The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People

by David Wallechinsky

  HIS THOUGHTS: “If a woman poses for you, she gives herself to you.”

  —R.M.

  The Rich Bohemian

  PABLO PICASSO (Oct. 25, 1881-Apr. 8, 1973)

  HIS FAME: He was without doubt the most original, forceful, and influential personality in the visual arts in the first three quarters of this century.

  HIS PERSON: Born in Málaga, Spain, son of José Ruiz Blasco, an art teacher and sometime painter, Picasso had little formal education and not much more training in art, being clearly superior to his teachers. Legend has it that when Picasso’s father realized the scope of his son’s artistic genius, he gave him his own brushes and colors and did not paint again. In his late teens Picasso joyfully discovered the bohemian life in Barcelona; he continued his exuberant lifestyle on visits to Paris, where he was immediately inspired by the streets of Montmartre and the works of Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh, and Cézanne. He was from the beginning an extraordinarily prolific painter. From the age of 20, in accordance with Spanish custom, he signed his works with his mother’s maiden name—Picasso.

  Picasso at age 66

  In 1904 he quit Barcelona and moved to Paris. There he and Georges Braque, working together, founded the Cubist movement. “When I want to paint a cup,” Picasso said, “I will show you that it is round, but it may be that the general rhythm and construction of the picture will oblige me to show that roundness as a square.”

  The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 ended his political apathy; he became a passionate Loyalist, and the destruction of a small Basque town by Hitler’s bombers inspired what many consider to be his masterpiece, the huge canvas Guernica. Throughout both world wars he remained in France.

  Picasso’s energy was relentless. Habitually a late riser, he saw his friends in the afternoon and then worked far into the night. Although he was only about 5 ft. 4 in. tall, the intensity of his black eyes and his often explosive presence gave the impression of a much larger man. He settled comfortably into fame, earning millions each year from his prodigious output—an estimated 14,000 canvases, 100,000 prints and engravings, and 34,000 book illustrations. A multitude of objects—mementos, paintings, antiques, African sculptures, junk, old clothes—were carefully retained as he moved through various houses, studios, wives, and lovers. When Picasso died at 91 in his hill-side villa at Mougins, France, he left an estate valued at $1.1 billion.

  SEX LIFE: Beauty and relative youth were the only qualities he consistently desired in women. Usually before and always after a sexual relationship began, his wives and mistresses became his models, though at times not recognizably so.

  Fernande Olivier was the partner of Picasso’s early bohemian life in Paris. She was a green-eyed, auburn-haired, provocatively voluptuous young woman whom he met one day at the common water tap of the run-down Montmartre tenement in which they both lived. She was four months his senior, which prompted him, then all of 23, to speak of her to his friends as “very beautiful—but old.” She later described him as having “a sort of magnetism which I could not resist,” but then resisting, or any other kind of overt action, was not Fernande’s style. She liked posing, preferably in a reclining position, and she did not much mind when lack of money to buy shoes prevented her from leaving the flat for two months. Picasso provided, if at times meagerly, for their most urgent needs, and for entertainment there was always lovemaking. Picasso adored Fernande and was obsessively jealous of her. “Picasso forced me to live like a recluse,” she said later.

  Periodically, Picasso’s restless nature required a change both in models and in sources of inspiration. Marcelle Humbert, whom he called Eva, perhaps as an assurance to her that she was now his first woman, was as small and delicate as Fernande had been robust. Because their romance paralleled Picasso’s Cubist period, no portraits of her exist, but she is immortalized in the words ma jolie (“my pretty one”), which appear variously inscribed in several of his paintings, and two works bear the words J’aime Éva (“I love Éva”). She died in 1915 of tuberculosis.

  In 1917 Picasso was persuaded to go to Rome with Jean Cocteau and the Ballets Russes. There he designed the curtain for Sergei Diaghilev’s new ballet, Parade. Walking at night with the dancers along moonlit Roman streets, he singled out Olga Koklova, the diminutive daughter of a colonel. Her “good family” background and upper-class tastes appealed to him at that time as solid and lasting values. His bohemian life had died with Éva; he was becoming rich and famous. Something essentially Spanish and bourgeois in his nature told him that it was now time to settle down and start a family. He took Olga with him to Spain, introduced her to his friends and relatives, painted her in a Spanish mantilla, and married her not only in the obligatory civil ceremony but in the Russian Orthodox service as well. Then he installed her in a luxuriously decorated Parisian flat with—as if in premonition of failure—twin beds.

  Picasso’s first son, Paulo, was the product of that marriage—a marriage that was already coming apart when his first daughter, Maïa, was born in 1935 to his mistress and model, the large and lovely, blond and blue-eyed Marie-Thérèse Walter. Picasso was delighted. Olga had grown increasingly demanding and neurotic, and Picasso had, consciously or unconsciously, taken his revenge by painting a series of female monsters with shriveled breasts and exaggerated sexual organs. His conjugal unhappiness and sexual deprivation produced deformed female figures in his art, but once the warmhearted, gentle Marie-Thérèse appeared, a refuge offering uncritical devotion and sexual fulfillment, the sunken breasts became round and firm, the mouths smiled, and the figures, although still distorted, exuded a kind of sensual joy.

  After Maïa was born, his affair with her mother became complicated by parental responsibility. Picasso’s ever-roving eye was then caught by the dark eyes and serious expression of Dora Maar, whom he saw for the first time seated at a nearby table at the Deux Magots, a café on the Left Bank. A photographer and a painter herself, Dora Maar could not only converse intelligently on the creative process, she could also do it in Spanish. Picasso was charmed. Soon Dora Maar was making regular visits to the Paris studio, and paintings of a woman with flowing blue-black hair began to appear. Dora Maar offered Picasso intellectual as well as sexual companionship; unfortunately, she also matched his ferocious temperament and depressions with her own. The series of paintings of women weeping are all of Dora Maar.

  In his 60s but with no apparent diminution of sexual energy—“his sexual gluttony was becoming obsessive,” wrote one friend—Picasso acquired a young painter, Françoise Gilot, as his new mistress. Although she was, at the time, the sole occupant of his bed, Françoise soon discovered that Olga, Marie-Thérèse, and Dora Maar all still played their roles in his life. Summers in the south of France were enlivened by the presence of Olga, who literally dogged their footsteps on the street and at the beach, raining verbal abuse on the couple. In Paris, Thursdays and Sundays were set aside for visits with Marie-Thérèse and Maïa, and during vacations daily letters arrived outlining in loving detail for Papa Picasso the events and concerns, particularly financial, of their lives. Picasso continually insisted that Françoise accompany him when he called on or had a luncheon engagement with the now scornful and bitter Dora Maar. Forcing the women of his life to relate to each other, however violently, was for Picasso one of the more amusing aspects of longevity.

  Some 40 years younger than Picasso, Françoise Gilot’s relationship with him was more complicated than that of her predecessors. Whenever she became dissatisfied with her role, Picasso prescribed maternity as a cure. Their son, Claude, and daughter, Paloma, were the result. Living with Picasso was hard—too hard, as it turned out; after seven years Françoise took the children and left. Picasso was furious. “There’s nothing so similar to one poodle as another poodle, and that goes for women, too,” he said. Françoise later married the renowned Dr. Jonas Salk.

  Picasso’s final relationship of any duration was with a young divorcée, Jacqueline Roque, who moved in after Fran
çoise had left. She organized his affairs and devoted herself to his well-being. When Olga died in 1955, Picasso was at last free to remarry; he and Jacqueline were wed in 1961. Jacqueline was less voluptuous than Fernande, less delicate than Éva, less graceful than Olga, less sweet than Marie-Thérèse, less intelligent than Dora Maar, less talented than Françoise. But her own expectations may have been less, too. She was in any case loyal, capable, willing, and beautiful. All of his women had been beautiful, and at different times and with varying degrees of passion Picasso had loved them all. But there had always been something of anger and hatred, too. Picasso authority Pierre Cabanne pointed out: “Sex stimulation was the basic motive force of his lyrical flights; desire, with him, was violence, dismemberment, tumult, indignation, excess.” A reference in the Diaries of Anaïs Nin, Cabanne felt, gave a clue to Picasso’s attitude toward women: “Alice Paalen, the wife of the Surrealist painter Wolfgang Paalen, who was Picasso’s mistress, is quoted as saying that one of his joys was to deny women their climaxes. As Éluard wrote in transcribing a graphological analysis of him in 1942: ‘Loves intensely and kills the thing he loves.”’

  HIS THOUGHTS: “Nature and art, being two different things, cannot be the same thing…. Academic training in beauty is a sham. When we love a woman, we don’t start measuring her legs.”

  “For me, there are only two kinds of women—goddesses and doormats.”

  —N.C.S.

  The Promiscuous Behemoth

  DIEGO RIVERA (Dec. 8, 1886-Nov. 25, 1957)

  HIS FAME: Mexican artist Diego Rivera won international fame as a muralist during his long and productive career. His brightly colored, primitive murals, covering immense areas—one was 17,000 sq. ft.—often dealt with politically leftist subjects reflecting Rivera’s Communist beliefs.

  HIS PERSON: The son of a mine owner and a schoolteacher, Diego Rivera began drawing at the age of three. After he had ruined several walls with his scribbling, his father gave him his own studio with blackboard walls and a limitless supply of colored chalk. At the age of 13 he entered the San Carlos Academy of Fine Arts to study painting, but he was expelled three years later for involvement in a political riot.

  Rivera and Frida Kahlo

  In 1907 he went to Spain to study. After traveling throughout Europe, he ended up in Paris in 1909, where he lived on and off for the next 12 years. In 1921 he returned as a mature artist to North America, where he did murals throughout Mexico and the U.S. During his career, the subject matter of his paintings frequently caused controversy. Commissioned to paint a mural for New York City’s RCA Building in Rockefeller Center, Rivera included in his Man at the Crossroads a portrait of Lenin. A newspaper headline at the time announced, “Rivera Paints Scenes of Communist Activity and John D. Jr. Foots Bill.” In the end, the mural was chipped away from the stone wall. Furious at the destruction of his work, Rivera later repainted it on a wall in the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City.

  A childlike, violently emotional man, Rivera projected a gruesome, machismo image. He went so far as to claim that as a student he had bought cadavers and experimented with cannibalism. Supposedly, he most liked cooked female breasts and “brains in vinaigrette.”

  At the age of 70 he died of heart failure in bed at his home in Mexico City.

  SEX LIFE: After he was caught cutting open a live mouse to find out where baby mice came from, Rivera was given a practical course in sex education, complete with anatomical texts, by his father. According to Rivera, he used this knowledge several years later at the age of nine, when he allegedly had intercourse for the first time. His autobiography reveals that his first partner was an 18-year-old American schoolteacher, who “prepared me for the arms of my second mistress, a generous Negroid girl, wife of an engineer on the Mexican Central Railroad.”

  It is known that, by the time Rivera arrived in Europe at the age of 21, he was highly experienced in sex as the result of numerous liaisons with actresses and prostitutes. In Europe he was pursued by countless women, who wanted to sleep with this Mexican macho who was an artistic genius even though he weighed 300 lb. and had a face like a frog’s. Rivera, who easily succumbed to the advances of any woman, whether beautiful or ugly, was described by one lover as having huge Buddha breasts, hair all over his 6-ft. body, and a penis proportionate in size to the rest of his massive frame.

  One of his early European loves was Maria Blanchard, a small French-Spanish hunchbacked painter who introduced Rivera to his first common-law wife, Angelina Beloff. Leaving Maria, Rivera moved in with Angelina, a Russian émigré artist. During their 10-year relationship, Angelina, who was six years older than Rivera, served as a mother figure for the emotionally erratic artist. Even though they lived together, Rivera never curbed his affairs with other women. In 1917, when Angelina became pregnant, Rivera responded by moving in with a Russian painter, Marievna Vorobiev. Deeply in love with Rivera, Marievna later recalled that his first presents to her had been two Siamese cats and a condom. Their lovemaking—in which he often bound her hands and feet—was so violent that Marievna’s uterus became slightly displaced. Nevertheless, Marievna was soon pregnant, and Rivera moved back in with Angelina.

  Finally, in 1921, Rivera headed for Mexico, promising both women that he would send for them later. He never did. Instead he fell in love with the wildly beautiful and violent Guadalupe Marín, who became his second common-law wife. Their relationship, which produced two daughters, was filled with arguments, physical violence, jealousy, and passionate sex. When confronted with one of his sexual escapades, Lupe slashed several of Rivera’s paintings and then attacked his Cuban lover. Lupe left him once after she walked in on a sex session Rivera was having with her younger sister. At the end of seven years, this turbulent affair had burned itself out.

  A short time later Rivera was officially married for the first time. The 43-year-old Rivera’s new wife was Frida Kahlo, a 19-year-old Mexican Jewish girl, who grew into a well-respected and important artist in her own right. During their courtship and throughout their marriage, Rivera continued his affairs with other women. Initially Frida accepted his extramarital escapades as “proper to genius,” but when he slept with her best friend, Frida went to New York, where she retaliated by having a multitude of love affairs. In 1939 the Riveras were divorced, but in 1940 they remarried. Frida agreed to the remarriage under two conditions: that she would support herself through her art, and that she and Diego would no longer have sexual intercourse. They seem to have adjusted to one another’s promiscuity and even enjoyed talking about their various bedroom adventures.

  Frida died in 1954, and Rivera remarried the following year. His new wife was a friend of 10 years, Emma Hurtado.

  MEDICAL REPORT: According to Rivera’s autobiography, his last years were sexless and his second marriage was unconsummated because he had cancer of the penis. Supposedly, his doctors repeatedly told him his penis had to be amputated, but Rivera refused to submit to such an operation.

  HIS THOUGHTS: “If I loved a woman, the more I loved her, the more I wanted to hurt her.”

  —R.J.F.

  The Coffeepot

  HENRI DE TOULOUSE-LAUTREC (Nov. 24, 1864-Sept. 9, 1901)

  HIS FAME: Toulouse-Lautrec’s naturalistic style had a great influence on Postimpressionist French art. Considered a minor talent while alive, Lautrec achieved international renown after his death. Indeed, our image today of Paris in the Gay Nineties is very much a result of Toulouse-Lautrec’s paintings of prostitutes, bohemians, and, especially, the performers and audiences of the Moulin Rouge and other Parisian night spots.

  HIS PERSON: The only surviving child of an eccentric count and his shy and patient wife, Toulouse-Lautrec suffered two falls as an adolescent which broke both his thighbones. He was left crippled for life, and his growth was frozen at 5 ft. 1 in. This greatly disappointed his father, who had been counting on a strong and healthy son to join him when he went hunting and debauching. Ugly, deformed, and quite a bit shorter than his peers,
Toulouse-Lautrec nonetheless had personal charisma and a quick wit, which made him a much-sought-after companion in the counterculture of Paris in the late 1880s and throughout the 1890s. He became a well-known figure on the streets of Montmartre, dressed in baggy trousers, an overlong overcoat, and a bowler hat, and sporting a beard, a bamboo cane, and pince-nez.

  Toulouse-Lautrec at age 26

  Despite his blue-blooded origins, Toulouse-Lautrec felt most at home with society’s outcasts and devoted extended periods of his life to living in brothels and hanging out in lesbian bars. Alcoholism, syphilis, and general abuse of his health led to his death in his mother’s arms two and a half months before his 37th birthday.