50-something years separate these two Warren Beatty photos — the gray-haired version taken last night with Rules Don’t Apply star Lily Collins at the Hollywood Film Awards, and the brown-haired version snapped at either the 1962 or ’63 Oscar awards, which he attended with Natalie Wood. The fact that Beatty plays the famously reclusive Howard Hughes in Rules allows me to mention the late Tony Curtis (who became a Hollywood Elsewhere pally 16 years ago), and how he once told Bill McCuddy that Hughes and John Wayne “wouldn’t like” Brokeback Mountain.

Curtis also told me the following during a chat we had at the Beverly Glen shopping mall in March 2000: “Can I tell you a story, Jeffrey? In 1948, when I was 23 or 24, when I first came out here I lived in a house on Fountain Avenue. I rented a room there. And they had a swimming pool. I had an appointment and I got on a trolley car…they were running right down the middle of the freeway back then. Then I got back, I jumped into the pool, I took a shower, got dressed and got into the car, and drove up here to meet you. That’s how quick these 50-fucking-two years have gone…quick as that.’”