Apparently Warren Beatty slept with 12,775 women between the age of 19 and when he got married. How do people get this job?

Wilt Chamberlain is the current ranking champ, having claimed to have slept with 20,000 women (enough that his personal life merits its own Wikipedia article). In his autobiography, he urges the reader to realize that (I’m paraphrasing from memory) “It’s better to have one woman 20,000 times than 20,000 women one time.” Crikey. I wonder if Mr. Beatty feels the same way?

It may not be one of the great remaining mysteries, on a par with the nature of dark matter or the origins of the universe, but the question of how many women Warren Beatty, 72, has slept with certainly seems to have got New York’s media-land in a froth.

Peter Biskind, Beatty’s new biographer, estimates that the famously seductive star of Bonnie and Clyde and Reds has notched up 12,775 sexual conquests, including Isabelle Adjani, Diane Keaton and Madonna. If true, that is impressive. Don Giovanni could only claim a lacklustre 2,065, according to Mozart’s librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte.

Biskind writes in his book, Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America, that he arrived at the figure by “simple arithmetic”. He appears to have worked out the number of days between Beatty losing his virginity at 19 and the date in 1991 when he met Annette Bening on the set of Bugsy and fell into monogamy, and applied the questionable logic that during that entire period Beatty slept with an average of one woman a day. Biskind, an accomplished writer on Hollywood and author of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, adds that for these purposes he ruled out “daytime quickies, drive-bys, casual gropings, stolen kisses and so on”.

(The Guardian: Warren Beatty’s Sexual Conquests)

(Update: Apparently Warren Beatty debunked this.)