On Thursday, December 6, 2001, Steve Bing, a 37-year-old producer and screenwriter, drove down the piece of hillside he owns opposite the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles. Ordinarily it’s a bucolic journey, commencing on a grass driveway that blends in with Bing’s eight-acre lawn. The vista from the house is spectacular, of mountaintops meeting the sky and Los Angeles sitting like a toy town in the distance. As it descends, the driveway twists and turns for half a minute or so until it meets Stone Canyon Road.

Most days Bing is greeted there by the grounds staff at the Hotel Bel-Air, where he lived for almost nine years, starting in 1991. He waves back, despite the fact that— or perhaps because—at 18 he inherited a fortune approaching a billion dollars from his late grandfather New York real-estate magnate Leo Bing. Steve prides himself on having the common touch. Whether he’s in the strip clubs of Las Vegas or on the streets of Bel Air, appearing low-key is something of a priority with him, as both his 1997 Lincoln Town Car and his uniform of jeans, sneakers, and T-shirt, occasionally topped with a Hawaiian shirt, attest.

That Thursday, however, was no ordinary morning. Paparazzi, dozens of them, were waiting for him at the bottom of his driveway. Bing panicked. From the car he called his best friend, the 63-year-old actor James Caan.

Caan told Bing to get out and give them their shot, and Bing did as he was told. The resulting photos capture a tall, broad-shouldered man whose distinguishing feature is a full head of prematurely white-gray hair. His face is a blank canvas, his eyes slightly stony. It’s a face that leaves you wondering if still waters run deep.

Evidently they do. Or at least the 37year-old model and actress Elizabeth Hurley thought so—to the point that on April 4, following an off-and-on, 18-month romance, she gave birth to a boy, Damian Charles, who she claimed was Bing’s son. Bing said he was not so sure, and sued her to have a paternity test performed on the baby. On June 18, his fatherhood was confirmed. Meanwhile, the souring of their relationship has done little to improve Anglo-American relations: most of moneyed Hollywood—especially those people whose charitable causes benefit from Bing’s wealth—appears to think their friend has done nothing wrong; most of Britain believes he has supplanted James Hewitt, the Princess of Wales’s paramour who kissed and told, as the world’s worst cad.

The day the paparazzi ambushed Bing, the British tabloids called him “Bing Laden”; one, the Daily Mirror, actually printed a wanted poster of him on its front page and included his office phone number. The accompanying editorial encouraged readers to call and berate him, which they did.

And that was before it emerged, in May, that the billionaire Kirk Kerkorian, 85, who has bought and sold MGM more times than anyone cares to remember, and who likes to stay out of the public eye, claimed that there was a 99.993 percent chance that Bing was the true father of four-year-old Kira Kerkorian, whose mother is former tennis pro Lisa Bonder, 36. Kerkorian says he proved this after he had an associate rummage through Bing’s garbage, where he found a piece of dental floss, from which a DNA sample was obtained; Bing, in turn, sued Kerkorian for $5 billion for invasion of privacy and other causes. The paparazzi once again parked at the bottom of Bing’s driveway. By this time, some of them told him, they pitied him. He was soon nicknamed the Sperminator, and the New York Post made him the subject of a cartoon in which a park was littered with baby Bings.

Across the Atlantic, Elizabeth Hurley read about what was happening, and felt sorry for her ex-beau. Motherhood, her friends say, had mellowed her fiery temperament. She telephoned him from Elton John’s country house in Windsor, Berkshire, where she had been hiding out for several weeks postpartum. (At her London town house, says a friend, she cannot even go out to buy a newspaper without being photographed.) The estranged couple spoke for the first time since Damian’s birth. Her sympathy loosened former impediments to conversation. He asked her why she had named her son after the child-devil from The Omen; she replied that Damian had long been a favorite name of hers and that some of her closest friends bore it.

Then Bing set her off again by telling her he was considering speaking to the press in an attempt to do damage control. Hurley, who as the movie producer Jerry Bruckheimer points out “certainly has the upper hand as far as dealing with the media,” was furious, according to the Bing camp. Ultimately, Bing wheeled out his friends to defend him to a reporter. They include Caan, a longtime mentor, and Bruckheimer, for whom Bing has co-written Down and Under, a comedy set in the Australian outback, due to be released in January; Rob Reiner, with whom he backed Proposition 10, which established a California sales tax on cigarettes that aids the early education of children; Terry McAuliffe, chairman of the Democratic National Committee (after television mogul Haim Saban, Bing is the biggest donor to the D.N.C. ever—he gave $5 million last year); John Ford, the V.P. of development at Stanford University, to which Bing has pledged $25 million; Tom Shepherd, the president of Bastyr University in Kenmore, Washington, “America’s leading institution in the natural health sciences” (Bing gave $1 million); John Adams, the president of the Natural Resources Defense Council (Bing gave $10 million); Norman Lear, founder of People for the American Way (Bing gave more than $1 million); and the model Alana Stewart, the former wife of George Hamilton and Rod Stewart.

“None of us [knows] who is in what bedroom when. If there were no lies, there d be no sex.

Most of Bing’s friends try hard to be polite about Hurley—they say things such as “She’s much prettier in person” (Stewart). Or “She’s a talented actress” (Bruckheimer). Caan is perhaps the least embarrassed to admit to his mixed feelings. “I offered my advice at some point during the relationship,” he says. “I said to Steve, ‘If it makes you happy, great. But I hope it doesn’t go any further.’” (Caan and Hurley worked together on the 1999 Mafia caper Mickey Blue Eyes; Hurley produced it, and friends of Caan’s say he feels she overly enjoyed the authority the job bestowed on her.) “She has that accent,” he says, his voice dropping into London mockney. “Where does that come from?” Other friends of Bing’s echo this particular complaint.

It is rather ironic that Americans criticize Hurley for her upperclass accent, which she appears to have cultivated in an attempt to elevate herself from her middle-class British origins. Her late father was an army major. To her friends this made her “incredibly grounded”; those in Steve Bing’s universe, though, believe that this caused her to crave social acceptance.

But then, Hurley has always been a woman who incites strong passions one way or the other; from the very moment she hit the public consciousness in 1994 as a fresh-faced beauty in a safety-pin Versace dress, on the arm of Hugh Grant at the premiere of Four Weddings and a Funeral, she was celebrated for just being “It,” and simultaneously reviled for being famous without a good-enough reason. Even inside Estée Lauder, the cosmetics firm, there was ambivalence about the woman they’d anointed “the Face of Lauder” in 1995. “Within the company she was called Sleaz-E behind her back,” says a fashion insider. Her “alpha female” mode of dress—namely skintight Versace dresses and poured-on jeans and kitten heels— and her effusive, physical manner are two reasons cited. “Naughty” is a word that comes up often when people talk about Hurley. (Indeed, Bing’s friends say it was the party-girl side of her that appealed to him.)

Yet Leonard Lauder says the malicious gossip was just that. “The thing that gets me upset is ... I am the only one who makes decisions about what model we hire.... What everyone else [in the organization] thinks is of no consequence whatsoever.... Let everyone talk.” He adds, “[Elizabeth] has been a superb partner for us.”

He admits her public image wasn’t always quite what he’d have liked: “No one loves the idea of the Estée Lauder model being on ‘Page Six’ [the gossip column] of the New York Post.” And once, after a photo shoot in Germany where, Lauder says, Hurley “went too far,” he had to call her and ask her to “be cautious.” She agreed. He says later, “I am in no way judgmental about her private life. She’s been rather open about that with me_I do not subscribe to the notion that everyone is as clean and as pure as the driven snow.”

According to Hurley’s friends, her spontaneity leads her into trouble. “She’s a sexy woman who’s not shy with her affections,” says one of her male friends, trying to explain why in the past two and a half years, when she was first dating Bing and then pregnant, she was photographed with Hugh Grant, Matthew Perry, Green Shield Stamps heir Tim Jeffries, N.B.A. star Steve Nash, actor Denis Leary, and financier Teddy Forstmann. The friend adds, “The irony is that with Bing she really fell for him. She was good. She wasn’t naughty at all.”

Cynics see Bing’s wealth as the feature that most attracted Hurley to him, and certainly that’s the easiest interpretation: the supermodel in her late 30s, facing a declining career, looks for security in the arms of a rich caretaker. Hurley was replaced as the face of Estée Lauder by model Carolyn Murphy last September; though she appears in August alongside Matthew Perry in Serving Sara, and will star with Sean Penn, Catherine McCormack, and Sarah Polley in The Weight of Water in November, she has only two other movies in the pipeline, both co-starring Denis Leary. They are not scheduled for theatrical release, according to Gold Circle Films, which financed them. She has a project planned with producer and director Jerry Zucker and Hugh Grant, but an industry insider says that Castle Rock Entertainment may not be renewing its deal with Simian Films, the production company Hurley runs with Grant. (Martin Shafer, the Castle Rock C.E.O., denies this.)

But Hurley’s friends resent any gold-digger insinuation. “In my view I very much doubt that Elizabeth will ask Bing for a single penny [of child support] after the way he’s treated her,” says author and journalist William Cash, and other Hurley supporters hotly echo him on this point. Cash adds, “If she wanted to be with a rich guy, believe me, she’s turned down guys who are plenty wealthier than Bing. She’s not exactly lacking in money herself.” The shadow of billionaire Teddy Forstmann, a frequent escort of Hurley’s, hovers over our conversation. (Hurley declined to be interviewed for this story.)

Perhaps it was a case of opposites attracting: Hurley is allegedly as unsure of herself as she is assertive, while Bing has the reassuring confidence that comes with never having known the fear of not having enough. “The surprising thing about Elizabeth is that she does not believe she is beautiful,” says one of Bing’s friends, adding that Hurley always felt she had to put on heels and makeup before she went out, in case she was photographed. This ended up being a contentious issue for Bing. “He got tired of waiting for her,” says the L.A. clothing-boutique owner Tracey Ross.

Sandra Ellis, who shared an apartment with Hurley when Hurley was just 18 and training to become a dancer, remembers, “She had absolutely no idea of the effect she had on people; even when she had pink hair and kohl all over her eyes in her punk phase, she was the most drop-dead woman I’d ever seen. She had milky skin and an amazing five-foot-teninch figure.”

Similarly, Bing was known to tell friends, “Her sister, Kate [now a literary agent in London], was always the beautiful one and [Elizabeth] got no attention. And then overnight she got breasts and got tall. And she’s still the ugly little girl that doesn’t believe she’s good-looking.”

"'They had a threesome in Vegas, so Hurley must have known it wasn't an exclusive relationship.

Cash and other friends of Hurley’s who met Bing saw an urbanity that they believed appealed to Hurley. “He’s easygoing and charming,” says one. “There is more to him than your average L.A. producer.”

True, Bing is erudite on a vast range of subjects. Thanks to his relationship with the D.N.C., he is impressively informed about national politics—he was among the early substantial donors to North Carolina senator John Edwards, the aspiring presidential candidate—and he also has regular conversations with California governor Gray Davis.

Bing talks easily about business and movies. He plays the blues on the piano. He is passionate about sports, especially basketball. (One Hurley friend says she didn’t like that he’d show up for dates accompanied by a bunch of football players.) And he is modest and self-effacing, almost to the point of absurdity: Rob Reiner likens his two-bedroom house to a “postage stamp,” because it is so out of scale with the size and grandeur of the property on which it sits. “Name anyone else with his wealth who only has a maid, no assistant,” says Reiner. “You’d be hard-pressed.”

Bing’s favorite personal memento is a framed note on stationery from the Four Seasons Hotel, stating that Mr. Robert Mitchum will be joining him for tea. (Sharon Stone arranged for the two to meet when she was dating Bing, 10 years ago.) Bing tells friends that should his house catch fire this is the one thing he’d save. Which may have something to do with what even some of his friends see as a fault.

“Steve’s a starfucker,” says one. He has been seen with Uma Thurman, Farrah Fawcett, and Naomi Campbell in addition to Stone and Stewart, although Stone, not yet famous, was his only serious girlfriend. “I love Steve. I also think he’s a starfucker.”

Throughout the media storm, Bing’s personal life hasn’t taken any detours into reclusiveness. When people ask him why he spends time at the Playboy Mansion and at the strip clubs of Las Vegas (where, one of his friends eagerly points out, “Elizabeth enjoyed herself every bit as much as Steve”), he grins like a five-year-old: “You know, I’m single—what is so wrong?” He recently took the model Gisele Bundchen and a mutual friend for a drink at the Latin Lounge in Hollywood; he told Bundchen to crouch down in his car to avoid photographers. When she raised her head too early, the couple was caught.

Bing says to people that the former Mrs. Kerkorian, Lisa Bonder, whom he has not seen in five years, “was a nice woman.” But just mention the name of caviar clerk Brenda Swanson, who claimed to the London tabloids to be the “other woman” while he was dating Hurley, and Bing turns vicious: “She had no authority to speak for me.” (He is currently suing Swanson for defamation of character.)

One friend says that Bing has financially helped some of the strippers and others down on their luck with whom he’s socialized. When someone asked him about this, he replied, “I’ve helped so many you’d have to get me the name to give you the details.”

James Caan takes some of the credit for his friend’s interest in strippers and models. “When he was 18 and 19, I took him ... to the [Playboy] Mansion ... and we met girls.” He says he taught Bing to treat the women there well. “I was his second dad for a long time. I’d like to think I gave him the same New rk moral code I was brought up with. That means being honest, respectful, and decent.”

Bing as a teenager “had some issues,” according to Caan, who believed that the heir deliberately lived like a pauper because he was afraid people would cultivate him for his money. “He lived in a shack off his parents’ house and used to watch a 19-inch black-and-white TV. He didn’t want anyone to know he had money.”

Alana Stewart remembers that, when she used to go for lunch with Bing, “I felt really bad. I didn’t want him to spend his money buying me lunch. ... I didn’t find out for a few years that he was not the poor struggling young writer.”

Bing and his sister, Mary, now a 35year-old married social worker in Queens, grew up knowing they had money, but not what or where it could get them. The family always flew coach and drove around in beat-up station wagons. Their father, Peter Bing, was a doctor who worked for Presidents Kennedy and Johnson in public health. Their mother, Helen, is a former nurse with a long gray braid.

When Steve was three, his father moved the family from Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles and embarked on full-time philanthropic work. Quietly. The one thing that got drilled into the Bing children was: Whatever you do, do it modestly and not for self-aggrandizement.

Bing dropped out of Stanford in his third year to focus on co-writing the script of the 1984 Chuck Norris movie, Missing in Action. Over the next decade he wrote two movies that never got made and one episode of Married ... with Children that did. In 1996 he sold the script of Down and Under to Jerry Bruckheimer, and more recently he founded Shangri-La Entertainment and got an eight-picture deal with Warner Bros. The first movie he had a real role in producing, Night at the Golden Eagle, with Vinnie Jones, received mixed reviews and has played in only a few theaters.

“Steve is actually a great writer,” says Bruckheimer. “He also has amazing ideas. I think there’s another picture we’re trying to get going of his too.”

One of his current scripts, Bing enjoys telling people, is entitled Why Men Shouldn’t Marry; the protagonist is Joe Garrett, a misogynist who winds up falling for a Vanity Fair reporter sent to profile him. The woman has long hair, a “stunning” figure, an avid interest in—and athletic ability for— basketball, and a quick wit. When you read it, you find yourself wondering, How good is Elizabeth Hurley at shooting hoops?

Even those of Bing’s friends who didn’t like her could not deny that Elizabeth Hurley mesmerized Steve Bing. He wrote her love letters and bought her a sapphire-and-diamond ring from Neil Lane, a Hollywood dealer in estate jewelry. “In many ways it was an old-fashioned romance,” says a friend. “He really wooed her.”

He also looked after her. He hired his friend the lawyer Marty Singer to get her out of a potentially damaging situation when, alone among high-profile actors anywhere, she broke the Screen Actors Guild strike in the summer of 2000. (She claimed she hadn’t known about it.) Singer got her off with a $100,000 fine from the union.

Hurley in turn adored Bing. “From what I saw, she and Bing seemed very happy,” says Cash.

According to Bing’s camp, it all went bad when she called him at the end of the summer from London to tell him she had some news she knew would horrify him; it had horrified her at first, she said. She was pregnant, evidently because of the interaction of some antibiotics she was taking with the pill. To his surprise she said she was thinking of keeping the child. Bing told her to get on a plane so they could discuss it in L.A. When she arrived, he said he thought it best that she get an abortion. She refused. He suggested therapy. Again she refused. Her friends say that she didn’t need therapy to think through something she felt so sure of. After this meeting they split up.

That Bing considered the relationship to be “nonexclusive”—the term he is said to have used when asking her to have an abortion-had never crossed her mind, say her defenders. Evidently it never crossed his that she expected him to be faithful. One of his friends says, “They had a threesome in Vegas, so she must have known it wasn’t an exclusive relationship.” In the summer of 2000, in addition to seeing her in the newspapers with other men, Bing heard whispers from Gold Circle Films that Hurley was having an affair with Denis Leary. An insider there says, “No one ever admitted to it. It remained speculative.” (Leary did not return calls for comment.)

While the paternity issue with Damian still lingered, Leonard Lauder said, “None of us has any evidence as to who is in what bedroom when.... If there were no lies, there’d be no sex.”

What annoyed Bing the most about his relationship with Hurley, says his camp, was the unwanted publicity it brought him. “Suddenly it would appear in the press that Elizabeth had been playing pool with Bill Clinton [and Bing] at [supermarket magnate] Ron Burkle’s house,” says boutique owner Tracey Ross.

If Hurley was trying to fan the flickering flames of a high-flying career that seems on the brink of morphing into something different—a source at IMG, her modeling agency, says that she is in discussions about writing a diet book—one can scarcely blame her.

Nobody has ever claimed that she is not ambitious; a Bing defender recalls that the day after Hugh Grant was caught with Divine Brown on Sunset Boulevard, and Hurley was playing the victim in public, she phoned a senior executive at Castle Rock and told him that it was business as usual as far as Simian Films was concerned.

Hurley must be all too aware that very few former models and actresses of her level continue to “make it.” “In the fashion world, to be considered glamorous you need to retain a glamorous lifestyle—and that costs millions,” says a fashion editor. “If Elizabeth stops flying first-class, she’s over, and she knows it.”

Hurley told Bing she was pregnant on September 1; he claims to people that the date is stamped firmly in his mind, since it was the day after she was told officially she would not be renewed as the face of Estée Lauder. She went public with the pregnancy in November 2001, and shortly afterward William Cash wrote an article in the Daily Mail which made it plain that she felt abandoned by Bing. (One of her friends says she’d heard Bing was dating other women and she wanted to pre-empt any “humiliating” speculation that she’d been dumped.) In December, Hurley went on the Today show and told Matt Lauer that she was certain that Bing was the father. “Do you really think she’d have done that if there was any doubt in her mind?” asks a friend.

Yet when Bing kept asking her privately to have a DNA test done, she stalled, according to Bing allies. Why should she stoop to his level? her friends ask angrily. But then, after Damian’s birth, he took matters a step further and actually sued her to have the test done—the papers were served at Elton John’s house. She told people that she felt violated. “He was putting her on the defensive,” says a friend. “She didn’t like it.”

The Bing camp meanwhile points out that in London, unlike in L.A., child support is determined by “reasonable need” and not a percentage of parental income.

As this article was going to press, Bing flew to London and took a paternity test on the airport tarmac before returning to Los Angeles. Hurley did her part, and the question was finally resolved.

If Bing is eager to avoid more undue publicity or a court battle in his home state, there is good reason in the form of the other paternity-test soap opera in which he has a starring role.

Case SC070406 in L.A. Superior Court is Lisa Bonder Kerkorian v. Kirk Kerkorian, the owner of 81 percent of MGM as well as the Bellagio and Mirage hotels in Las Vegas. The leading lady of this saga makes Elizabeth Hurley look as pure as her white-robed persona in the Estée Lauder ads.

Lisa Bonder Kerkorian, currently living in an $8 million home just five minutes from Steve Bing’s house, recently increased her already record-breaking support demands to $320,000 a month for her daughter, Kira, including $436 a month for a pet rabbit. Bonder was married to Kerkorian for only one month—in a deal she’d asked for in order to legitimize their child. (He had been guaranteed a divorce agreement before he married her.)

Some months ago, while the Kerkorians were haggling, a “mutual friend” of Bing’s and Kerkorian’s told the latter that Bing and Bonder had had a brief relationship. Bing tells people that theirs was a one-night fling—and given his track record, it’s hard not to believe him—during a phase when Bonder and Kerkorian were more off than on.

Early this year Kerkorian telephoned Bing. At the outset, Kerkorian was courteous; the court papers say that he asked Bing “man to man” if he was the father of Kira. Bing, who has not seen Bonder in five years, said that it was a possibility. He agreed to take a test but asked Kerkorian to keep the matter private. Kerkorian refused to do so, and when Bonder’s demands grew to obscene proportions, he felt he had to reveal the affair.

Bing’s friends do not approve of what Bonder has done. Alana Stewart says, “I had two children from a man who flew around in jets and private planes_I never expected or wanted my children to lead that kind of life ... so I find when a woman asks for that kind of money it’s outrageous.” His sister, Mary Bing, says that in both cases her brother has been “reproductively taken advantage of. He has been snookered into being a parent.”

Bing tells people he’d like to be involved in raising Damian Charles Hurley. Hurley, his circle claims, is not rushing to have him back in her life; she’s reportedly suggested recently that Bing could be something of an “uncle” to Damian. Some of her friends think he’s lucky to have gotten that far. Several weeks after giving birth Hurley posed with Damian for the cover of Harper’s Bazaar and gave an interview about being a single mother.

Bing’s plight has served both to put him on the map as a public figure and to generate a wave of sympathy in his hometown. The list of people who have apparently called to offer condolences is long and illustrious. It includes David Geffen, Mick Jagger, Naomi Campbell, and producer Eric Fellner.

Bing recently bumped into Jodie Foster, who commiserated and said no one made such a fuss about finding out who is the father of her kids. He claims he still wants to get married, and even jokes with friends about the contretemps with Hurley. “Sure I’d like to have kids,” he says, “kids, that is, that I voluntarily play a part in conceiving.”

Jimmy Caan doesn’t buy it for a second. “Married? Steve? I think presently he wouldn’t want to be married, because I know he wouldn’t want to cheat_He’s extremely moral.”