Why We're Still Talking About 79-Year-Old Warren Beatty's Long-Ago Sexual Exploits
In DepthRecently, 79-year-old Warren Beatty sat down with AARP Magazine and, in the course of the interview that followed, attempted to clarify something: He has not actually slept with 12,775 women. Imagine being 79 and still feeling obliged to deny such a figure! But then, the legend of Warren Beatty’s dick has a long Hollywood history.
AARP informs its readership (in a section of the magazine seemingly titled “Movies for Grownups”):
He insists there is wild hyperbole in his reputation as a manslut and disputes the mathematics of the 12,775 women one of his biographers, Peter Biskind, has claimed for him. “Think about it, sleeping with 12,775 people,” he says, not without a certain amount of glee. “That would mean not just that there were multiple people a day, but that there was no repetition.”
So let’s say, for the sake of argument, it wasn’t 12,775. Let’s say it was a few hundred. Why is every star biography, every tabloid report, about what a great lover he was? And why is it nobody seems mad at him? Forget the quantity; everyone wants to know the secret of bedding half of Hollywood and not having them want you dead.
Beatty just blinks at me innocently, with a kind of guileless sincerity. It’s the look he gives pretty much everyone in Shampoo. “Look, I never misled anyone,” he says. “And … and I’m a nice guy.”
That specific, astronomical number dates back to 2010 and the biography Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America. Author Peter Biskind estimated/guesstimated that Beatty had bedded 12,775 women. How he arrived at that number, according to the book:
How many women were there? Easier to count the stars in the sky. But devotees of the Guinness Book of Records want to know. Beatty used to say that he couldn’t get to sleep at night without having sex. It was part of his routine, like flossing. This was who he was. As the evening progressed, he would disappear with his little back book, looking for a phone. Simple arithmetic tells us that if he had no more than one partner a night—and often there were several—over a period, say, three and a half decades, from the mid-1950s, when he arrived in New York, to 1991, when he met Annette Bening, and allowing for the stretches when he was with the same woman, more or less, we can arrive at a figure of 12,775 women, give or take, a figure that does not include daytime quickies, drive-by blowjobs, casual gropings, stolen kisses, and so on.
Even six years ago ABC News reported Beatty’s lawyer was denying the number, calling it “absurd,” “baloney,” and insisting that, “Somebody must have made it up.”