Vice-obsessed film writer Peter Biskind, best known for the book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-And Rock ‘N Roll Generation Saved Hollywood, has a new biography coming out of Warren Beatty. The most interesting thing to me about Beatty is how an actor who could have easily done just fine on his good looks, charisma, and acting ability also became one of the most important filmmakers of the later 20th century. But that’s me and I’m weird.
True to form for Biskind, he has grabbed headlines with an estimate that Beatty, who in his prime was definitely noted for being one of the world’s most avid heterosexuals, might have slept with as many as 12,775 women, a number inflated to “almost 13,000” by caption writers. This was all presumably between losing his virginity at 20 in 1957 (kind of late for a future mega-multi-stud, even in the fifties) and settling down with Annette Bening to start a family in the early nineties.
Now, if we simply multiply 365 days by 33 years, the number we get is 12,045. That means that Beatty would have had to sleep with at least an average of a different woman every day, plus add in a good number of various menages or multi-partner days while also managing to help redefine Hollywood movies during the sixties, seventies, and eighties. Not impossible, I suppose but a guy’s gotta sleep and work and eat and stuff.
Naturally, the Beatty camp has shot back and everyone has clarified that, while Beatty allowed himself to be interviewed by Biskind, the book it is in no way an authorized biography, as some outlets had wrongly stated.
Anne Thompson writes that “Beatty works in mysterious ways.” Absolutely. Anyone who’s seen one of his Barbara Walters interviews can see that the extremely intelligent Beatty is a remarkably cagey fellow in dealing with the gossip-loving press and, based on his reputation, it’s easy to assume that Beatty did sleep with a number of women most of us would regard as enormous, even if this particularly number seems a bit absurd. This, my friends, is not news. Absent moral qualms and given the ability to easily bed innumerable beauties, so, perhaps, would most of us males.
But, what’s really interesting to me is that Beatty’s career-defining role which presumably upped his already massive sexual stock into the stratosphere, was playing a guy who loved exactly one woman and couldn’t even make love to her — not physically, anyhow. That’s how it works sometimes.
