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Some friends find their relationships with Beatty one-sided. But women who have had flings with Beatty speak of him more often with amusement than rancor. One survivor of a brief affair recalls: "He doesn't just want to seduce you but to quite literally charm the pants off you. He tells you you're fabulous and laughs at all your jokes. When we first met, we spent six hours talking about politics and articles in The Atlantic and sex and show business and Julie Christie. He's so in love with himself that it's contagious. He's very funny. I certainly don't regret knowing him." Actress Lee Grant, a longtime Beatty watcher, feels that "Warren's conquests of women are not totally successful. His percentage is about fifty-fifty. Those he can't conquer don't want to be part of a crowd—one of Warren's girls. But the Peter Pan quality in Warren is very attractive to some. He teaches them to fly, and they have extraordinary experiences with him. Then they grow up and go on, and he keeps flying. Like Peter Pan, he always comes back to another little girl who's ready to fly off with him to never-never land."
By now Beatty is used to having others theorize about him, though press accounts still test his not inconsiderable sense of humor. "I have never talked about my personal relationships—with women, my sister, my parents —because these are important people to me. I don't want to hurt them by discussing them in public. As for my love life, I can't control what others say about it; it is what it is. I know that movie actors are overrewarded in our society, and that the press has to cut people like me down to size. So they come up with all sorts of wild things. They make me into an insane eccentric with an incredible fear of losing my youth, who lives in a bomb shelter, who contemplates or is going through plastic surgery, who has devastating relationships with women. It goes through cycles. First they say that women like me too much; then that women don't like me at all; then that they like me too much again. Somewhere along the way they say that I secretly like men—but then that men don't like me! I'm old, I'm young, I'm intelligent, I'm stupid. My tide goes in and out."