I didn’t drop the pen deliberately. Honestly, it just rolled off the table. But when I went to retrieve it, I saw a remarkable sight. Of the 10 journalists sitting at the table lobbing questions at Warren Beatty about “Dick Tracy,” his new film as director, star and all-around poobah, more than half were women. And what I saw as I retrieved my pen was that the feet of every single woman at the table were in wild, nervous motion (a couple of those pairs of feet were fluttering like hummingbird wings).

When I sat back up, pen in hand, the faces attached to those pairs of feet seemed genial and composed, utterly belying the agitation out of sight. North of the table, everyone looked as if they were having a friendly chat with the waiter who had just ferried over the Ahi tuna.

Nothing Warren Beatty said — or possibly could have said — revealed more to me than accidentally dropping my pen on the floor.

Beatty not only talks to the press when it serves him, he’s monstrously good at it — articulate, intelligent and spectacularly gifted at saying nothing while he seems to be saying a lot. It’s part of his legend that one of his favorite things to do in life is to spend marathon hours on the phone. It should have been no surprise that some of us were allowed to have nice, fat, one-on-one conversations with him before the release of his last good film — and one of his wildest and very best — “Bulworth.”

Ahhh, but that’s a long way from cooperating with an independent biographer as steeped in current Hollywood lore and byways as he is. Which is why this, at long last, is the Great White Whale of the Hollywood journalist, the utterly mystifying obsession of the trade, harpooned.

I wouldn’t say that Peter Biskind — certainly the juiciest of current Hollywood historians — has been dragged down to the depths with Captain Ahab and the Pequod. But, in the final analysis, the Great White Whale and all obsession with him is revealed to be an insanity that, in itself, tells more than the actual tale ever could.

Everything about the title of this compulsively readable and long-awaited book is wrong.

Warren Beatty isn’t the distilled essence of Hollywood stardom itself, in all its archetypal splendor; he is merely the most masterfully manipulative and megalomaniacal symbol of a particular era’s star pathology. And he never seduced America, he seduced Hollywood. America was asked to put up with the result.

And it’s there that Beatty, the Hollywood obsession, is so much more interesting than Beatty the director, producer, star and prime mover. There is now at least a whole generation of Americans who doesn’t really understand why on earth Warren Beatty should matter.

But he does, and not just because his bedroom list makes him the Don Juan of 20th century America, the most successful of all American womanizers: not just major relationships with Joan Collins, Natalie Wood, Julie Christie, Michelle Phillips, Diane Keaton, Leslie Caron and Madonna, but literally hundreds, perhaps thousands, of minor ones including Mary Tyler Moore, Carly Simon, Goldie Hawn, Joni Mitchell, Cher, Elle McPherson (all mentioned in the book). It is literally true that it seems infinitely easier to list those who resisted Beatty — like Paula Prentiss — than it is those who didn’t.

Every age needs its Don Juan—if only for the stories and the fuel for easy moralizing — and Beatty was ours. His history makes Tiger Woods look like a mewling kitten.

But it’s the other, non-sexual seductions — the Hollywood executives, politicians, journalists and, in one representatively ghastly and revealing episode, the great New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael — that matter. They are what might well make him the symbolic figure of everything errant, even rotten, about Hollywood’s last half-century. And that’s why he is important.

It isn’t his films, God knows. For such a long career, there aren’t that many of them, either as actor or, in his preferred adult role, actor/producer/ director/poobah. For Beatty, witholding is a way of life, which is why the very existence of this book— the first to have his cooperation — is rather amazing.

Biskind truly is the juiciest of creditable Hollywood annalists, as any reader of “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” and “Down and Dirty Pictures” knows. He is the former editor of American Film and Premier Magazines, which makes him a man with a Hollywood “contact” list that might actually exceed Beatty’s own. And he’s not a man to have much truck with needless discretion. This book is barely 20 pages long before we’re told of a young Jane Fonda’s predilections for the sort of sex that made Pamela Anderson and Paris Hilton download stars — not to mention a young Jack Nicholson’s problems with boudoir prematurity.

There is more dish here than in a few years worth of White House dinners and all of us are Salahis at the spectacle, but with one crucial difference: We’re all invited, by the publisher, by the author and, by dint of his cooperation with the author, the 72-year-old star himself, who engineered, hereby, one of his better renown-producing seductions.

Whether this finally gets him a crack at the Howard Hughes project he has long coveted is doubtful, but in Peter Biskind, he has just about as good a revisionist of contemporary film and cultural history as an egomaniacal, power-tripping Hollywood manipulator could get.

Which is what makes this book — for all its wildly entertaining indiscretion and revelation — so grim by the time it’s over.

The tale here is more like Genesis than “Moby Dick.” Access is the poisoned fruit of contemporary journalism. And Beatty is one hell of a serpent. By the time Biskind began counting on all those regular apple deliveries, he probably never even noticed that he was on the other side of the earth from Eden (which is where the pure truth lies).

The big trouble is that I don’t begin to buy the Biskind critical assessment of Beatty that underlies this book. As an actor, he was never really much better than interesting, whether we’re talking about Kazan’s “Splendor in the Grass,” or his own “Reds.” As a director, Pauline Kael was right, no matter how compromised she was by Beatty’s corrupting seduction of her into “the industry” and all-too-predictable abandonment (he actually got her to suspend New Yorker criticism to make a play for Hollywood executive power). “Reds” wasn’t all that great a movie beyond the mind-boggling radicalism of its subject matter. “Shampoo” and “Bonnie and Clyde”—as good as they are — need some explanation now to make their producer/star as important as he should be. It’s quite true that “Bonnie and Clyde” changed the landscape of American filmmaking and Beatty was the prime force behind all that. Look at it now and there’s something slightly absurd about outlaw glamorization that Warner gangster movies of the ’30s and ’40s wouldn’t have sat still for.

“Dick Tracy” is a fascinating failure. “Heaven Can Wait” is a tedious one. The Beatty I like onscreen is the rare kinetic and comic one you can see in a few scenes in “Bugsy” and throughout the gloriously nutty and radical “Bulworth,” one of the great American films about politics.

But Biskind over-inflates his subject, just so he can tell the mind-boggling tale of his controlling freakishness and his manipulative skill as the all-time No. 1 Don Juan of corporate Hollywood. And all so he could seduce, abandon, charm and abuse in monstrous quantity, for the sake of the glory and the grandeur that is Warren, a man who could carry on an affair with one resident of one of the Waldorf Towers (Mary Tyler Moore) while in full view through the window of another in another tower (Diane Keaton).

And we’re not even talking about all the people who’ve loathed his transparent power and vicious abuse games from the beginning. (It remains, somewhat astonishing, that Hollywood history, as of this moment, records no public swift kick to the groin by anyone.)

A great story, to be sure, told by a movie historian who got regular deliveries of freeze-dried apples. It’s a great read, about 20 times over, even when it bogs down into Hollywood tradesheet porn but make no mistake, this is, writ large, a horror story about the hellish way Hollywood actually works.

Eden, as I said, is somewhere else, far, far away.

Jeff Simon is the News Arts and Books Editor.

NONFICTION

Star:How Warren Beatty Seduced America

By Peter Biskind

Simon and Schuster

627 pages, $30