The black Lincoln Continental pulled up to the downtown Los Angeles Music Center parking lot. The driver-side door opens and there is Warren Beatty, all dash, arrogance, and sexily disheveled hair. Beatty the idiosyncratic anti-Hollywood Hollywood playboy. The slick, womanizing bohemian who litters his penthouse suites with beer cans, casually crumpled $80 shirts, and high-brow novels; who's been known to cruise down the street and stalk young ladies like a nouveau-riche Vegas sharpie, then to imperiously proclaim his ambition to be a serious, non-commercial writer and filmmaker. Beatty the enigma, the paradox, the eccentric. The spoiled-boy heartbreaker of unbreakable hearts. There was super-sohisticate Joan Collins, playgirl Natalie Wood, sensuous Leslie Caron.... The unlikeliest candidates for romantic duping - all left with egg on their formerly-invulnerable faces - and tears in their eyes.

Now it's Julie Christie who's crying. Julie, the light-hearted, mod, no-strings angel of the New Morality. Julie the tousle-haired harbinger of the British sexual revolution, the original "bird" who briskly poo pond marriage from the back of a dozen Carnaby Street motorcycles. Over the past five years of their steady-dating, Warren turned footloose Julie into a dreamy-eyed romantic who kept house and poured tea and openly confessed the new desire to "settle down and even get married." Now Julie's crying because yet another young woman is with Warren tonight...

The photographer crouches low behind Warren's car, waiting for the blond in the front seat to exit. "Is it Julie?" he wonders. He positions his camera as the right door swings open, and out steps a tall, graceful young woman. The photographer squints, is tempted to rub his eyes, for the girl looks... well, very un-Hollywood, to say the least. Her dress is a high-necked Victorian affair. Her face, framed by charmingly simple straight across bangs and long, natural-blond shanks - is clear and unmade-up, characterized by delicate features and extraordinary cheekbones. She looks like she ought to be carrying a bouquet of daffodils, or be ensconced in a room full of sunflowers and spice jars, kittens and old spinning wheels.

Warren pockets his car keys, walks around the car, and takes the lady's hand. The photographer stands up, focuses and before he can click!, the pair cannily rush away.

The next day, unshockable Hollywood is shocked by the news that Warren's new love is sensitive singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell. Now, Joni hardly fits the formula of Warren's other ladies. She's not flashy, decadent, sophisticated, or actress. She's a soft, sweet young lady who left art school in Saskatchewan to become a coffee-house folksinger: a poet and painter who lives among flower pots and antique music boxes and chirping birds in a simple house in rustic Laurel Canyon. Her excruciatingly personal and romantic ballads, accompanied by soft piano or acoustic guitar, speak of a lovestyle and lifestyle light-years away from the sort of neon, cocktail-party social scene that Warren Beatty has always traveled in. The men in Joni's life have been deep-souled blue-jeaned poet-prophets - like writer-bard Leonard Cohen (who wrote the famous ballad, "Suzanne")' Woodstock-style singer/musician Graham Nash, and shy, tortured pop hero "Sweet Baby" James Taylor. Indeed, one of Joni's most popular songs, "For Free," is a tender diatribe against the long black limousines that her record company hires to take her to her rare public concert dates. And here she is, Joni Mitchell, exiting this slick, flashy car with movieland's enfant terrible!

"Opposites attract": that was the way perplexed Hollywood gossipmongers resolved the surprising new romance. But, three thousand miles away, alone in New York City and trying to clear her mind of the pain of heartbreak in order to rent a new apartment, Julie Christie knows better.

How did Warren's love for Julie begin to fade? And what is he proving by dating Joni?

The answer begins with the fact that Warren is a man who likes a challenge. Julie - with her insouciant, plucky, bohemian lifestyle - provided that challenge at the beginning of their romance. The man who flippantly admitted that "my personal life is very disorganized. I think short-term relationships are more satisfying than long-term ones, where the truth becomes more painful," had, observers thought - finally met his match in Julie Christie. For she was the woman who'd said, "I don't want to be tied down to one man. I believe in being free. I don't believe in marriage."

When they met, five years ago, both were living out of suitcases - literally. Julie'd just split from her adoring "mate," British artist Don Bessant. The two feckless, hip young nomads struck up a romance that whooshed them, on whim and film-schedule, from city to city. "We're in love, but we don't want to get married," they'd charmingly smile. A friend of Warren's was once asked: "Is he really in love with Julie?" "Yes," the friend had replied, "because Julie is as ephemeral as a butterfly. The fact that she doesn't want her wings clipped is all the more reason for Warren to stay with her."

But then things started to change. Warren's unique, deadly charm got the better of Julie's bluff and she turned into a love-struck, dependent woman; the utterly domesticated female animal whose adoring lowered eyes are regular announcement that the game of try-and-catch-me is over and the new game of can-I-trap-you has begun. Settled into a rambling old house during the months of filming McCabe And Mrs. Miller, visitors noticed that the mod English bird had changed from free-flight to nest-building. "Under Julie's urging," a visitor to their house remembers, "they started acting like a married couple. They'd have six for dinner, and Julie was very good with the wine and cheeses, very attentive, never forgetting little amenities like puffing pillows for Warren, and organizing the next day's shooting script in front of him. Julie is terribly feminine and vulnerable. Her man is important to her, and she delights in pleasing him." But one person's delight is another person's warning - and Warren felt, beneath Julie's sincere caring, a jabbing prod, a tightening bond. The friend continued: Warren was still the perennial nomad, but Julie started talking about wanting to settle down." The woman who had only two years before said, "Men don't like responsibilities, and neither do I!" was suddenly, tremblingly eating her own words.

Soon, she began to eat not just her words, but her heart out as well. For Warren's boredom grew apparent, and his eye roved. Who was left to challenge him? What insouciant, steely, liberated lady would next titillate Warren's conquerer's bravado?

Carly Simon. She was the perfect challenge. The sexy-faced, shapely six-foot-tall daughter of a rich New York publisher, she had just broken onto the pop music scene and seemed to have the whole world in her hands. Wearing chic boutique clothes, living in a ritzy East Side apartment, and dating eligible men like director Milos Foreman and comedian David Steinberg, she wrote saucy, vibrant songs that were earmarking her for a reputation as the sophisticated, liberated lady of rock. She was said to have had flings with rock idols like Mick Jagger and to have exploited them as much as they might have exploited her.

Warren met her, and was predictably enticed by her self-confidence. If Julie had been a woman who once eschewed but then begged for marriage, Carly was a woman who, loudly, proudly lambasted the institution. "That's The Way I Always Heard It Would Be" was her hit song about the false trap of matrimony. And Warren, the man who loved challenges - was out to "snow" the girl who wrote and sang that song. He wanted to make her a second, contrary lyric - with him as catalyst.

Carly, indeed, fell for Warren. Or so he thought. When the romance was terminated, he went back to ever-waiting Julie, secretly crowing about the new notch on his Love-Em-And-Leave-Em belt.

Then came the fall of 1972, and Warren discovered that it was Carly who had gotten the last laugh. Her new hit single, "You're So Vain" was a raucous, mocking put-down of a certain pretentious man. Warren heard the song - indeed, it was hard to avoid, since every radio station played it several times in the course of an hour, and thought he recognized himself in it. The media began devoting columns of print, openly speculating who the "subject" of "You're So Vain" was. Could it have been Mick Jagger? Or James Taylor, Carly's then boyfriend, now husband? Most people finally came to believe that the subject was Warren Beatty.

Friends say that Warren felt like a fool. Every time he'd turn on the radio, there was the sexy, caustic double-voice of Carly and Mick Jagger (who did back-up vocal) jibbing: "You're so vain, i bet you think this song is about you, don't you? don't you?!" Yes, Warren apparently did think that song was about him. And now the public thought the song was about him. Carly Simon became the Number One female pop singer on the basis of that song. And, to seal the coup, she married male pop heartthrob James Taylor. The alliance was so neat and perfect that one rock writer mocked its smuggery by calling the pain "The Ozzie and Harriet Nelson of Rock."

Warren sank into an angry, bitter depression. "He's really an insecure guy," a friend says, "a buy who's hurt by rejection and defeat." But he's also a cocksure comeback-artist, a challenge seeker who has to have the last word. Now that the public, particularly the rock public, was duly warned of Beatty's scathing ego, what bigger challenge could there be than to woo and win one of the queens of soft-rock, a woman whose very lifestyle and values were such that she wouldn't ordinarily be impressed by flashy playboy fame? And what more exquisite retaliation could there be than to woo and win a lady who was once Carly Simon's biggest rival for the hand of the man she eventually married?

Joni Mitchell was this lady. for Joni was the crimp in Carly's confident armour. While Carly was beginning to fall in love with James Taylor, she waited anxiously, nervously, uncomfortably for him to end his longtime romance with Joni Mitchell. Joni's new album, released almost simultaneously with the Simon-Taylor wedding even had a song on it that was about James. "We married," the ostensibly "liberated" Carly had confessed, "because there's more freedom when you're secure in another person's commitment to you." If Joni's new song undercut this confidence and security about James, Warren's dating of Joni could be perfect icing on the cake... That's how it started. What Warren feels now for Joni, only he can tell.

Now Warren Beatty's Continental is frequently parked amidst the brambles and birds outside Joni Mitchell's Laurel Canyon home. And it is Carly Simon-Taylor who is shaking her head with wry concession, admitting: "I guess he got the last laugh on me." And it is Julie Christie who is crying. Will Julie now seek retaliation, and thus add another coil to the complicating spire of challenge/conquest/rebuff/retaliation which comprises Warren Beatty's lovestyle?