Franklin Delano Roosevelt had Lucy Mercer.

Dwight Eisenhower had Kay Summersby.

John F. Kennedy had Judith Exner.

Wayne Hays had Elizabeth Ray.

Gary Hart had Donna Rice.

Benjamin Franklin had Anna-Louise d`Hardancourt Brillon de Jouy. And Madame Helvetius. And Margaret Stevenson. And Polly Hewson. And Madame Foucault. And Countess Diane de Polignac. And Countess Wilhelmina Golowkin. And Catherine Ray. And Georgiana Shipley. And Madame Le Veillard. And Madame Le Roy. And Countess Houdetot. . . .

And, of course, Deborah Read, his wife of 38 years.

Yes, even Ben Franklin-who is ensconced in our national consciousness as a kindly, bespectacled dispenser of aphoristic advice-was a womanizer. Make that especially Ben Franklin.

Most Americans encounter Franklin only in school, where his moralistic side is emphasized in heavily censored versions of his autobiography and

''Poor Richard`s Almanack.'' Thus we associate Franklin with such sentiments as ''Early to bed, Early to rise, Makes a man Healthy, Wealthy and Wise.''

Few Americans ever come across these aphorisms offered by Franklin through Poor Richard:

''After three days men grow weary of a wench, a guest & weather rainy.''

''Neither a Fortress nor a maidenhead will hold out long after they begin to parley.''

''She that paints her Face thinks of her Tail.''

Franklin often philosophized that it was important for a man to be reasonable-since it enabled him to find a reason for doing anything he wanted to do. But Franklin himself was frightened by his sexual appetite, admitting in his autobiography that ''the hard-to-be-governed passion of my youth had hurried me frequently into intrigues with low women that fell in my way.''

Franklin`s siring of an illegitimate son in Philadelphia, and his neglect of his wife, Deborah, have been well documented by historians. But from the age of 50 until the end of his life, a period in which he spent more time on the banks of the Seine and the Thames than the Schuylkill, Franklin had a sucession of relationships with younger women. Some of the affairs were sexual and others were platonic.

Gossip about Franklin and his women followed him throughout his adult life, and once it took the form of verse:

Franklin, tho` plagued with fumbling age

Needs nothing to excite him.

But is too ready to engage

When younger arms invite him.

There was no Johnny Carson around to make jokes about Old Ben. But after his death in 1790, a statue of Franklin was placed near the State House in Philadelphia-and it was widely reported that the marmoreal Ben leered at the wenches that passed by and that every night he climbed down from the pedestal and headed to the nearest pub.

This year the City of Philadelphia is holding a celebration of the bicentennial of its most famous citizen, and the praise is gushing forth of Benjamin Franklin as politician, diplomat, journalist, scientist, publisher, author, philosopher, teacher and inventor.

So before the man is obscured by the rhetoric, let`s examine why he was once called ''the all-embracing Doctor Franklin, America`s upstanding genius.''

''In his morning litany he could pray to be kept from lasciviousness, but when night came lust might come with it. He went to women hungrily, secretly and briefly.''

-Carl Van Doren, ''Benjamin Franklin.''

Franklin was born in 1706 in Boston on a Sunday, which for the Puritans was reason enough for him to be morally weak; they believed that any child born on the Sabbath was conceived on the Sabbath-we have no confirmation of this in Franklin`s case-and was therefore doomed to a life of degeneracy.

As a lad he chafed at taking time for the family prayers, and he suggested to his father that in the interests of saving time, grace should be said just once over the entire winter`s provision of meat. His sexual awakening appears to have occurred at 14, when he noticed the ''doxies'' and

''ramblers'' of Boston Common.

As every good American student knows, Franklin was apprenticed to his half-brother James at the age of 12, published articles in the New England Courant by the age of 16, quarreled with his brother and came to Philadelphia in 1723 at the age of 17, was befriended by the governor of Pennsylvania, William Keith, who offered to set him up in a printing business. To that end, Franklin left for London in 1724 to buy printing equipment-but not before he had begun courting his future wife, Deborah Read, daughter of his Philadelphia landlord.

Franklin arrived in London on Christmas Eve at the age of 18. He was accompanied by his friend, James Ralph, a poet. Franklin and Ralph partied, drank and whored around London for most of 1725. The friendship ended when Franklin made amatory advances to Ralph`s mistress; Ralph was so incensed that he cancelled a debt of 27 pounds he owed Franklin. Franklin returned to Philadelphia in 1726.

In the 18 months he was overseas, he had written to Deborah Read once.

For the next several years, the impecunious Franklin courted a number of wealthy young women in the hopes of landing a wife who would be accompanied by a fat dowry. He also maintained shorter liaisons, and in 1731 one of his mistresses bore him a son. There was speculation at the time that the mother was a maid named Barbara who worked in Franklin`s household, but the identity of the woman remained Franklin`s darkest secret.

Meanwhile, Deborah Read gave up on Franklin and married a potter named Rogers, who soon fled to the West Indies to escape his creditors. He was never heard from again, but without proof of his death Deborah could not legally remarry. Thus it was that in 1736, at the age of 30, Franklin settled down, taking Deborah as his common-law wife and setting up a household above his shop on Market Street.

Historians do not believe that Deborah was the mother of the illegitimate son, but he was received into the household as William Franklin. Depictions and descriptions of Deborah indicate that she was not an attractive woman. Indeed, Franklin affectionately likened her figure to that of a beer mug. Some historians speculate that Franklin`s motivation for marrying Deborah was to have a convenient way to appease his ravenous sexual appetite.

''It is no use blinking the fact that Franklin`s animal instincts and passions were strong and rank, that they led him to the commission of deplorable errata in his life, and that the taint of an irredeemable vulgarity is upon much of this man.''

-Albert Henry Smyth, a Franklin biographer, 1907.