Warren Beatty’s conquest of truth
Sometimes a headline can say enough without one having to read what’s beneath it. Thus this on The Guardian’s website: ”Warren Beatty slept with 12,775 women, claims biographer.” As if you would stop there. Depending on your degree of envy or tolerance of exaggeration, the only respective responses could be (a) How many? or (b) is that all?
Warren Beatty is, of course, the legendary Hollywood lothario whose sexual history, the Almanach de Gotha of Beverly Hills, makes Don Giovanni’s list of conquests (”In Spain, one thousand and three,” sings Leporello in the opera) pathetic and derisory. Woody Allen once declared in a moment of pure enlightenment that he would like to be reincarnated as Warren Beatty’s fingertips. when, not so long ago, Beatty was asked about this on a chat show, he mumbled some nugatory response that proved self-deprecatory humour is not part of his DNA.
This said, Beatty still must be quite amused at the idea he has had sex (surely ‘’slept with” is too coy a term, especially since, at that alleged rate, sleep could hardly have been an option) with 12,775 women. such is the reckoning of Peter Biskind, the author of Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America. Beatty’s lawyer, however, has dismissed the figure as ”baloney”. I’m sure it is not lost on mr Attorney or his client that baloney is, of course, a lengthy sausage originating from Bologna.
Biskind’s deductions were, he says, ‘’simple arithmetic”. He worked out the number of days between Beatty losing his virginity in 1956 at the age of 19, and the date in 1991 when he met Annette Bening, who is still his wife, and mother to their four children. Biskind’s logic – logical, I suppose, but questionable – is based on the supposition that, during this period, Beatty slept with an average of one woman a day. Biskind says his calculations ruled out ”daytime quickies, drive-bys, casual gropings, stolen kisses and so on”.
Two questions arise. the first is to do with timing. Let’s say that Beatty made love to each of his 12,775 women for an average of 15 minutes (highly debatable, I know, but a convenient bedmark considering the circumstances). This makes a total of 191,625 minutes, or 3193.75 hours, or 133.06 days. This doesn’t sound that taxing, especially when you consider this figure works out to about .364 of a year over 35 years of once-a-night lovemaking. But factor in essential logistics such as chat-up time, pre-dinner drinks, the meal itself, home to watch a rerun of Bonnie and Clyde; then, after the obligatory 15 minutes, assurances of everlasting fidelity, plans for the next date or dirty weekend in Vegas (even if they didn’t materialise), and calling and waiting for the taxi home – that adds hours to each conquest. How did Beatty find the time to make all those films? Reds could, with a bit of thought for Beatty’s affair with his co-star, Diane Keaton, have easily become Reds under the Beds.
The second question is more moralistic. Why did Warren Beatty feel compelled to take so many women to bed? even allowing for the fact he might have bedded someone more than once (is double-dipping an appropriate term?), the grand total is still staggering. But Peter Biskind, instead of taking the moral high-ground, plummets to the basement. ”If you looked like him and were gifted with the talent for seduction that was his, why not? He did it because he could, thank you very much, Dr Freud!” Biskind writes.
Well, yes. what amazes me more than such slapdash psychology is how such assertions, wedded as they are to arithmetic of dubious provenance, could be taken seriously in a book that purports to be credible biography. In American publishing, it seems, salaciousness isn’t secondary to truth: it becomes it.
In England or, for that matter, Australia, such a book would not fare well under our defamation laws. (Imagine, for a moment, if the same things were said about Jack Thompson or Hugh Jackman.) But in the good old US of A, it’s OK to unreel the baloney, whatever the consequences.
Michael Shmith is a senior writer.
