Stealing Kisses

Depp & Ryder

They held hands at his premiere of Cry-Baby and groped and necked and (finally) fell to the floor of a Vegas film exhibitors’ convention. But if these lovers in retro-chic black leather are acting like a couple of teenagers, they might be excused: He’s America’s premier teen idol, she is a teen.

The chemistry between Heathers’ Winona, 18, and 21 Jump Street‘s Johnny, 26, began when they met six months ago, between films in L.A. Things turned serious in January when Depp flew to Rome to minister to Ryder, suffering from exhaustion on the set of Godfather III (she subsequently dropped out of the cast). Last month they plighted their troth, sort of. Johnny’s sporting a tattooed WINONA FOREVER on his right arm, and they’re wearing matching engagement rings.

Though Depp has been engaged twice before—to Jennifer Grey and Sherilyn Fenn—Winona may prove his match. “I’ve done pretty much any drug you can name,” Johnny once confessed. Winona won’t be shocked: She’s the goddaughter of LSD guru Timothy Leary. Johnny dropped out of school at 16. Her mom, Winona has said, “used to keep me home whenever there was a good old movie on TV.” Ryder’s own movies include next fall’s Mermaids with Cher; both Winona and Depp will star in Batman director Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands.

To date, they’ve set no date. “We can do it any time,” said Johnny recently, “but we’ll probably do it when we’re not working.” At least one grown-up approves: “They’re a couple made in heaven,” says Cry-Baby director John Waters.

Gere & Crawford

She’s not a fellow Buddhist, but Richard (American Gigolo) Gere, 40, seems to have found the true way with megamodel Cindy Crawford, 23. The beautiful duo met two years ago at a barbecue for Elton John thrown by celeb photographer Herb Ritts, whose mother pushed them together. “They got to talking,” reported Ritts, “and it grew. He’s changed her. He’s a mature, intelligent guy…. It’s a very easy relationship. They’re very sweet and good to be around.”

Though Gere’s career is zooming with Pretty Woman and Internal Affairs, Cindy has said, “I don’t want to be scooped up in someone else’s fame.” No doubt, she can get it on her own: Though they’d never met, Prince was inspired to write his 1987 song “Cindy C” simply by looking at her picture. So far, nobody’s written “Richard G.”

Kennedy & Hannah

From the start—said to be at the 1988 wedding reception of Lee Radziwill (his aunt) and Herbert Ross (her Steel Magnolias director)—it was just one of those on-again, off-again things. He, a President’s son carving a career in the Manhattan D.A.’s office, she a lanky blond sex symbol who made her Splash in fins. Last summer it looked like puppy love when they were spotted romping in Central Park. “She was straddling him,” says an observer of the pair. The crush lasted long enough for John to bid adieu to Madonna, whom he had escorted to her artist brother’s downtown loft, in order to dine with Hannah last fall. There have also been sightings of the couple in Telluride, Colo., where Daryl’s family has built a lavish family compound.

The scion, 29, and the starlet, 28, have more in common than great cheekbones. Hannah, the stepdaughter of a wealthy Chicago real estate magnate, travels in circles lofty enough to place her at the dinner table of then President Daniel Ortega on one of four mid-’80s trips to Nicaragua. What pushes them apart are very significant others—his longtime girlfriend, actress Christina Haag, and her big time beau, singer Jackson Browne. (They met at one of his concerts in Chicago a decade ago, when he pulled her onstage from the front row.)

Lately the liaison seems tenuous at best. “Whatever happened isn’t happening,” a Kennedy family friend said. “There’s no marriage ahead.” In fact, Kennedy has again been happily in Haag’s company, and Hannah may be reigniting her old flame: At a recent California concert headlined by former E-Street band member Clarence demons, she warbled a duet with Browne.

Pfeiffer & Stevens

As Sir Andrew Aguecheek in last June’s Central Park production of Twelfth Night, he was barely mentioned in reviews. But Fisher Stevens, now 26, obviously made quite an impression on the play’s leading lady, Michelle Pfeiffer, 32.

A Manhattan stage actor who played a Hindu scientist in 1986’s Short Circuit, Stevens is a cancer survivor (he was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease in his teens) who, friends say, has an appealing exuberance. Short Circuit II director Kenneth Johnson recalls auditioning young actresses: “When I told them Fisher was the lead, they all got knowing grins. He’s a terribly endearing person.”

So endearing, Pfeiffer just can’t help cuddling him in public. He even accompanied her to this year’s New York Film Critics and Golden Globe ceremonies, where she picked up her Fabulous Baker Boys Best Actress awards.

Whether this is anything more than a soufflé remains to be seen. But Pfeiffer, who ended an eight-year marriage to thirtysomething’s Peter Horton in 1988, falls hard. “I’m the type who meets someone and is just not interested—or I’m under some illusion that I want to marry him,” she has said. “There’s no in-between.”

Madonna & Beatty

As an unabashed Material Girl, she has earned $90 million in the past four years and has never wanted for available Boy Toys. He hasn’t had a hit movie since the 1981 Reds but has bedded more starlets than Serta. In this merger of major Hollywood career objectives, Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone, 31, and Warren Beatty, 52, are a star pairing that could last as long as, say, their first weekend’s grosses.

Madonna was introduced to Beatty at his house in 1985 on her first date with future husband Sean Penn. After her bust-up with Penn last year, producer-director Beatty cast Madonna as the siren Breathless Mahoney in his forthcoming Dick Tracy. Three weeks later, on the set, “They were always kissing each other. It was embarrassing and awkward for the crew,” says an observer. Not that their professional relationship was all lovey-dovey: During one set-side spat, Madonna snapped, “Don’t touch me!” when Beatty tried to calm her, the source reports. “Warren knows what he wants, and she was the temperamental star.”

By last spring they were filling the shadowy places in L.A.’s fringe night spots. She called him “old man” and danced with abandon, while Beatty clung to the wall.

What baffles onlookers is who’s zooming whom. “She’s letting her aging Boy Toy think he still has it,” says one observer. “The one thing she really wants is a successful movie career, and Warren can give it to her.” For his part, “Warren needs a hit movie. Yes, he’s had his choice of women, but young people don’t even know who he is. He needs Madonna to keep him in the public eye.”

The two were most recently spotted together Grammy night, but since then their ardor has apparently cooled. “It is a great romance, but it’s not headed for the altar,” says a Beatty pal. “It was never as exclusive as everyone thought.” Apparently not. Beatty was seen squiring former flame Isabelle Adjani around Hollywood.

Tyson & Campbell

When British model Naomi Campbell, 19, showed up late for a New York fashion shoot last year, she blamed her hairdresser. But Elite agency President Monique Pillard demurred: “That hairdresser weighs 220 lbs., has short, curly hair and is the heavyweight champion of the world.”

After his knockout bout with Robin Givens, Tyson, 23, has picked a flyweight. He met the 5’9½”, 120-lb. beauty, who played Julia on The Cosby Show, at a party for lingerie designer Fernando Sanchez. They were later seen sporting around New York City in his white Lamborghini. Soon, the champ was going over the ropes to pose playfully with Campbell for Vogue—where he articulated her allure: “She has a great body. And she’s scared of nothing.”

Campbell plays down notions of a permanent partner. She and the champ are “friends; that’s it,” she told the New York Post. “We’re both young. If he wants to see other people—that’s fine.”

Winger & Kerrey

Debra Winger’s two-year Term of Endearment with Nebraska’s then Gov. Bob Kerrey ended in 1985 and seemed definitely kaput when she married Timothy Hutton the next year. But Winger and Hutton have now been separated nearly two years, and Hutton filed for divorce in December. The result? Ricochet romance.

The two met in 1983, when Winger’s hit Endearment was filming in Lincoln and Winger booked B&B at the Governor’s mansion; these days she visits the Senator’s home in Omaha. Two weeks ago Winger, 34, and her son with Hutton, Noah, 2, visited for several days, ostensibly to promote Kerrey’s Prairie Life fitness center. There, the Senator, 46, issued what could be construed as a nondenial denial. “She’s a partner in this,” he told reporters. “No, we’re not dating.”

Say again? “They saw each other but weren’t seeing each other,” Kerrey press rep Steve Jarding told reporters. “But now it’s fair to say they’re seeing each other.” Next question.

Sutherland & Roberts

For a time after his 1987 marriage to Puerto Rican-born actress Camelia Kath, 36, Kiefer Sutherland, 23, publicly basked by the hearthside. “That’s really all my life consists of, family and the work,” he pronounced not long after the birth of their daughter, Sarah, two years ago. But after months of rumors, the marriage crumbled. “Intellectually, Kiefer handles the family and marriage well,” a friend has said of their troubles. “Emotionally, it’s different.”

The son of actor Donald Sutherland got close to Julia, the sister of actor Eric Roberts, on the set of their just completed film, Flat liners. In recent weeks, Roberts has reportedly visited Sutherland on the Tucson set of his Young Guns sequel, and the two have been seen lunching in L.A. Though Sutherland has kept silent about the friendship—”He’s been lying low because of the divorce,” says one insider—Roberts has shown no such caution. Accepting a Golden Globe Award for her Steel Magnolias supporting role, she waxed rhapsodic. “I want to thank my beautiful, blue-eyed, green-eyed boy,” gushed the Pretty Woman star, “who does everything for me.”

Fonda & Caccialanza & Turner

“I’m perceived as a go-getter. In fact I was a living, open scar—vulnerable and fragile,” Fonda confided to a French newspaper last fall, after the breakup of her 16-year marriage to Tom Hayden. Consolation came in the well-chiseled form of former soccer player and aspiring actor Lorenzo Caccialanza.

After meeting at an L.A. party last spring, Caccialanza, 35, who played a terrorist in Die Hard, vacationed with Jane, 52, in the Caribbean in September. In the fall, the pair went to Milan to visit Lorenzo’s mother—who wasn’t impressed. “An almost 18-year age difference is too much!” Mama told an Italian magazine.

Peccato, said Jane. “I have an Italian boyfriend younger than myself, and I don’t understand why so many people are scandalized,” she rejoined.

According to Fonda’s publicist, Pat Newcomb, the two have now “parted amicably.” Meanwhile, Jane attended last month’s People’s Choice Awards with media czar Ted Turner, 51. “Lorenzo and Jane are two very attractive people who were friends and still are,” explains Newcomb. “Ted and Jane are smart and are futurists. They are both committed to the environment.”

Prince & Basinger

“I’m not up for grabs,” Kim Basinger once said. “I don’t fall in love all that easily.” But during the recording of Prince’s Batman sound track last year, it seemed she’d done just that. Soon enough, the 5’7″ former Breck Girl, 36, and the 5’2″ Prince of rock, 31, were hunkered down in Minneapolis at Prince’s $10 million Paisley Park complex, collaborating on a steamy 19-minute maxi-single, The Scandalous Sex Suite.

The woman who bared almost everything in 9½ Weeks and the man who spins his stage show around his sexual fantasies would at least seem to have exhibitionism in common. No, no, protests a Hollywood agent. Out of the office, “They’re both painfully shy. They’re both very private…. Yeah, I can see them together.”

In January things got rocky when Basinger abruptly pulled out of Graffiti Bridge, Prince’s Purple Rain sequel. Rather than attend the American Music Awards with him, she finished up her $20 million purchase of Braselton, Ga., the town she plans to develop as a film site. She also finalized her divorce from makeup artist Ron Britton (married nine years, they separated in 1988).

“Prince is a control freak, and he thought he could control Kim,” says one film-industry insider. “But he found out he couldn’t completely.” There’s at least one indication, however, that he may have learned his lesson. According to the same source, the two are now ensconced in an L.A. hotel suite: “They’re back together again. For how long, I don’t know. But for now, you can bank on it.”

Ronstadt & Davis

The women portrayed in her 1987 Songs of My Father LP, she said, “don’t defer to men. They just don’t compete with them.” Nor did Linda Ronstadt herself compete, in past relationships with California’s then Gov. Jerry Brown and with producer George Lucas. But things may change now that she’s dating someone in the music business, New Orleans impresario Quint Davis, producer of the city’s annual Jazz and Heritage Festival.

Davis, the son of a prominent architect, plays on his reputation as an iconoclastic loner. Still, says a friend, he and Ronstadt “are wild for each other. She has flown in on her private plane to see him.” They’ve even been seen strolling hand in hand through the French Quarter.

Davis has forbidden his family and friends to discuss the relationship and denies rumors that Linda has bought a Garden District manse. On March 18 Ronstadt arrived late for a fund-raiser for the city’s homeless and, after a duet with Aaron Neville, skipped out—without Quint. Was that because, as rumored, she and Davis are on the outs? Linda will never tell. “I’m real happy to talk about the music,” she has said, “but that other stuff is just what happens to you.”

Cruise & Kidman

“The most important thing for me is I want Mimi to be happy,” said Tom Cruise, 27, late last year. Unfortunately that didn’t mean he’d stay married to her. Hard on the heels of his separation from Rogers, 35, Tom seems, once again, to be cruising. The Daytona Beach location of his Days of Thunder was abuzz earlier this month with rumors of a romance, and indeed, post-split, Cruise’s rented white BMW and Harley-Davidson motorcycle had been spotted outside the condo of his Australian co-star, Nicole Kidman, 22.

Cruise has long been closemouthed about his preferences in women, but last year he extolled the virtues of having a wife in the same profession. “It’s like trying to explain how driving a race car feels. You can’t do it. They’ve got to get in the car themselves.”

But Kidman, who spent 95 minutes hiding from a psychotic killer in last year’s boat-bound Dead Calm, can speak to the downside of the acting game. “I do get lonely when I’m on the road,” she told PEOPLE last year. “It gets a bit meaningless when you don’t have anyone to get in bed and watch the telly with.” Is she watching with Cruise? Stay tuned.

—Susan Schindehette, from bureau reports