The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People

by David Wallechinsky

  SEX LIFE: Although he didn’t reach too far from head to toe, Toulouse-Lautrec had unusually well developed sexual organs, even for a man of normal size. His genitals were so out of proportion to the rest of his body that he compared himself to a “coffeepot with a big spout.”

  Coming from an aristocratic family, Toulouse-Lautrec was introduced to brothels early. Because he was misshapen and somewhat grotesque-looking, marriage with a woman of his own class was considered unthinkable. He moved to the Montmartre district of Paris when he was 19 and divided his time between painting and observing the extremes of Paris nightlife. He began having sexual affairs with some of his models, in particular Marie Charlet, a teenaged adventuress who spread the word about the painter’s sexual prowess.

  In 1885 Toulouse-Lautrec became involved with model Suzanne Valadon, the mother of artist Maurice Utrillo and an artist in her own right. For three years they carried on a stormy affair, which ended abruptly when he learned that Valadon’s threats of suicide, which he had taken seriously, were in fact sheer playacting. After the breakup with Valadon, Toulouse-Lautrec painted six studies of Rosa la Rouge, a red-haired prostitute from whom he contracted syphilis.

  In 1891 Toulouse-Lautrec prepared his first poster for the Moulin Rouge nightclub, and his fame began. Following a breakup with another lover, Berthe La Sourde, he began frequenting brothels with great regularity and by 1894 had taken up residence in a high-class house of prostitution in the Rue des Moulins. He lived in this brothel and others on and off for the rest of his life. This unusual living arrangement provided Toulouse-Lautrec with the opportunity to indulge completely his sexual appetite, while simultaneously allowing him to observe and paint unposed nude and seminude women. “The professional model is always like a stuffed owl,” he said. “These girls are alive.”

  He lived with the prostitutes day in and day out. He played cards with them, laughed with them, and surprised them in their beds. He shared their meals and brought in pâtés and fine wines to brighten up the menu. He kept track of each woman’s birthday and brought them all presents. On their days off, he would invite these women of the night to his studio and take them to a restaurant or to the circus or a theater.

  When he began to tire of brothels, Toulouse-Lautrec moved on to lesbian bars, particularly La Souris and Le Hanneton, near the Place Pigalle. Here, also surrounded by women, he again became a popular figure who could be turned to for advice.

  In 1897 he fell in love with a young relative named Aline, who had just left a convent. For a while he cleaned up his act, forswearing cocktails (which he had helped popularize), talking of entering a clinic for alcoholics, and drinking only port. But when Aline’s father forbade Toulouse-Lautrec to see his daughter, the artist plunged deeper than ever into the Paris underworld, eventually being sent to a mental asylum with delirium tremens. Within months of his release he was drinking heavily again. Struck down with paralysis on Aug. 20, 1901, he died three weeks later.

  QUIRKS: An extreme sensualist, Toulouse-Lautrec periodically zeroed in on different parts of the female body. It was said that he could caress a woman’s hand for an hour. Red hair drove him to ecstasy. His friend Thadée Natanson described how Toulouse-Lautrec would “purr with delight as he plunged his face into a woman’s bosom, wrapping her two enormous breasts around him like a comforter made of human flesh.” He would also “clutch a pair of women’s stockings that had fallen to the ground, roll them into a ball, and inhale their scent with his eyes closed.”

  At one point Toulouse-Lautrec became obsessed with the actress and dancer Marcelle Lender. Night after night, more than 20 times, he reserved the same seat in the orchestra stalls so that he could watch her dance the bolero. When asked why he kept returning, he replied, “I simply come to see Lender’s back. Take a good look at it; you’ve never seen anything so magnificent.” Apparently he was impressed with her nose as well. According to Natanson, Toulouse-Lautrec loved the sight of finely chiseled nostrils since, owing to his size, they were the first things he saw when he looked up at a woman’s face.

  HIS THOUGHTS: “Love is when the desire to be desired takes you so badly that you feel you could die of it.”

  “A woman’s body, a splendid woman’s body … is not for making love…. It’s too beautiful, eh? For making love anything goes … anything … anything at all, eh?”

  —D.W.

  IV

  The Quill is Compelling

  Chéri

  COLETTE (Jan. 28, 1873-Aug. 3, 1954)

  HIS FAME: One of the most celebrated French authors of the early 20th century, Sidonie Gabrielle Claudine Colette wrote 73 books—fiction, nonfiction, and a mixture of the two—about the sorrows and delights of love. In her life, as in her art, she gave a new dimension to two of France’s most enduring sexual archetypes, the schoolgirl seductress and the aging coquette.

  HER PERSON: Colette grew up in the country, the adored youngest child of a fiercely possessive mother and a vaguely literary retired army captain. She was a singular child, a tomboy who went by her family surname and communed intimately with the flowers and animals in her own private enchanted garden. At 20, an ingenuous provincial with braided hair falling below her knees, she married Henry Gauthier-Villars, a 35-year-old writer and friend of the family. “Willy,” as he was known, added his young bride to his collection of mistresses, ghostwriters, and pornographic postcards in decadent fin-de-siècle Paris.

  At Willy’s urging, Colette began to fill notebooks with vicariously erotic stories about the adventures of a young girl. The four Claudine novels, published from 1900 to 1903, enjoyed a great vogue, giving rise to a whole line of “Claudine” products and to a cult of the precocious schoolgirl, innocent yet alluring, a sort of androgynous Lolita.

  Rebelling against her literary bondage to Willy, who signed his name to his wife’s first six books, Colette began publishing voluptuous nature stories, using the name Colette Willy until 1906, and then simply Colette. (She could describe a vegetable as if it were a love object, it was said.) She took up the study of mime, divorcing Willy in 1906 to tour in mildly erotic mime melodramas. She also contributed articles (published in 1970 in book form as Tales of a Thousand and One Mornings) to Le Matin, a leading French newspaper. The editor, Henry de Jouvenel, fathered her only child (a girl) and became her second husband, in that order. This marriage also ended in divorce, but while it lasted Colette achieved her greatest fame with Chéri (1920), the sexual tragedy of a young gigolo and an aging coquette, followed by The Ripening Seed (1923), a classic tale of adolescent sexual initiation.

  Married yet again in 1935, to journalist Maurice Goudeket, Colette enjoyed both fame and an active old age, raising the coquette to the rank of patriotic heroine with the publication of Gigi (1945) when she was 72.

  LOVE LIFE: Colette’s first husband, Willy, was constantly unfaithful to her. Once she followed him to an assignation and found him fornicating with one Lotte Kinceler, a foul-mouthed, hunchbacked dwarf. Sometimes, according to one biographer, Willy “brought his other coquettes to Colette’s apartment, where they would finger her things and speak smut.” Willy tried to promote a liaison between his young wife, who described herself as “sexually impartial,” and one of his mistresses. At the time, Colette was more comfortable with her husband’s male young homosexual secretaries. But as she became disillusioned with Willy, who with his bulbous eyes and drooping cheeks reminded her of Queen Victoria, she took refuge in her somewhat exhibitionistic career in mime and music-hall dancing. She also found comfort in the company of an aristocratic lesbian, “Missy,” the former Marquise de Belboeuf and a descendant of Napoleon, with whom she lived for six years after leaving Willy.

  Full-bodied and feline in her 30s, with sloe eyes and a mop of curly hair, Colette appeared in the mime theater seductively draped like an odalisque. One play required her to bare her breasts, which created “a luscious thrill of sensation” in the audience. Sensation turned to scandal when, miming a ballet in which “a mu
mmy awakes from eternal sleep, undoes its bandages, and, near nude, dances its ancient loves,” she ardently embraced her “prince,” who was in fact Missy, the choreographer of the ballet.

  Colette and Missy de Belboeuf, who looked and dressed like a man in daily life, enjoyed what was then known as “a loving friendship.” Colette, who also appeared in tuxedo at the famous sapphic banquets of the day and wore an ankle bracelet engraved “I belong to Missy,” described her friend’s love as maternal and possessive. She wrote of Missy: “You will give me sensual pleasure, leaning over me, your eyes full of maternal anxiety, searching through your passionate friend for the child you never had.” Colette had numerous lesbian loves, one of the most colorful being Natalie Barney, an American expatriate in Paris known for her Friday salons and her affairs with other women. On one occasion, Colette sent Barney a message reading, “Natalie, my husband kisses your hands, and I the rest.”

  After entering the world of journalism, Colette began a whirlwind affair with the aggressive, virile Henry de Jouvenel. (Fond of pet names, she called him “Sidi the Pasha.”) The affair ended in marriage when Colette, nearly 40, became pregnant. Jealousy blooms “like a dark carnation,” she wrote in reference to her husband’s chronic infidelity. De Jouvenel complained, for his part, about his wife’s preoccupation with “love, adultery, and half-incestuous relationships.” The latter was rumored when Colette took off on a Swiss winter vacation with her 19-year-old stepson, Bertrand de Jouvenel, after her separation from his father.

  It was only during the autumn of her womanhood, as Colette called it, that she was able to reconcile her fierce need for independence with both a desire for possession and a penchant for handsome young men. Colette was 52 when she met Maurice Goudeket, then 35, who later became her third husband. Whether writing in bed, surrounded by cats and cushions, or basking in the warm sunshine of Saint-Tropez, she enjoyed with Goudeket a loving companionship which renewed her creative energy and enabled her to remain vigorously active well into old age.

  HER PHILOSOPHY: “The seduction emanating from a person of uncertain or dissimulated sex is powerful,” wrote Colette, who refused to distinguish between normal and abnormal sexuality.

  —C.D.

  The Romantic Feminist

  GEORGE SAND (July 1, 1804-June 8, 1876)

  HER FAME: This French feminist author of more than 90 novels—among them Lélia and The Devil’s Pool—was notorious for dressing in men’s clothes, smoking cigars, taking on frail but brilliant young lovers, and voicing scandalous opinions.

  HER PERSON: Amandine Aurore Lucie Dupin was raised by her grandmother on the family’s country estate at Nohant, 150 mi. south of Paris. Her two years of formal education at a convent ended when, after a stint as leader of the diables (“bad girls”), she turned pious and talked of becoming a nun, whereupon her Deist grandmother yanked her out of school. At the age of 17, Aurore inherited Nohant. After an unsuccessful marriage, which produced two children, she ran off to Paris and began her writing career, taking George Sand as her pen name. When her first novel, Indiana, was published in the spring of 1832, it was a smashing success. Thereafter novels—most of them successful, several still considered masterpieces—flowed from her pen. A champion of woman’s rights, she billed herself as “the Spartacus of women’s slavery.” However, her heroines, often caught in marital traps, nearly always win their freedom through fortuitous turns of fate (e.g., a husband’s accidental death). According to one critic, “In George Sand, when a lady wants to change her lover, God is there to facilitate the transfer.” Unfortunately, in real life, Sand usually had to make the transfer herself.

  LOVE AND SEX LIFE: Interpreters of George Sand have called her fickle and heartless, have labeled her as bisexual or lesbian; have hinted at incest (in view of her enormous love for her son, Maurice) and at a covert maternal instinct that encouraged her to take younger lovers.

  The cigar-smoking woman whose sexuality has aroused such interest was once described by Charles Dickens as resembling “the queen’s monthly nurse.” She was short and swarthy, with heavy features and dark eyes. Her manner was brusque. In her intellect and passion for living lay her sensual appeal.

  Her first sexual encounter was probably with neighbor Stéphane de Grandsagne when she was 16 or 17. Grandsagne may have fathered her daughter, Solange, born in 1828. At 18 she married 27-year-old Casimir Dudevant, who proved to be a drunken boor and beat her from time to time. Although she left him—and their children—in 1831, they were not legally separated until 1836.

  It was in Paris, where sexual liberation was in the air, that her love life really began. Her first Paris lover, Jules Sandeau, with whom she briefly collaborated on a book, was typical of the men who attracted her—younger than she by seven years, frail, blond, and artistic. Long after their affair ended, Sandeau, still bitter, described her as a “graveyard.” Bad endings were to become typical of her love affairs.

  Sand needed to be in love to enjoy sex. A short experiment in nonromantic copulation with writer Prosper Mérimée was a disaster. Though some of her lovers accused her of frigidity, it seems that in truth she was like many women—passionate when aroused by romance, indifferent when she was not. She spoke of biting, beating, and kissing Sandeau; and of Michel de Bourges, a married lover whom she adored in spite of his bald ugliness, she confessed he caused her to “tremble with desire.”

  When rejected, she suffered—even groveled. As her stormy relationship with the poet-playwright Alfred de Musset drew to a close, she wrote: “I was hoping you would come and waited for your call from 11 o’clock in the morning until midnight. What a day! Every ring of the doorbell made me jump! I have such a headache. I wish I were dead.” She cut off her hair and sent it to him.

  With Polish composer Frédéric Chopin—tubercular, aristocratic, an opium smoker, and six years younger than she—Sand ran the gamut. In 1838, at the beginning of their relationship, she compared his attitude toward sex to that of an old woman and wailed, “Can there ever be love without a single kiss, and kisses without sensual pleasure?” Long before the end of their nine years together, he complained that she wouldn’t sleep with him.

  Among her other lovers were engraver Alexandre Damien Manceau, who lived with her in calm serenity from the time he was 32 (she was 45) until he died 15 years later, and painter Charles Marchal, 39 to her 60, whom she called her “fat baby.”

  Gossip linked her with others. Gustave Planche, a literary critic with careless personal-hygiene habits, fought a duel to defend her literary honor against another critic who had attacked her novel Lélia (the shots misfired, the sales of Lélia shot up); it is not clear whether she ever had sex with him. Nor is it clear whether she had sex with women, notably with actress Marie Dorval, to whom she wrote letters that would today be considered erotic but were commonplace among women friends at the time. Example: “In the theater or in your bed, I simply must come and kiss you, my lady, or I shall do something crazy!”

  And some passionate friendships were nonsexual—those with Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Franz Liszt, Alexandre Dumas père, and Gustave Flaubert.

  HER THOUGHTS: “I had no feeling of guilt because I have always felt my infidelities were caused by fate, by a search for an ideal which impelled me to abandon the imperfect in favor of what appeared to be nearer perfection. I have known many kinds of love. I loved like an artist, a woman, a sister, a mother, a nun, a poet. Some loves died the day they were born without ever being revealed to the person who had inspired them. Some made a martyr of me and drove me to despair…. Some kept me shut away for years in a sort of excessive sublimation. Every time I was perfectly sincere.”

  —A.E.

  Salonkeeper

  GERTRUDE STEIN (Feb. 3, 1874-July 27, 1946)

  HER FAME: Gertrude Stein was an American writer whose avant-garde writing style and odd, masculine appearance helped establish her as an eccentric in the minds of the American public. Her permanent home in Paris, which she shared wi
th her lover, Alice B. Toklas, served as the gathering place for expatriate writers and artists during the years between WWI and WWII.

  HER PERSON: Born in Allegheny, Pa., to fairly well-to-do and restless parents, Stein spent her early years living with her family in Vienna and Paris before returning to settle in Oakland, Calif., of which she said, “The thing about Oakland is that when you get there, there’s no there there.” Critics believe that her early association with three different languages later influenced her writings, allowing her to use words as sounds, detached from their general meanings.

  Her weak-spirited mother died of cancer when Stein was 14, leaving her tyrannical father to browbeat his daughter into the study of medicine. He died three years later, but he was a strong influence on her feelings toward men. Later she would write, “Fathers are depressing.”

  At Radcliffe College she studied psychology under William James, whose theory of pragmatism (understanding immediate events without applying past experiences to them) would later influence her writings. She entered Johns Hopkins Medical School for graduate study, only to flunk out four years later, when she became distracted by her first lesbian love affair and her subsequent inner struggle to accept her own sexuality, which was thoroughly at odds with the standard mores of the time.