"Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America" (Simon and Schuster, $30) is 627 pages of delicious – or malicious, depending on your viewpoint – inside stories. Beatty is a dim light on the cultural scene today but the man who gave us "Bonnie and Clyde," "Shampoo," "Heaven Can Wait," "Reds," "Bulworth" and important parts of "McCabe & Mrs. Miller" while sleeping with 12,775 woman (Biskind's guesstimate) has a life worth considering. Peter Biskind's biography offers detailed accounts of Beatty's jiu-jitsu bouts with studio moguls, co-stars and directors, bending foes to his will while leaving then puzzled about how it happened. It recounts his epic erotic life and his longtime fascination with politics in depth and detail. The actor-producer-director-writer comes across as a genius and a credit hog, an insatiable womanizer (Jane Fonda, Joan Collins, Natalie Wood, Cher, Leslie Caron, Vivien Leigh, Brigitte Bardot, Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Diane Keaton, Madonna, ad infinitum) who broke many hearts but never left anyone feeling she had been bullied or harassed. The actor's narcissism is amazing. Shooting "Dick Tracy," Biskind writes, "Beatty's close-ups were confined to a window of time during which he knew he looked best, usually between 10:00 a.m. and 2:00." Especially revealing is the chapter on Gary Hart's 1988 presidential campaign, which came unglued as the politician began to emulate his Hollywood friend's Don Juan lifestyle. The humiliating exposure of Hart's affair with Donna Rice was a watershed for press coverage of officeholders' private lives, for better or worse. While the book's fact-checking wobbles here and there (it calls Joe Biden a senator from Maryland, not Delaware) the comments from Beatty are remarkably, and often unintentionally, revealing. "I don't think there's anything to be admired in lying and cheating, or philandering," Beatty said of Hart's downfall. "But there might be something to be admired in not burning people at the stake because they have these weaknesses." Isn't it remarkable that a performer can spend so much time in front of a mirror and not see himself clearly?
