There are certain things you never forget: your first kiss, wrecking your dad’s new car, the birth of a child and, definitely, that time you slept with Warren Beatty. Barbra Streisand might have some of those memories, but when it comes to bedding down with Beatty, well, things are a bit fuzzy for the Hollywood legend.
Speaking to the New Yorker about her upcoming duets album, The Secret of Life: Partners, Volume Two, the 83-year-old star of stage and screen said she definitely remembered being propositioned by Marlon Brando back in the day, but, as she wrote in her 2023 memoir My Name Is Barbra, she just can’t remember is she and legendarily Casanova Beatty did the deed.
“I know I slept in the bed with him, but I can’t remember if we actually had penetration,” she said in answer to a question — more of a statement, really — about how no one in the “history of sex, or Hollywood, or anything” has ever written that line. “I swear to God, I can’t. There are certain things I block out,” Streisand said.
Respectfully, New Yorker editor David Remnick couldn’t help calling b.s. on Streisand’s memory lapse, even as she doubled-down on saying she has no recollection of sex with Beatty. “But I know we’re still friends. Every year on my birthday, he calls me and we have a wonderful talk about our lives, our children, and so forth,” she said. “So we’re still friends. I met him when I was fifteen years old, and he was twenty-one, I think.”
In the memoir, Streisand first revealed that her memory is foggy about any intimate time with Beatty, who has been married to actress Annette Bening since 1992; Streisand married actor James Brolin in 1998. “Warren and I go back a long way (back to summer stock) and there’s some water under that bridge,” she wrote. “Recently, we were on the phone talking politics and who knows what else when he said, ‘I remember why we broke up.’ I said, ‘When were we together?’ Then I hung up and asked myself, Did I sleep with Warren? I kind of remember. I guess I did. Probably once.”
The book features details on the first time she met Beatty, when he was starring in a production of A Hatful of Rain in Connecticut. “He asked me to cue him on his lines. If that was a come-on, I missed it entirely,” she wrote. “He also played the piano. I was impressed. We used to eat together occasionally and talk about life. He was twenty-one, tall with movie-star looks, and women were already falling at his feet. I was sixteen.”
Streisand also chatted with Remnick about Bob Dylan after the New Yorker editor noted that in 1971 Dylan wrote a letter to one of his friends revealing that he’d written “Lay Lady Lay” about Babs, which was followed in 1978 by a letter/flowers exchange. Now, they are reconnecting on the Partners album, where they trade lines on the 1934 Ray Noble pop standard “The Very Thought of You.”
“The fun thing is that we were both nineteen years old, in Greenwich Village, never met each other. I was at the Bon Soir, and he was playing the guitar somewhere else,” she said. “I remember him sending me flowers and writing me a card in different-color pencils, like a child’s writing: ‘Would you sing with me?’ I thought, What would I sing with him? How could we get together on this? I couldn’t understand it at that time.”
But now that they’ve recorded “The Very Thought of You” she is delighted by the song choice that they both love. “He’s very shy, like I am. But he was wonderful to work with. I was told that he didn’t want any direction,” she recalled. “But when I talked to him about things that I suggested, he was so pliable — he was so open to suggestions. Everything I heard about him just went out the window. He stood on his feet for three hours with me.”
Also, for the record, when asked if she would ever tour or perform live on stage again after battling stage fright for much of her career, Streisand gave a clear answer: “Oh, my God! No!” The singer said that aside from when she was a teenager on her way up, she never really enjoyed live performance.
“I never wanted to be a singer; I wanted to be an actress. So I looked for material that I could act from Broadway plays — to be silly, you know, singing ‘Who’s afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?,’” she said. “I was open to the audience, and talking to them. Whatever I was doing was just about being in the moment, things that I was experiencing in acting class. It was never to be a singer; it was to be an actress.” That, and the fact that she’s had a lifelong battle with a bad back. “I’ve always had a bad back. So it’s not just age,” she said.
The Secret of Life: Partners, Volume Two is due out on June 27 and features a duet with Sir Paul McCartney on “My Valentine,” as well as guest spots from Hozier (the previously released “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face”), James Taylor (“Secret O’ Life”), Tim McGraw (“I Love Us”) and Mariah Carey and Ariana Grande (“One Heart, One Voice”).
