Opinion

King of the cougar hunters

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He likes his women like a fine wine — aged.

As the “Frost/Nixon” star dishes about the people he worked with over his 40-year career in his new memoir, Frank Langella reveals a penchant for veteran actresses.

He bedded Rita Hayworth and Elizabeth Taylor at the end of their careers, befriended 90-year-old Brooke Astor, and had phone foreplay with the legendary Bette Davis, who was 20 years his senior.

“Dropped Names” contains stories only about the dead — so don’t expect any revelations about his five-year relationship with Whoopi Goldberg (a rare younger conquest) and his 2009 courtship of Goldberg’s co-star on “The View” Barbara Walters, who had just turned 80.

And there’s a reason why he keeps the living out of his tome.

“Don’t turn the page if you like your stories spoon-fed or sugar-spread,” Langella warns in the preface. “There will be a fair amount of forks to the eyes and knives to the throat; even a self-inflicted wound or two.”

Luckily, Langella, 74, delivers, exposing the sometimes self-centered, sometimes nasty and always eccentric lives of his rich and famous friends.

Paul Newman, known for his impressive roster of charities as well as his film roles, was beautiful and dull, “like the Statue of David.”

Richard Burton was a “crashing bore” who spent his time reciting poetry in a drunken haze.

Charlton Heston, a “weak piece of wood,” lacked acting chops. Legendary acting coach Lee Strasberg was a “pompous pygmy” running a “highly profitable racket.”

Even his idol Rex Harrison, best known as Henry Higgins in “My Fair Lady” is not above criticism. Harrison was a “real son of a bitch” and “resolutely homophobic.”

But it’s the actresses that he deeply cared for — despite their flaws — that makes for the best reading.

RITA HAYWORTH

Langella met the redheaded beauty during the making of the 1972 film “The Wrath of God” in Mexico.

She was in her mid-50s, and playing his mother.

Working on the set with her was a “nightmare” because she was incapable of remembering her lines, prompting cast and crew to belittle the star behind her back. No one knew her memory problems were the beginning signs of the Alzheimer’s disease that would later kill her.

Langella admits he didn’t sympathize with Hayworth and assumed her behavior was the “neurotic insecurity of a fading star.”

Yet, despite her difficulties on set (and the 20-year age difference) the two hit it off and began an intense seven-week affair. They spent every evening together over unending cocktails.

Often during the night she “clings, weeps and talks in words I cannot understand, and it is not always my name she calls out in the dark.” This unraveling is too much for Langella, who never spent a full night with her, leaving her to wake up from her hangovers the next morning alone.

ANNE BANCROFT

“Actors are angry babies,” Langella writes. “And I know of no baby angrier than Anne Bancroft.”

Langella met Bancroft, a k a Mrs. Robinson, in 1966 when the two co-starred in the play “A Cry of Players.”

The two were never lovers, only frenemies, as Langella noticed early on that she had a “galloping narcissism that often undermined her talents.”

She threw hissy fits when co-stars (like Langella did in “Players”) got a louder round of applause and was prone to scenes of hypochondria during shoots.

Langella still managed to maintain a relationship with the actress for over two decades.

She confided to him about the time that while walking through Bloomingdale’s, she caught sight of a friendly face. She felt the urge to hug the stranger “until she realized that she was looking into a mirror.”

She also boasted about Dustin Hoffman’s ardent acting during the making of “The Graduate.”

“We just did the scene in bed and he was as hard as a rock. Short Jewish guys,” she quipped.

After too many diva-like scenes, Langella called their friendship off in 1991. Bancroft passed away in 2005.

JACKIE O.

The two were both weekend guests of socialite Bunny Mellon’s summer home in Cape Cod during the summer of 1968.

Though they were from different worlds — she was White House royalty originally from Southhampton, he was a poor Jersey kid from Bayonne — they hit it off.

Perhaps because of her lofty reputation, Langella made himself a fool around her. One time, he recited an odd incident that occurred at the theater with Bancroft, when a supposed FBI agent pulled a gun on them.

To illustrate the punch line of his supposedly funny story, he formed the shape of a gun with his hand and placed it against Onassis’ head. It occurred to him moments later that a gun to the head might elicit painful memories for the widow.

“That must have been very scary for you both,” she said, obviously stunned.

BETTE DAVIS

“The courage to be hated,” that’s what it takes to succeed in Hollywood, Davis has said. And boy did she live by the motto.

Langella and Davis met in the 1970s through their mutual agent, Robbie Lantz. Davis had watched a few of his movies, and she liked what she saw.

“Is he gay?” she asked her agent.

“Bette, dear, he’s married with two children,” Lantz said.

“So what?” she snapped. “Get him on the phone.”

Though 20 years Langella’s senior (and well into her 60s), a “number of racy phone conversations, not quite phone sex but certainly rife with foreplay” commenced. But nothing ever progressed past the phone, because Davis always canceled when they made dinner plans.

A decade later, before her death in 1989, Langella ran into her while staying at a Los Angeles hotel.

He heard that seductively harsh voice command: “Get the car.” He decided to approach her and reminisce about old times.

“Miss Davis?”

“Yes,” she said.

“I’m sorry to disturb you, but I just want to tell you that I think you are the greatest actress of the 20th century.”

“Thank you!” she replied.

He leaned in closer so that she could get a better view of his face and said, “Miss Davis, it’s me, Frank Langella.”

She sucked on a cigarette and exhaled in his face, apparently not recognizing him. “I said, ‘Thank you!’ ” and turned to leave.

BROOKE ASTOR

Langella used his lifetime of experience with older ladies on the whitest-gloved of Manhattan’s elite, the venerable Brooke Astor, getting her to open up about her first sexual experience.

“I was 17. His name was Dryden, and he couldn’t do the business on our honeymoon. He spent every evening downstairs getting drunk . . . He came upstairs drunk and thought he’d done it, but he hadn’t,” she told Langella. The scene had taken place nearly 80 years before.

The two became fast friends in the late 1990s. She invited him to dinner parties at her Park Avenue townhouse, where she would hold court over New York’s richest and most famous (Langella being the latter).

Though the two were never involved, he does speak about the effect the elderly woman had on men of all ages.

“No question about it. Brooke Astor had pheromones,” he writes. “If you were a man, at some point you found yourself at Brooke’s side and the absolute center of attention.”

But the only man in her life that she seemed to have little time for was her own son, Anthony Marshall, who would, in 2007, be charged with grand larceny for exploiting his mother’s estate before her death at 105 in 2006.

Langella admits to sympathizing with Marshall and his wife, Charlene, whom Langella calls Marshall’s “life raft.” Astor, he says, was a “self-involved, non-maternal narcissist who had very little time for her one and only child.”

In the end, Marshall only wanted “a mother to recognize her son as not just a name in her appointment book.”

ELIZABETH TAYLOR

In 2001, Taylor may not have been the beauty she once was, but she still had it, according to Langella.

After the end of his relationship with Whoopi Goldberg, Langella was set up on a date with the 69-year-old, violet-eyed icon.

During their second date at her home, she urged him to “Come on, baby, and put me to sleep.”

He was “frightened” by her room, as it was filled with pictures of her dead ex-husbands, prescription pills, magazines, nail files and an open box of chocolates.

As he sat beside her, she took two pills, slipped off her caftan and invited him to spend the night. He declined.

But the “lonely” Taylor was undeterred and began incessantly calling and leaving voicemails, referring to Langella as “my angel,” even insisting to friends that the two were “dating.”

Still, Langella says being around her was “like quicksand” and he was sucked in. During their final fling, he invited her back to his hotel, where she confessed to wanting to “find a place that’s normal.”

“Like a farm or a country house. Animals. No more of this s–t. I’m finished. Let’s go east and look for something,” Taylor said.

It may have sounded nuts (the two hardly knew each other), but Langella was hooked.

“She was fragile, tender and extremely vulnerable,” he writes. “No man could possibly stay afloat in it. I knew that when I leaned in to kiss her, but still I kissed her.”

He stayed until 4 am and then took her downstairs to return to her house. He never saw her again before hearing of her death in 2011.