Did Barbra Streisand Have Sex with Warren Beatty? She Still Can’t Quite Recall

Memory occasionally plays tricks on you—something Barbra Streisand knows very well. In her 2023 biography, Streisand famously wrote that she’s not quite sure whether she actually went all the way with her fellow Hollywood icon Warren Beatty years ago. Two years after making that confession, she still can’t recall what happened between the two of them. “I know I slept in the bed with him, but I can’t remember if we actually had penetration,” Streisand recently told The New Yorker. “I swear to God, I can’t. There are certain things I block out.”

When New Yorker editor David Remnick tried to pry, Streisand insisted that she really, honestly cannot recollect her history 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. So we’re still friends. I met him when I was fifteen years old, and he was twenty-one, I think,” she said.

In her book, Streisand writes that she and Beatty have known each other for a long time, and the two have a lot of water under the bridge. “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?’” After she hung up, Streisand then wondered to herself if she had indeed slept with Beatty. “I kind of remember. I guess I did. Probably once.”

Beatty has been married to Annette Bening since 1992, while Streisand has been linked to her current husband, James Brolin, since 1998. But the affair—or almost affair—between Streisand and Beatty seems to have been a point of contention for some time. In Kathy Griffin’s 2016 memoir, for instance, the comedian writes about Streisand and Beatty allegedly arguing about their shared history: Beatty is certain that the two of them had a tryst while returning from a club in the Catskills, but Streisand swears they didn’t. “Barbra started shaking her head,” Griffin writes. “‘Warren, I’m not going to have this fight with you again. We nev-ah hooked up.’”

Original story in VF Italy.