"Yes," he says. "Yes. Oh yes. Yeah." Another long pause, then a face that is priceless: slightly amused, slightly self-satisfied:
"And when I go into action," he says, "I'm in action."
"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)
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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.
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Then he swears he's not about to be indiscreet, because, after all, he's said this before, but . . .
"I always see Annette's shoulders rise slightly when I tell this story," he admits, then continues on, damn the consequences.
"We had made a movie together ['Bugsy'] and I had gotten to know her quite well under the pressure of making a movie," he says. "We had never had a date. On our first date, which was at the end of the movie, I did ask her if she wanted to have a child."
He loves this story. Because, of course, they did have a child. Practically immediately. And then another, and another and another . . . and now he has his cabal.
"I never looked back on that," he says. "It was a decision I had made on my behalf, and she agreed."
By this time, the afternoon is sinking into twilight, and a photographer has been waiting, restlessly, in the hallway.
As he poses lounging against a door frame, he brings up the Washington Senators, his favorite childhood team. With no prompting, he reels off the names of the Senators who played back in the 1940s, when he was a boy hanging out at Griffith Stadium.
He has fond memories of his childhood in North Arlington, where he was raised with his sister, Shirley MacLaine, and became a football star at Washington-Lee High School. Are there places in Washington that remain special to him? Monuments? Museums?
"What may be museums to me, wouldn't be to you," he says, laughing. "I spent a lot of time in Georgetown. We'd cross the river."
To the land of college girls and booze?
"Well, it wasn't so much college girls," he says, and the smile betrays the lie, "because we were in high school. Drinking did occur."
He went on to college at Northwestern, then made his first picture. And everything changed.
"If you become, for all intents and purposes, rich and famous at 21 and you grow up as a Baptist boy in Virginia, there is an element of the candy store about it," he says, with a knowing smile.
