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Adam West, the star of the 60’s television adaptation of Batman, died last week at the age of 88 after a short battle with leukemia.
Batman spanned just three seasons and 120 episodes, but gained a huge cult following for its snarky double entendres and nostalgia-inducing themes. West–the face of the franchise–took full advantage of his ascension to fame, having sex with the endless chain of groupies that would throw themselves at him day and night. According to Page Six, West and co-star Burt Ward, who played sidekick Robin, would have sex constantly in between scenes, but due to the physical limitations of the costume, they’d have to have quickies.
West explained:
“Burt and I were like kids in a candy store. It was the Swinging Sixties with free love and women threw themselves at us. I remember one night with eight different women. Orgy is a harsh word, but it was eight at one time. I’d have young female co-stars in my dressing room at 7:45 in the morning.”
Burt Ward, now 71, claimed West opened him up to a whole new world as he arrived on set as an innocent youngster.
“When I entered ‘Batman’ as a naive 20-year-old who had only dated a couple of girls, I met Adam West, who immediately introduced me to the wildest sexual debauchery that you can imagine. We often found that women were banging on our windows while we were bedded down with other women.”
He added: “We’re talking about wild times in the dressing rooms, on the set, between the shots, in the lunch wagon. And then of course, doing the personal appearances on the weekend, that’s where it really got wild. And I have to be honest with you, we became like sexual vampires.”
After the show ended in 1968, West’s Bruce Wayne fame didn’t take him to the acting heights he hoped. He picked up a few acting roles in between swigs of the bottle, but admitted to becoming very “self-destructive.” He soon found himself appearing in safety ads and paying the bills through personal paid appearances. The low point of his career was being shot out of a cannon at a carnival in Indiana dressed in his Batman outfit.
West later supplied the voice of Mayor Adam West, the bizarre leader of Quahog, Rhode Island, on Family Guy.
Despite his career trajectory failing to live up to the early Batman days, there’s not an average Joe on the planet who doesn’t envy West’s life.
[h/t Page Six]