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Even before movie audiences got their first glimpse of Beatty, he was starring in Hollywood gossip columns. Nominally engaged to Actress Joan Collins, Beatty carried on a public affair with Splendor Co-Star Natalie Wood. It broke up her marriage to Actor Robert Wagner, though they later remarried. (A few years later Director Peter Hall named Beatty the corespondent in a divorce suit against Leslie Caron.) Beatty was notorious as a rake, and not of the garden variety, by the time his first film opened. At the time, his feelings about his profession were mixed. "When I would fly in from Europe," he recalls, "it was embarrassing for me to put 'actor' on my landing card."
Beatty followed Splendor with a string of movies—The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, All Fall Down, Lilith—that turned out to be disappointments, but enlarged Beatty's image. Along the way, he earned a reputation for being hard on directors. "If the director was indecisive, Warren would absolutely destroy him," says Robert Towne. "He'd ask so many questions—and he can ask more questions than any three-year-old—that the director didn't know whether he was coming or going. I think Warren's drive to be a producer was that he feared he would get into more films where the person in authority didn't quite know what he was doing." Beatty agrees: "Once I became interested in stories and getting stories told, I realized I had to be a producer to get them told in the right way."
With Bonnie and Clyde, Beatty's chance to tell a story in his own way arrived. He didn't fool around. "He bund the script and brought it to me," says Director Jenn. "He put together the financing and did the casting jointly with me. Warren is a great fighter. Warner Bros, didn't like Bonnie and Clyde and released it poorly. Warren got in there and reorganized the advertising and the release pattern. He made himself a real pain in the ass to the people at Warner's. 'Why do we have to deal with this good-looking actor?' was their attitude. People didn't recognize him as the superior businessman he is. They do now. The results of his efforts were absolutely electrifying."
To say the least. Bonnie and Clyde became a classic of '60s pop culture and the year's highest grossing film. Beatty became an international culture hero. Visiting France after the movie opened there, he found that "people everywhere were dressed like Bonnie and Clyde; it was the pervasive theme." And Beatty was celebrated as its prophet. At haul monde parties in Paris, he recalls, "you would be seated at a table with Maurice Chevalier on one side, Arthur Rubinstein on the other and Mr. and Mrs. Pompidou across the candlesticks. There were old men with beautiful young girls—not one but clusters of them. There were women dripping jewels, and somehow you felt, this will never come again." He had just turned 30.
After the Bonnie and Clyde hysteria died down, Beatty acted only occasionally. His single memorable performance was in Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971); it was also his first appearance opposite Julie Christie, who had been the most important woman in his life since 1965.