The Beattys' Affair to Remember | Interviews

"There are inescapable autobiographical parallels here," I found myself informing Beatty, as if the thought had not occurred to him.

"Do you think so?" he said. "Well, this story is not so different from your story or somebody else's story because unless . . ."

"I think it's more like your story . . ." I said.

"It is?"

". . . than it is my story."

"Is that right?"

"I think so."

"Oh, OK."

The story is about a man who is world-famous as a lover of women. One day on an airplane he meets the woman he wants to spend the rest of his life with. She knows all about him. She is engaged to someone else. So is he. But the conviction grows between them that this might be the Real Thing.

Beatty remembers the moment that thought occurred to him, about Bening.

"I was just talking to Jimmy Toback the other day," he said, naming his longtime friend, who wrote "Bugsy," the movie during which Beatty and Bening co-starred, met and fell in love. "Jimmy was in the office one day when we were working on 'Bugsy' and I went down to a pizza joint to talk to Annette about being in the movie. Jimmy said, 'You know, I'm the first person who you saw after you met Annette.' I said, 'What did I say?' He said, 'You said, 'WOW!' "

Beatty smiled. Dressed as usual in black - pants, jacket, turtleneck - he was sitting in a New York hotel suite a couple of days before "Love Affair" was set to premiere.

"Doing it late, getting married, it gives you something extra," he said. "I always think of something Maria Callas said to me about singing. She said, 'When I sing, I only use my interest. I never touch my principal. I'm not doing well unless I sing on my interest.'

"When you're older and you meet somebody, the decision-making process is a lot shorter. You know, and you say, 'I know.' And that happened here and I listened to it. And by listening to it, it enabled me not to question it too much - because when you question it, I think you can start to complicate things in a way that can be detrimental and I never did. I just never did."