Photoplay (Jul-Dec 1963)

Natalie & Warren continued that Natalie’s name has replaced Joan’s as his future bride-to-be. Exit Joan— but not without one last loud meow. She’s a guest on the "Ed Sullivan Show" shortly after Natalie and Bob have announced they’re engaged. Ed looks into the TV camera, cracks his knuckles to get the attention of his millions of viewers and wishes Bob “lots of luck" in his forthcoming marriage. Joan bats her beautiful eyes, opens her beautiful lips and adlibs the lines, “Lots of luck is right. He’ll need it with Natalie." Analysis: Uh, easy. In the romantic wars . . . uh . . . Natalie has too many weapons for Joan and can out-woman her every time. Or, if you’re keeping score, note that at the end of the second inning (episode) it’s Joan Collins— 1, Natalie Wood— 1. Episode III: The time is a few years back. The principal players in this episode are Joan Collins and Warren Beatty. As Bob and Natalie’s marriage, after an auspicious beginning, slowly runs downhill (her career skyrockets, his fizzles) until it’ll be only a matter of time before they reach the point when “debts us do part," Joan finds love in the person of a brash, handsome heartbreaker, Warren Beatty. Warren is smitten by Joan when he sees some still photos of her, and then he goes to a showing of “The Big Country," her film, to get a better look. Here’s Joan’s account of it: “We had not met at this stage and Warren went along to the film to decide whether he would like to meet me in person. Well, he was very disillusioned by what he saw. And he came away saying I was not so hot after all." But when he does see her in person— in a Hollywood restaurant, he must like what he sees because— even though he is out with another girl— he flirts outrageously with her. She is outraged (and secretly flattered) until she finds out that the girl he’s with is his sister, Shirley MacLaine; then she is just flattered—and also pleased. They see each other again at a party a few days later, .but again they don't say a word. Even when she invites a few of the guests to her apartment for coffee after the party breaks up —and makes sure that Warren is given her address and phone number and is asked to come along, she is disappointed. Because he doesn’t show up. Yet when she arrives home the next afternoon, her answering service tells her Warren has called six times. She phones him back just to tell him how surly he’d been the night before, but instead she hears herself accepting his invitation for dinner. All right. She’ll tell him off in person. That is only fair. But as she sits across from him in the little Mexican restaurant, he beats her to the punch. “I was very depressed on Saturday and when they asked me to come over to your apartment I didn’t want you to see me in such a blue mood," he explains. Before she can graciously accept his apology, he boyishly tells her that he was so happy when she agreed to have dinner with him that he rushed out and had "an ice cream cone to celebrate." That does it. That and his blue eyes and . . . she can’t help it, she feels herself melting. Then, for almost two years, she knows the joys of love. Her own words chart the course of their passionate romance. “We’re not officially engaged yet. But that doesn’t matter either. I trust our love." “We are going to announce our engagement soon, but we won’t get married for quite a while." "We’ve been engaged a year. That is because both of us like long engagements." “Yes, we hope to get married, but I don’t know when.” “Now you be sure and say I love him very much." She loves him so much that she can’t bear to be away from him and leaves movie sets at a minute’s notice (and sometimes without any notice), to fly to his side. An executive at 20th Century-Fox comments wryly, "When Joan is in love she simply takes off and to hell with her work, her career and her studio." So the day comes when Joan making, “Esther and the King” in Rome, is so miserable without Warren that once again she boards a plane for New York to be with the man she loves. Even as she heads for Manhattan where Warren is filming “Splendor in the Grass" with Natalie Wood, all the columnists are emphatically heralding an imminent Collins-Beatty merger. Analysis: Well, a long engagement probably precedes a long marriage. Now, if Natalie and Bob had had Joan and Warren’s good sense to have a long engagement so they could really get to know each (Continued on page 86) 68