filming the ill-fated "Ishtar." In it, Hoffman talked about watching Beatty around his kids, and the sense of sadness it brought him. Beatty, he surmised, seemed like the kind of guy destined for endless bachelorhood, one of those guys who would end up old and alone.
Fast-forward about 16 years and the phrase "old and alone" is enough to start Beatty laughing. An image is conjured up for him, one of a guy who dies all alone, his body not discovered until it's been half-eaten by wolves.
This, he loves. Very funny. "Wolves? Wolves?" He contemplates.
"You know," he says, circling back to the question, "I think my rhythms are my own and I do things when I do them, but, um . . .''
Did he always know his life was going to be this? Married, kids, those things Hoffman doubted?
