Jane Fonda Says She Once Mistakenly Assumed Warren Beatty Was Gay

Nowadays Warren Beatty is known for being one of cinema’s greatest ladies men, but it appears he didn’t always come across that way to everyone, as while talking to W Magazine, Jane Fonda says that at one point her gaydar went a bit wonky as she thought he was gay.

And as a blow to his manhood, her assumption didn’t come from looking at him from afar, but was partly due to a 1959 screen test they had together where it appears his kissing didn’t convince her of his love of the ladies. She says of the test that they “were thrown together like two lions in a cage and kissed until we had practically eaten each others’ heads off.”

She admits she doesn’t remember much else about it, but adds, “I thought Warren was gay. He played piano, and all his friends were gay.”

She’s not completely wrong either, as it’s known that his friendships with gay playwrights such as William Inge and Tennessee Williams helped his early career and his transition from the stage to Hollywood, although with the likes of Annette Bening, Natalie Wood, Joan Collins, Julie Christie, Madonna and Diane Keaton as notches on his bedpost, it seems clear his reputation as a ladies man isn’t undeserved.

Fonda was being interviewed about her new Netflix show Grace & Frankie, which sees her and Lily Tomlin playing women dealing with the fact their husbands (Martin Sheen and Sam Waterston) have both come out of the closet and run off with one another.