Jane Fonda & Warren Beatty

Splendor In The Grass...1959
William Inge was still rewriting the screenplay, further refining the part of the high school football hero to fit Warren Beatty, who continued to visit the playwright frequently at his apartment on Sutton Place. Jane Fonda, who had become pals with Beatty while they were preparing to costar in Parrish, thought at first that he was Bill Inge’s boyfriend.After both Beatty and Fonda were famous, she often would be included on the long list of his girlfriends, but their relationship was more like brother and sister. “Warren and I became friends—not lovers, but friends,” said Fonda. Beatty’s intimate circle recognized the distinction. “He did only hang out with Jane,” affirmed Verne O’Hara, who still sometimes shared her husband’s hotel suite with Beatty, and was thus able to observe his bedroom partners firsthand. In O’Hara’s evaluation, “Warren was of the good girl/bad girl school in those days.” Jane Fonda, who had graduated from Emma Willard—similar to the seminaries for young ladies both Tat and Blanche MacLean had attended—was the former. As Tom Laughlin noted, “Jane was not a sex machine. She was a sensitive, beautiful, caring person…what would you look to, Eva Marie Saint? That kind of sensitive, beautiful quality.”When he went out with Jane Fonda in 1959, Beatty entertained her with tales of his carnal adventures, which seemed to surprise and amaze the essentially Baptist son of Ira and Kathlyn Beaty as much as they did the sheltered Fonda. “We mostly talked about sex,” Fonda recalled, laughing. “I mean, we talked about lots of things—I’m not saying that we didn’t talk about professional things, but…maybe it was because I was just his friend that Warren would talk to me about his lovers, which I found fascinating.”