It's not exactly the kind of thing that can easily be confirmed, but among the traits that certain famous getbiggers are famous for is their promiscuity. For every "purity ring"-wearing Jonas Brother, there are five or ten or fifty male celebrities who claim to, or are rumored to, or are assumed to, have had more sex partners than you can shake a stick at (if that's your idea of a good time, to quote Groucho Marx).
So who have been some of the most famous names that have had the most "conquests" (or at least worked hardest to acquire such a reputation)?
* Warren Beatty
In his heyday in the 1960s and 1970s, Beatty was one of Hollywood's top male sex symbols, though really he didn't exactly star in a lot of critically acclaimed films or box office smashes.
Beatty's reputation was not only that he was highly sought after by his female fans, but that he fully exploited his sex symbol status. Biographer Peter Biskind estimates Beatty managed 12,775 partners before settling down with just one in 1992-wife Annette Bening, a figure he says doesn't even include such things as "daytime quickies." (Why? What time of day does it have to be to count as sex?) Given that there's no way anyone other than Beatty could know how many people he's slept with, plus the fact that he'd likely be dead or at least really, really tired if that figure were even close to accurate (especially since evidently you have to have sex for a substantial period of time for it not to be a quickie and thus count toward the total), plus the fact that the number is laughably precise, it's safe to assume that the good Mr. Biskind acquired that figure somewhere from the general region of his derriere. But even 10% of that is pretty darn impressive.
* Jerry Buss
By his lifestyle one can only assume that Los Angeles Lakers owner Jerry Buss's idol is Hugh Hefner (which is likely true for about 80% of males who have any awareness who Hugh Hefner even is any more, though only about 1% of that 80% would admit it to their wife or girlfriend).
The septuagenarian Buss has enjoyed the company of at least hundreds of women-almost all teenagers or close to it-over the years, proving yet again that money can indeed buy happiness.
* Fidel Castro
Rebel leader and long time Cuban Presidente Castro led a successful revolution against incalculable odds, defied 11 American presidents, dodged hundreds of assassination plots and terrorist attacks by those acting for the world's greatest superpower, and changed the history of the 20th century.
But you want to know what's really impressive? Dude slept with 35,000 chicks.
Or so documentarian Ian Halperin was told by a Cuban official.
Allegedly, for decades, every day Castro had at least one woman brought to him in the afternoon and one at night, and sometimes one or more additional women at other times.
Certainly when you have other people assigned to do all the recruitment and screening and delivery and such, and you have to do absolutely nothing but be present when your lovers are delivered to you so you can sleep with them, it's a heck of a lot easier to run up a high score than if you were hitting the bars and the singles ads. But 35,000? Uh, no. Not buying it.
A lot? Certainly. More than Warren Beatty? Probably. Five figures. Well, maybe, though even that's stretching it. But no way 35,000.
* Wilt Chamberlain
One of the most famous and talked about claims ever written in an autobiography was basketball legend Wilt Chamberlain's assertion that he had had over 20,000 different sex partners in his life. Besides inspiring an endless number of "greatest scorer in NBA history" quips (Chamberlain actually was the number one scorer in NBA history when he retired by the way, though he's dropped to fourth now), his claim also sent people scurrying to do the math.
What they discovered is that even if he started quite young and continued until the day his autobiography was published, Chamberlain would have needed to have sex with between one and two new women on average every single day, including on the days of basketball games, when he was sick, when he was injured, when he was flying cross country, etc.
If anyone were physically capable of such a feat, presumably it would be one of the all time freakishly great athletes. But that's a big "if." Once again one suspects just a little bit (or a lot) of exaggeration here.
But what about between Wilt the Stilt and Castro? Chamberlain's got the big edge physically, but Castro has the big edge in terms of having an efficient delivery system. Chamberlain still presumably had to do a certain amount of his own work in meeting and seducing people.
So that makes it very, very close. But let's give the edge to Chamberlain.
By the way, feigning surprise at all the publicity his claim got when his autobiography was released, Chamberlain insisted that in no way was he bragging, that in fact he was confessing that he must not be a very good lover since he had to keep sleeping with new women rather than getting repeat customers.
Sure Wilt.
* Hugh Hefner
Hefner was a highly important social and cultural figure starting in the 1950s. In its time, Playboy was to beautiful women what Webster's is to dictionaries. Ultimately Playboy faded to a position of far less significance-ironically, less as a result of the prudes and censors that have always been its nemesis, and more due to the legal and technological changes that made far, far harder core pornography very readily available, and largely free.
But through it all, Hef has made sure to enjoy every moment of his life to the maximum that he is capable, which means spending a great deal of time in the presence of some of the most desirable women in the world.
The number of his partners over the years is estimated somewhere in the four figures, so Hefner is no slouch in the quantity department to go along with the quality. Parties at the Playboy Mansion provided ample opportunity for group sex, and experimentation of all kinds.
Nowadays the octogenarian Hefner is routinely ridiculed, hated, insulted, pitied, attacked, and denounced for his continued penchant for curvaceous young women in their teens and 20s with spectacular bodies (100% of which critics, by the way, are folks not in a position to have sex with countless curvaceous young women in their teens and 20s with spectacular bodies).
And he just seems really broken up about that....
* Julio Iglesias
Famous for his duet with Willie Nelson To All the Girls I've Loved Before, if Latin heart throb Iglesias ever had to actually list all the girls of that song by name, we could be here for awhile.
Asked to comment on multiple press reports (presumably pulled out of thin air) that he had slept with a whopping 3,000 women in his life, Iglesias laughed and immediately denied that the figure was accurate, adding that presumably they were only counting up until about 1976 and missing all the ones after that.
And since we know guys always tell the truth about such things, that pretty much settles that.
* Magic Johnson
Perhaps he could never hope to approach the numbers put up by his Laker predecessor Chamberlain, but you can't say Magic didn't give it his best shot.
Cashing in fully on his celebrity status, Johnson made the acquaintance of many an aspiring actress or model in Los Angeles. He also had a habit of entertaining his lady friends in the Laker locker room after a game, often enjoying a quickie before returning to the court for postgame interviews. He estimates he had thousands of partners overall, peaking at approximately 300 in his most successful year.
Throughout Johnson's years of partying, there were persistent rumors that more than a few of those thousands were not female, though he never admitted as much. When he was diagnosed with the HIV virus in 1991, many considered those rumors basically confirmed, though again he stuck to his story.
* Joe Namath
Unlike most allegedly promiscuous famous males, no wild estimates in the four or five figures of how many women Broadway Joe has slept with have been produced, not even by him. It's possible it's really not that huge a number.
But one suspects that Namath got all the action he wanted, however much that happened to be. In the late 1960s and into the '70s, as the starting quarterback of the Jets and the owner of a Super Bowl ring obtained in one of the greatest upsets in NFL history, he was the toast of New York. His good looks, mellow style, and love of the good life made him as successful off the field as he was on.
Maybe more so. Though Namath made the Pro Football Hall of Fame, his selection is considered one of the more dubious ones. His career was not very long, and the numbers he put up overall were pedestrian at best, mainly because his knees were in terrible, terrible shape his whole career, and he just couldn't hold up physically. What he had was as much pure potential as virtually anyone who has ever played the position of quarterback-in that sense he was not overrated-but his career was more a matter of moments of greatness and plenty of "what could have been."
It's entirely possible Namath played up to his potential more with the ladies than in the NFL.
* Babe Ruth
Before Chamberlain's mind-boggling claims, perhaps no Hall of Fame athlete in any sport had had a reputation for womanizing to match that of Yankee immortal Babe Ruth.
And with Ruth, it wasn't just the sex, it was across the board debauchery. Yes, Ruth enjoyed the ladies, but he also enjoyed booze, cigars, gambling, prodigious amounts of food, and staying out all night.
He missed the better part of one season with syphilis. (Of course it was not reported as such at the time. The team claimed instead that the Babe had been felled by gastrointestinal troubles due to consuming too many hot dogs-actually not an implausible claim, given his gluttonous ways.) Another season he had to get an advance on his entire year's salary because he had already spent and gambled the money away.
Ruth's teammate Bob Meusel claimed that the Babe had a habit of routinely sleeping with multiple women in the same night, stepping outside into the common area after finishing with each to take a break and smoke a cigar. Meusel often lost track of just how many women Ruth had, but then he would glance down at Ruth's ash tray to count the cigar butts. Babe's record? On at least one occasion, seven cigar butts accumulated in that ash tray.
Unlike Namath, Ruth put up spectacular numbers on the field. But like Namath, you can make the case that he didn't come close to living up to his potential. As it is he would make anyone's top five list of greatest baseball players of all time, and might well get the most number one votes. And that's with abusing his body throughout his career. Imagine how much longer he could have played, and how much better he could have played had he actually cut down on the vices and focused on keeping himself in top shape, like Cal Ripken, Jr. and so many contemporary and recent players. Not only would his records still stand, but few players if any would even be halfway to some of them.
What is it with the Yankees and debauchery, by the way? As great as Hall of Famer Mickey Mantle was, he too no doubt could have achieved far more on the field if he hadn't been drunk a good portion of his career. In modern times, Yankee great Derek Jeter is said to "get around" about as much as any star athlete (though in his case his reported sexual success has not been accompanied by a general abuse of his body, as he in fact is an excellent athlete in excellent shape).
* Charlie Sheen
Sheen in real life is apparently at least as fond of the womanizing lifestyle as his character in the long-running CBS comedy Two and a Half Men. The actor claims to have been with more than 5,000 women, a figure which, if true, would dwarf that of the vast majority of even the most lascivious Hollywood stars. Jack Nicholson, by comparison, who has been at it for a lot more years, has reportedly only recently cracked the 2,000 level. There wouldn't be many ahead of Sheen, aside from Beatty, depending on how serious you take the estimates of the latter's conquests.
Like Castro, Sheen seems to have discovered a way to increase his total by eliminating a great deal of the necessary groundwork most people have to do to get someone to sleep with them. Reportedly, he has a penchant for working girls, which means about the only time and effort he has to put into seduction is to keep Heidi Fleiss's phone number and a credit card on him at all times.
* Gene Simmons
No doubt any number of rock stars could be placed on this list, but let's let Gene Simmons of KISS be a sort of stand-in for all of them.
The well-painted Simmons insists that his total number of partners by now is at or above the 5,000 level, and that he takes a photo of each one for a special scrapbook he keeps for that purpose.
Yes, it's fun indeed to have groupies.
Among the more memorable of his encounters, he reports, is the young lady who had an elaborate Gene Simmons face tattoo on her, um, nether regions. Which makes one wonder about the strange psychological position that would put Simmons in, of looking down at one's intimate partner, and seeing oneself looking back.
With promiscuous famous males far more than with females, you'll notice, there are typically specific (very large) numbers floating around, for people to debate or be in awe of (or angrily denounce), with as often as not the source of those numbers being the celebrity himself.
No Wilt, you're not bragging. Not bragging at all.
