Tiger now looks little better than an also-ran

Opinion

The humiliation of Tiger Woods continues.

Exposed as a rotten husband and fraudulent family man, he had the consolation of becoming the new benchmark for compulsive womanising.

But even that dubious distinction has gone the way of everything else.

Woods' reputation as a lothario has deflated like a party balloon following the revelation that Hollywood star Warren Beatty has slept with 12,775 women.

Should he deign to acknowledge Woods' paltry tally of 15 or so ornamental airheads, Beatty would surely recycle Muhammad Ali's taunt: "Is that all you got, chump?"

The claim, which appears in a new biography of Beatty by Peter Biskind, puts a whole new slant on the Carly Simon song You're So Vain (I Bet You Think This Song is About You).

Having - it almost goes without saying - joined the cast of thousands, Simon let it be known that the song was about Beatty.

In light of what we now know, one can only say: "No bloody wonder." Considering the importance society places on being attractive to the opposite sex, you could hardly blame Beatty for being quietly pleased with himself.

Beatty is threatening to sue, which seems strange.

In the first place, the case would be one of the most lurid in legal history; when it was all over Beatty's private life would be a contradiction in terms.

Secondly, a defamation action would beg the question: what exactly is Beatty objecting to here?

Rather than being branded a paedophile or a war criminal, or even a lousy actor, he has been outed as the greatest lover of his generation.

So how did Biskind arrive at the figure of 12,775, which, by the way, doesn't include day-time quickies or "drive-bys", whatever they are?

At first blush, his explanation - "simple arithmetic" - seems disingenuous, but that's exactly what it is.

Beatty, now 72, apparently lost his virginity at the age of 20, so assuming he gave up sleeping around when he married Annette Bening in 1992, he was "active" for 35 years.

12,775 divided by 35 equals 365. Biskind's working premise, it would seem, is that Beatty slept with a different woman every day for 35 years on the trot.

The implications are mind-boggling. For a start, repeats don't count. Beatty was "romantically linked", as they say, with the likes of Julie Christie, Jane Fonda, Isabelle Adjani and, perplexingly, Madonna, so he was either routinely unfaithful or as busy as the proverbial one-armed paper-hanger when between relationships.

Did he take Christmas Day off? Did he suspend his routine for funerals, presidential elections, or the Academy Awards? Was he on the job when President Kennedy was assassinated or the Berlin Wall came down?

Did he ever simply not feel like it?

Didn't he ever get man flu which, as we now know, renders the slightest physical effort impossible?

Or was his daily assignation part of the natural order of things, like night following day and the sun sinking in the west?

Where did he find them all?

Perhaps more to the point, where did he find the time, considering he was a perfectionist who drove others to distraction with his painstaking work habits, and a political activist who harboured ambitions of following Ronald Reagan's path from Hollywood to the White House?

Writing about the making of Bonnie and Clyde in his 1998 book, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Biskind portrays Beatty as a multi-tasker who made use of every minute God gave him:

"When Beatty wasn't acting, producing or arguing with [director Arthur] Penn, he was in his Winnebago. Girls clambered in and out at all hours of the day and night.

"The cast and crew watched it rock back and forth like a ship upon the sea."

Elsewhere, Biskind has reported that Beatty modelled himself on Charlie Feldman, the legendary agent and producer who was a key Hollywood player from the mid-1930s until his death in 1968.

A notorious charmer, Feldman represented a galaxy of stars including Greta Garbo, Marilyn Monroe, and John Wayne.

He broke the studio contract system by forcing the studios to pay actors on a film-by-film basis, thereby ushering in the era of $30 million-a-film salaries, and pioneered the technique known as "packaging" - putting together an idea, a star, a writer and a director and selling it as a package deal.

One of Feldman's biggest hits was the comedy What's New, Pussycat?

Beatty gave him the title: it was his standard opening gambit.

Biskind's astounding claim raises many questions, some of which may only be answered if Beatty donates his body to science. The most intriguing question of all, however, is this: what has Annette Bening got that the other 12,774 haven't?