The Book of the Dead

by John Mitchinson

  Kinsey’s crusade to rid the world of sexual ignorance started in his own bedroom. His marriage to Clara McMillen—always known as “Mac”—in 1921 wasn’t consummated for several months. This may have had something to do with his unusually large penis and her short stature, but they hardly gave themselves the best start. For their honeymoon they went on a grueling climbing expedition, and their first attempts at sex were on a mountainside in the middle of a storm. The gradual release of personal documents by the Kinsey Institute means we now know that the Kinseys’ marriage and sex life were liberated in a way that H. G. Wells could only dream of. They loved nudism and took their clothes off whenever they decently could. They operated a system of interacting open marriages with colleagues at the Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction, which Kinsey had founded in 1947. He had casual affairs with many of his colleagues, male and female. Many of his staff had affairs with Clara. During a research trip to Chicago, he was delighted to find an outlet for his homosexual urges, and frequently went cottaging among the gay community there. Kinsey was particularly keen to get the man-on-man taboo out in the open, and when one of his assistants confessed that he had no experience of homosexuality, Kinsey said he could personally help him “tick that box.”

  He also experimented with masochism, inserting objects into his urethra while masturbating, enjoying the pleasure and the pain equally. As this organ became less sensitive over the years, he started putting larger and larger things up it. By 1949 he was able to insert pencils into his penis and even a toothbrush, bristles first. He also tried self-piercing, which culminated with his successfully circumcising himself with a penknife in the bath. Kinsey was proud to call himself “unshockable.” As he was keen to drill into his researchers, the key thing was gathering data: “We are the recorders and reporters of facts—not the judges of the behaviors we describe.” The results were often controversial; he reported that almost half of American men had had a homosexual experience, that almost half of married men had committed adultery, and that a quarter of married women found their sex life unsatisfactory.

  To Kinsey anything was “biologically normal” provided it was performed by a sizable number of people—or animals. He would have found the experiences of Casanova or Cora Pearl interesting but unremarkable. He once said that “the only unnatural sex act is one which you cannot perform.” This was mind-blowing stuff for the 1950s and ushered in attitudinal changes from which our society is still reeling. The modern view of sex—where masturbation isn’t evil or harmful, homosexuality is widespread, and enjoying sex doesn’t mean you are depraved—owes a huge amount to Kinsey’s work. By documenting behavior that many people at the time thought was “abnormal” and showing how widespread it actually was, he helped create a culture where sex could be seen as just another aspect of ordinary life.

  Some people didn’t wait for Alfred Kinsey to come along to know they needn’t be ashamed of their sexual desires, among them the actress Tallulah Bankhead (1902–68), who bragged that she had more than five hundred lovers. When the Kinsey report was published, she’d seen it all before: “The good doctor’s clinical notes were old hat to me,” she remarked.

  As a girl Tallulah was short and plump, weighing almost 150 pounds and just 5 feet 2 inches tall, but by the age of fifteen she had shed enough puppy fat to win a beauty contest in her hometown, Montgomery, Alabama. This encouraged her to head for New York to try her luck as an actress. She went on to appear in more than fifty plays and eighteen films, with her final appearance as a character called the Black Widow in a 1967 episode of Batman. Early on, she got a reputation for partying, and was a regular user of cocaine and marijuana. She was annoyed by what she saw as petit bourgeois fears about drug misuse, but chose humor to confront it: “Cocaine isn’t addictive,” she said, “I should know: I’ve been using it for years.” She was equally blasé about sex. She was once asked if it was true that she had been raped as a twelve-year-old on the drive of her father’s home. “Yes, it was awful, truly awful,” she said. “You see, we had so much gravel.”

  Her early career on Broadway was a series of false starts, but in 1923 she came to London to appear in a play called The Dancers opposite the suave elder statesman of the West End stage, Gerald du Maurier. Her lustrous hair, husky voice, and exuberant cartwheels turned her into an overnight star. The writer and actor Emlyn Williams wrote that her voice “was steeped as deep in sex as the human voice can go without drowning.” Her most devoted fans were her Gallery Girls, a group of Cockney teenagers who cheered, stamped their feet, and threw flowers onto the stage whenever she said a line. The writer Arnold Bennett was dazzled:

  Ordinary stars get “hands.” If Tallulah gets a “hand” it is not heard. What is heard is a terrific, wild, passionate, hysterical roar and shriek. Only the phrase of the Psalmist can describe it: “God is gone up with a shout.”

  Winston Churchill was a regular at her shows and before long “to Tallulah” had become a verb. She told an American reporter: “Over here they like me to ‘Tallulah.’ You know—dance and sing and romp and fluff my hair and play reckless parts.” After a triumphant and extravagant eight years, she returned to the United States to be signed up by Paramount, which planned to make her “the new Dietrich.” They didn’t—they made a string of turkeys. There was something about the nature of film that failed to capture what made her so sexy and delicious in the flesh. She continued to make the occasional movie, but through the 1930s and 1940s, her best work was on Broadway.

  Tallulah was bisexual but liked to joke that she couldn’t be a lesbian because “they have no sense of humor,” and she once let slip that she could never have an orgasm with anyone she was in love with. The only man she truly loved was an English aristocrat called Napier Sturt Alington, known as “Naps,” who was also bisexual. He married someone else, became a captain in the Royal Air Force, and died in Cairo on active service in 1940. Tallulah married only once, in 1937, to the bit-part actor John Emery. She told friends that she had chosen him because he was “hung like John Barrymore,” but later confided that “the weapon may be of admirable proportions but the shot is weak.” They never had children and were divorced after four years. When she was thirty, Tallulah had to have a hysterectomy brought on by a bad case of gonorrhea, an infection she blamed on going to bed with Gary Cooper. Leaving hospital in a very weakened condition, and having lost a lot of weight, she barked at her doctor, “Don’t for one minute think this has taught me a lesson!”

  She was the mistress of the one-liner. When a former lover came up to her excitedly babbling that he hadn’t seen her for many years, she shot back: “I thought I told you to wait in the car.” Arranging an assignation, she scribbled a note: “I’ll come and make love to you at five o’clock. If I’m late start without me.” She talked nonstop: One of her friends followed her around for a day, timing her with a stopwatch, and estimated that she spoke seventy thousand words, the length of a short novel. As the Hollywood publicist Howard Ditz wearily remarked, “A day away from Tallulah is like a month in the country.” Sometimes her mouth got her into serious trouble. Speaking to a fan magazine in 1932, Tallulah confessed that she hadn’t had an affair for six months, adding, “Six months is a long, long while, I WANT A MAN!” This drew a sharp reprimand from Will Hays, Hollywood’s censor and moral guardian, for allowing a star to indulge in “verbal moral turpitude.”

  Tallulah took her clothes off in public so often that her friend Estelle Winwood asked, “Why do you do that, Tallulah? You have such pretty frocks.” She was notorious for not wearing underwear, and delighted in showing off the fact to as many people as possible. When the film crew complained of her regular exposures on the set of Lifeboat in 1944, Alfred Hitchcock’s laconic reply was: “I don’t know whether that’s a concern for wardrobe or hairdressing.”

  Interviewing Tallulah was never easy. When Time magazine tried it in 1948, their reporters came away bemused. She had played the piano, performed some ballet, told
jokes, done impersonations, made them lunch, plied them with mint juleps, and talked without pause—accompanied by several dogs and her free-flying budgie, Gaylord, whom she had taught to drink champagne. (Luckily, by that time, she had got rid of her pet lion, Winston, and her chimp, King Kong.) As usual, her conversation was peppered with bon mots, which included, “I never think out anything, dahling; I do it instinctively or not at all. I do things I’d loathe in anybody else.” Trying to pinpoint her age, the reporters sought verification from her older sister, Eugenia, who sighed: “Every time Tallulah knocks a year off her age, I have to, too. I’m not sure how long I can keep it up.”

  Success, as opposed to notoriety, returned to her life from two unexpected quarters. In 1950 she became the host of a weekly celebrity talk radio slot called The Big Show. It featured Tallulah reciting Dorothy Parker monologues, interviewing other stars, and introducing comic turns by the likes of Jimmy Durante and Groucho Marx. Held together by her unpredictable charm, it became an instant hit. Then two years later her autobiography Tallulah went straight to the top of the bestseller lists. She had recorded most of it on a tape recorder and it reads like one long, frank, funny, opinionated Tallulah monologue.

  This welcome return to the limelight couldn’t mask her rapid descent into dependency on drink and sleeping pills. She recruited a bevy of young men as her assistants, calling them her “caddies.” Although they were usually gay, they often had to sleep in her bed because she was terrified of being alone. At night, one of her boys would tape her wrists together to stop her taking any more pills. Raddled, frequently irrational, her looks a grim parody of her former beauty, she still had her sense of humor. Not long before she died, a fan approached her and asked if she was Tallulah Bankhead. “Well, I’m what’s left of her, darling,” she replied.

  Long after her death, declassified British government papers revealed that Miss Bankhead had been investigated by MI5 in the 1920s over allegations that she had corrupted the morals of pupils at Eton with indecent and unnatural acts. No conclusive proof was ever found.

  If there is one thing this chapter does prove conclusively, especially in the work of Alfred Kinsey, it is that between the sheets at least, there is no such thing as normal. Or as Woody Allen put it, “Sex between a man and a woman can be a beautiful thing—provided you’re between the right man and the right woman.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Man Cannot Live by Bread Alone

  Helena, Comtesse de Noailles—George Fordyce—Elizabeth, Empress of Austria—Dr. John Harvey Kellogg—Henry Ford—George Washington Carver—Howard Hughes

  Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are.

  JEAN ANTHELME BRILLAT-SAVARIN (1755–1826)

  What would Brillat-Savarin have made of Aristotle, who liked camel meat and fried pregnant cicadas, or Friedrich Nietzsche, who gave up alcohol and tobacco and spent a lot of time at the local pastry shop wolfing down cakes and pies?

  Trickier still would have been Pliny the Elder, whose larder contained fresh gladiator blood (as a cure for epilepsy), hares’ testicles (for relief of pain in the loins), and lynx urine (sore-throat gargle).

  Ludicrous though these remedies sound, we should be careful before we write them off. Dietetics is a more complex science than astrophysics—we know less about the effects of the food we eat than we do about the galaxies.

  Nothing brings the dead more vividly to life than finding out what they ate. It makes the famous seem more human, and shines a light on the obscure.

  We know very little about the life of Helena, Comtesse de Noailles (1824–1908), but we know quite a lot about her theories on food and health. Born into the English aristocracy, she had a short-lived marriage to a French nobleman and her only child died at birth. Fabulously rich but bored much of the time, Helena migrated between her houses in England, Paris, Montpellier, and the French Riviera. In her fortieth year, she saw a striking portrait of a girl aged about six by the Parisian society painter Ernest Hébert (1817–1908). She asked to buy the picture but was told it had already been sold to Baron James de Rothschild. Undaunted, she decided that if she couldn’t own the painting she would acquire its real-life subject instead. She discovered that the child, Maria, had been brought to Paris by her feckless Italian father, Domenico, and that he was willing to allow her to be “adopted” for two bags of gold, with which he planned to return to Italy and set up his own vineyard. He made only two conditions: that the girl would be brought up as a Catholic and that she would be treated as an equal, not a servant. The comtesse agreed and Maria’s life changed forever.

  It was a privileged but peculiar existence. The regulations laid down by the comtesse dominated Maria’s whole childhood and, in due course, the lives of her English husband and their two children as well. They were kept in line by the threat of losing the inheritance promised by their “grandmother,” and dread forebodings passed around the family breakfast table whenever an envelope arrived from France embossed with a capital N.

  Loose clothing was one of Madame de Noailles’s iron rules. So when Maria was sent to a Catholic boarding school in Sussex, she was excused from wearing a school uniform. She also had to have her own exclusive supply of fresh milk. This was provided by the comtesse’s personal dairy herd, installed on the grounds of a large house she had bought on the nearby downs. Each winter, the comtesse left England for fear of catching the flu, and later instructed Maria to do the same with her children in the autumn, the climate being especially unhealthy when the leaves were falling, especially from the oak trees, of which, she said, England had too many.

  At mealtimes Helena de Noailles’s eccentricities really came to the fore. When Maria and her children came to visit, she would eat with them only if her food was served on plates hidden from view by a two-foot-high silk screen. She never revealed why.

  The comtesse always slept with a loaded pistol beside her bed, even when she stayed in a hotel, where she also demanded that a string of fresh onions be hung on the door to ward off infection. A visitor to her bedchamber noted the silk stockings stuffed with squirrel fur wrapped around her forehead and chin to prevent the formation of wrinkles. To avoid bronchitis, she would eat plate after plate of fresh herring roe. Once Maria and her husband received a gift from the comtesse of three dozen bottles of Bordeaux and fifty bottles of port. Along with the alcohol came instructions that they should drink the port only at sunset mixed with a little sugar. It was to be diluted with soft rainwater collected from the roof of their house by the servants, under strict supervision by Maria’s husband, Philip.

  Helena was sprightly and energetic into her mideighties, vigilant for the smallest error. Her granddaughter, named Helena in her honor, recalled the comtesse shrieking hysterically at the staff because one of the blue silk covers on her bedroom door handle had fallen off. The glare from the naked brass was, she said, damaging to the eyes. A similar theory led her to replace the lower half of all her windowpanes with red glass, which, she explained, was both healthier and more cheerful. And cows were essential. As well as fresh milk, they produced methane: her herds were always encouraged to graze near the open windows of her houses. She suggested to her grandson Philip that instead of enrolling at medical school he should become a vet, thus contributing much more to the good of humanity. She said she had read in the Royal Agricultural Review that “children brought up on good milk seldom become drunkards.” If Philip switched to veterinary medicine, she promised, she would give him some money from the sale of land in England, which would otherwise be going to help needy Armenians. He declined.

  On one occasion, Maria and her children were summoned to the south of France to mingle with polite society. They were under strict instructions to accept no invitations to afternoon tea at five o’clock. This was the hour when the comtesse believed most people caught the flu, not by mixing with other people but because there was a dangerous “miasma” in the air at the end of the day. One of her visitors made the mistake of wearing high heels.
After the comtesse had asked to examine them, she threw them onto the fire. Flat, broad shoes, she always said, were better for the general health, and in 1866, she wrote a letter to the Medical Times and Gazette extolling the benefits of going barefoot:

  Look at the magnificent gait of a barefoot Highland girl and the elastic play of every muscle, and compare her feet with those of girls who have been tortured in boots, too short or too narrow at the toes…. As for cleanliness, feet freely exposed to the air are not offensive, but the smell of unwashed feet enclosed in dirtier stockings and shoes is very unwholesome, whereas no one ever felt disgusted at the little bare brown feet of Italian peasant children.

  When Helena de Noailles died, her doctors said she had lasted longer than expected, subsisting largely on a diet of champagne and, of course, fresh milk.

  In her will, she endowed an orphanage for the daughters of clergymen, where, even after death, her regulations lived on. Any potential inmates were to have their skulls examined by two independent phrenologists, to ensure that they were “firm spirited and conscientious.” None of the girls was to be vaccinated—the comtesse believed vaccinations led to other illnesses—and no girl under ten was to be taught any mathematics except for multiplication tables.

  There was nothing remotely cranky about George Fordyce (1736–1802). He was a respected doctor who fought against quackery, exposing the ineffectiveness of treating epilepsy with a forehead paste made from ground-up elks’ hooves, and producing important theses on fever, smallpox, diet, and metabolism. He also conducted experiments in heated rooms that proved for the first time that the human body could effectively regulate its temperature whatever the environment.