Warren's World

The driver of the aeronautical-looking Mercedes cruising up Wilshire Boulevard punches a number on the car phone. An accented voice on the speaker announces the name of a trendy new Italian restaurant. ''Hi, this is Warren Beatty,'' the driver says. ''I'm gonna be there in — '' he squints at the street signs '' — about a minute and a half. Do you have a table?''

The question is strictly rhetorical. A moment later we're walking into a white-walled, bleached-floored place packed with L.A.'s swellest. Following Warren Beatty into a Los Angeles restaurant — especially a new Los Angeles restaurant eager to make a splash — is a bit like walking in the train of Phoebus Apollo. Beatty, in eyeglasses, black shirt, black-and-white wool pants, and black leather jacket, takes in the bowing, smiling heads in his blinking, slightly distracted style. He's not only too smart and too tasteful to be self-important, he's too powerful. Yet while the 54-year-old Beatty's reputation (and thus his power) may be vast in Hollywood, a company town run by men not immune to the standards of the schoolyard, out there in America, things are different. And Warren Beatty is smart enough to know that, too.

In a remarkable scene near the center of director Barry Levinson's Bugsy — the 19th movie in Beatty's 30-year career — the star, playing the legendary '40s gangster Benjamin ''Bugsy'' Siegel, terrorizes a fellow hood by the sheer force of his psychopathic personality, finally compelling him to crawl on the floor, barking like a dog and oinking like a pig. When, miracle of miracles, the man is allowed to leave the room alive, he is grateful to the point of tears. ''Thank you, Ben,'' he tells Siegel. ''You can count on me for anything.''

''Yeah?'' Bugsy says. ''We'll see. Everybody needs a fresh start once in a while.''

That seems especially true for Warren Beatty just now. Ask the man or woman in the street about him, and — if you don't get a crack about his sexual history — you'll most likely hear about Beatty's recent liaison with Madonna, his costar in Dick Tracy, the most profitable movie ($103 million in domestic grosses) ever to leave a sour aftertaste. Beatty, who also directed, produced, and cowrote Dick Tracy, had made the main character passive and two-dimensional, and while this may have worked artistically, it detracted from the star's already dimming reputation. However rich and powerful he was, Beatty wound up looking, in life and art, like a middle-aged second banana to his female lead. How did he come to such a pass?

''Warren only did two movies in the 1980s,'' Barry Levinson says. ''I think it's very difficult to work that infrequently. It's like being a stand-up comic — it's hard to get back to it. When you're out of it that long, you have to sneak back.''

Reds (1981), a moving, three-hour-plus historical drama, stands as Beatty's towering achievement: He starred in, directed, cowrote, and produced the film, receiving three Oscar nominations — he won Best Director — and one for Best Picture, the only person besides Orson Welles (and himself, on Heaven Can Wait) ever to be so honored. But 10 years ago is ancient history. And next came a sweet little comedy called Ishtar (1987), which somehow turned into a $40 million money pit.

The success of Bugsy, then, is of more than casual interest to its star, who is also the movie's coproducer. And its artistic success is considerable. Beatty plays Siegel full-out, with a mad self-possession (which periodically clicks over into chilling madness) and a deliciously goofy narcissism (which unavoidably comments on Beatty's own storied vanity). It's a turn that makes his previous work look tame.

Being romantically involved with his female lead — in this case, Annette Bening, his current living partner and mother-to-be of their daughter (due late this month) — is business as usual. And Bening's performance as the wily, corrosive-tongued starlet Virginia Hill, the woman for whom Siegel left his wife and children, is nearly as unsettling as Beatty's.

But the movie's humor is all his. What other major male star would allow himself to be depicted wearing a facial mask, a hair net, and cucumber slices over his eyes? ''I was amused by your willingness to toy with your own dignity in Bugsy,'' I tell Beatty, over tiramisu. ''One has always thought of you as somebody with a healthy dose of narcissism. Were you tweaking that a little bit in the movie?''

He leans back and arches an eyebrow.

''Well,'' he says, ''first of all you'd have to define healthy dose of narcissism.''

Heads turn, oh so discreetly. Whatever his public standing, there is no doubt — especially in a crowded Los Angeles restaurant — that Warren Beatty is a movie star of the sort they don't make anymore. Attention constantly circulates toward him; he absorbs it, plays to it, gesturing expansively with his hands, his shoulders. In person he looks more like his older sister than he ever has on film. His skin and hair have a touch of Shirley MacLaine's freckled-redhead tonality, and his face, for all its rock-jawed, deeply grooved masculinity, contains — especially around his long-lashed blue eyes and wide, satisfied mouth-a hint of the feline, a quality that has been at the core of his appeal since the beginning.

''Because,'' he continues, ''some would say narcissism would be a basically unhealthy thing. But if you say with a healthy dose of, um — peacockery.''

''Vanity?''

''Vanity. Although I think vanity is probably also — yes, okay, let's say vanity.''

''Nobody wants to make a fool of himself,'' Levinson says of the process by which he and Beatty re-created Bugsy Siegel, fop. ''But with all the extremes of Bugsy's character, caution had to be abandoned. Warren had to take the plunge.''

Among all the things riding on the result, not least is Beatty's self-esteem, and no one is more aware of this than the star himself. ''We — you and I and the theatergoer — are all victims of a huge national referendum that happens every week or two,'' he says. ''Pictures are opened up and then attacked and destroyed, or misunderstood. It's all a disservice to what could be a great art form.''

And no one knows better than Beatty that things haven't always been that way.