Jackie Kennedy wasn’t impressed by Warren Beatty’s bedroom skills: ‘Men can only do so much’

A new book details the brief dalliance between Beatty, one of Hollywood's most famous Lotharios, and the revered former first lady.

It’s known that Warren Beatty had high-profile relationships and brief encounters with many, many women, including such famous partners as Natalie Wood, Joan Collins, Julie Christie, Diane Keaton, Carly Simon, Madonna and his current wife, Annette Bening.

But Jackie Kennedy?

It turns out that one of Hollywood’s best-known Lotharios also bedded Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, the revered widow of the late President John F. Kennedy, according to a new biography of the former first lady, “Jackie: Public, Private and Secret,” which is excerpted in this week’s issue of People magazine.

It also turns out that Onassis wasn’t that impressed by Beatty’s skills as a lover — either in the bedroom or out, according to the biography by J. Randy Taraborrelli.

Onassis, who died in 1994, later confided to close friends that — surprise! — Beatty, now 86, was a bit self-absorbed. She’s not alone: Some of his other exes have said pretty much the same thing, including Leslie Caron, who told The Guardian in 2021 that he could be controlling and narcissistic. As for his sexual technique, Onassis reportedly told a confidante, “Oh, he’s fine. Men can only do so much, anyway.”

How and when did such a hook-up take place between two icons of late-20th-century American culture?

Perhaps, it could be blamed on the 1970s, when everyone seemed to be hooking up in a post-Sexual Revolution free-for-all. According to People, Taraborrelli reveals that the affair between Onassis and Beatty took place in the middle part of the decade, presumably after the 1975 death of her second husband, Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis.

Onassis returned to live permanently in the United States, taking on a job as a consulting editor for Viking Press. Taraborrelli writes that her dalliance with Beatty was born out of her work as an editor. She was trying to woo big names, including Beatty, to write their memoirs, People reported.

Onassis initially found Beatty to be “interesting” and went out on a few dates with him before bringing him back to her Fifth Avenue home and inviting him spend the night, Taraborrelli writes, according to People. One member of her staff recalled walking into the kitchen one morning to find the “Bonnie and Clyde” star sitting at the kitchen table, talking to her son,  John F. Kennedy Jr., “as if it was the most normal thing in the world.”

Onassis and Beatty “socialized” for a few months, People reported. It’s not clear how seriously either regarded the romance, but Onassis apparently began to find the movie star less interesting the more she got to know him. According to Taraborrelli, Onassis felt that Beatty was “consumed by his own career and movies. All he wanted to do was talk about directors and producers and films, and she just wasn’t into any of that.”

By the mid-1970s, Beatty had starred in hit films that soon became classics of that era of maverick American filmmaking: “Bonnie and Clyde,” “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” and “The Parallax View” and 1975’s “Shampoo,” which he also produced and co-wrote. By 1982, Beatty’s career obsession led him to win the Academy Award for best director for “Reds.”

Keaton, who dated Beatty around the time she co-starred with him in “Reds,” agreed that he was pretty consumed by cinema, but she happened to like that about him. She told Variety in 2016: “Not only was he beautiful, gorgeous and sexy and captivating and mysterious and a great movie star but he was also an unbelievable producer and director, or is rather, is also an unbelievable director and producer. All of this is just so unique.”

Onassis was less dazzled, according to Taraborrelli’s book. It’s also not clear from the People story whether she was in any way moved by Beatty’s support of Democratic politics, though it’s known she stepped back from participating in political events for at least a decade following her husband’s 1963 assassination.

Taraborrelli told People that the romance between Onassis and Beatty did not last long. In fact, “when it was over, Jackie said it lasted two weeks longer than it should have.”