Cher's mom encouraged her to date a young Warren Beatty

Cher met Beatty when she was still a teenager after he nearly crashed into her car.

If you were a straight woman with a pulse in the early 1960s, Warren Beatty was probably high on your list of celebrity crushes (frankly, he still should be).

Many of Beatty's relationships from that era, including romances with Natalie Wood and Julie Christie, are the stuff of Hollywood legend — and before he married Annette Bening in 1992, he was known as one of the industry's most notorious womanizers. Still, in spite of that, Cher's mother encouraged her to date Beatty after the two met in a near-miss of a car accident.

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In her newly released self-titled memoir, Cher details her not-so-cute first meeting with Beatty. Still a teenager, Cher was driving down Sunset Boulevard when a white Lincoln convertible cut her off and nearly hit her. She immediately pulled into a parking lot and started yelling at the driver, who turned out to be Beatty.

"I jumped out and yelled, 'What the f---'s the matter with you? You almost hit me!'" she recalls in Cher: The Memoir. "The man was wearing big, black-framed sunglasses, but I could tell that he was unbelievably handsome, with one of the sexiest smiles I'd ever seen. When he took off his glasses, I realized that it was Warren Beatty."

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Cher notes that this was shortly after Beatty won a "New Star of the Year" award at the Golden Globes for his work in 1961's Splendor in the Grass. She knew that her mom was a big fan of Beatty's, so she decided to try to make the most of the situation. She asked Beatty for a cigarette, and he ran across the street to a gas station to buy her some.

"Ten years older than me, at twenty-five, Warren was so drop-dead gorgeous I had to steady myself as he walked back toward me," Cher writes.

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Beatty then asked Cher if she wanted to get something to eat and invited her back to his place. "My knees almost buckled in the face of his charm and that smile — a devastating combination," she continues. "I followed his car to a big white modern house in the Trousdale Estates in Beverly Hills....He showed me inside, fixed us some cheese and crackers, then leaned in and kissed me. Now, this is interesting, I thought as I kissed him back."

Cher writes that she borrowed a swimsuit that belonged to Natalie Wood (one of Beatty's paramours at the time), swam in Beatty's pool, and returned home at four a.m. The pop star then details how she got in trouble for missing curfew and had to tell Beatty when he called the next day that she couldn't go out because she'd had a fight with her mother over getting home so late. Beatty then asked to talk to Cher's mom.

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"I wish I had a photograph of the look on her face when she realized who she was speaking to," Cher writes. "She literally melted in front of my eyes. Ten minutes later, she was inviting him over."

Beatty and Cher went on two more dates after their first meeting, but then she moved on to Sonny Bono. Reflecting on the memory of kissing Beatty years later, Cher tells Entertainment Weekly that she really only went out with Beatty multiple times to make her mom happy.

"He was funny," Cher says. "Look, I was young, and I went out with him because my mom and my best friend loved him. So for me, it was kind of fascinating. But it wasn't like, 'Oh, this is so amazing' and 'I can't believe it' or whatever. It was just, 'This is a guy who's really interesting and very handsome and charming,' and that was kind of it."