The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People

by David Wallechinsky

  She moved to Paris, living off the money that was willed to her by her parents. There she shared a home with her brother Leo, an art critic. The two began collecting Cubist paintings, which were new and daring at that time. Painters like Picasso, Matisse, and Braque became their close friends and began visiting regularly. During this period she wrote three books: Q.E.D., written in 1903 but not published until 1950, a cathartic account of her struggle with lesbianism; Three Lives, published in 1909 and well received by the public; and The Making of Americans, written between 1903 and 1911 but not published until 1925. Leo moved out after a fight with his sister, and Alice B. Toklas moved in, becoming Stein’s adviser, protector, and lover for the next 38 years.

  As her literary reputation grew, so did the number of writers and artists who came to visit, people like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, and Ernest Hemingway. With her short-cropped masculine haircut, thick girth, and loud laugh, Stein seemed an unlikely candidate for the powerful artistic figure she became, one who could make or break reputations by even the most innocuous of comments. Her most popular book was her autobiography, called The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, published in 1933. Stein died in 1946, leaving her estate to Toklas, who kept possession of her art collection until 1961, when it was appropriated by the Stein family and sold at auction for $6 million.

  LOVE LIFE: Gertrude Stein had problems accepting her lesbian tendencies in her first affair with fellow student May Bookstaver. May’s passionate nature led her to other affairs, leaving Stein to agonize over her own sexuality since it was so opposed to her middle-class upbringing. It wasn’t until later, when she met and “married” Alice B. Toklas, that she came to accept her feelings for women: “Slowly it has come to me that any way of being a loving one is interesting and not unpleasant to me.”

  Stein was living in Paris, presiding over a salon populated by Pablo Picasso and other painters of future renown, when Alice B. Toklas came into her life in the autumn of 1907. Toklas had been raised in San Francisco, was well educated, and was on a visit to Europe. She was invited by Stein to see her collection of art and soon dropped by. Toklas was shy and lean, Stein was heavyset (soon to exceed 200 lb.). Mabel Dodge Luhan remembered them both at the outset, saying of the 30-year-old Toklas: “She was slight and dark, with beautiful gray eyes hung with black lashes—and she had a drooping, Jewish nose, and her eyelids drooped, and the corners of her red mouth and the lobes of her ears drooped under the black folded Hebraic hair, weighed down as they were, with long heavy Oriental earrings.” And of the 33-year-old Stein she wrote: “Gertrude Stein was prodigious. Pounds and pounds and pounds piled up on her skeleton—not the billowing kind, but massive, heavy fat. She wore some covering of corduroy or velvet and her crinkly hair was brushed back and twisted up high behind her jolly, intelligent face.”

  It was love at first sight for both of them. Alice Toklas visited again and again, and finally Stein invited her to move in. Toklas proofread one of Stein’s books, then typed 1,000 manuscript pages of another. Eventually, according to Mabel Dodge Luhan, Toklas became Stein’s “hand-maiden … always serving someone … perfect for doing errands … so self-obliterating that no one considered her very much beyond thinking her a silent, picturesque object in the background.” But Stein’s brother, Leo, thought Toklas was more, and told Mabel Dodge Luhan, who wrote of Leo’s complaints: “He had always had a special disgust at seeing how the weaker can enslave the stronger as was happening in their case. Alice was making herself indispensable…. And Gertrude was growing helpless and foolish from it and less and less inclined to do anything herself, Leo said; he had seen trees strangled by vines in the same way.”

  But the relationship was more, and their love was mutual. Stein proposed to Toklas. “Care for me,” she urged. “I care for you in every possible way…. Pet me tenderly and save me from alarm…. When all is said one is wedded to the bed.” Alice Toklas accepted, and so began an almost husband-wife relationship, with Stein the provider and Toklas minding the house and the bills and in general keeping Stein’s life running smoothly.

  Stein maintained close relationships with men as well, although they were nonsexual in nature. She was close to Ernest Hemingway, despite the fact that she disliked his overly macho outlook. She once chastised him for his prejudice against lesbians: “You know nothing about any of this really, Hemingway. You’ve met known criminals and sick people and vicious people. The main thing is that the act male homosexuals commit is ugly and repugnant and afterwards they are disgusted with themselves. They drink and take drugs, to palliate this, but they are disgusted with the act and they are always changing partners and cannot be really happy. In women it is the opposite. They do nothing that they are disgusted by and nothing that is repulsive and afterwards they are happy and they can lead happy lives together.” Hemingway, for his part, said of Stein, “I always wanted to fuck her and she knew it.”

  As she grew older, Stein made her disgust with heterosexuality more evident: “If there are men and women, it is rather horrible….” Her life with Toklas was a contented one, and, except for the fact of their lesbianism, almost conventional. Both were faithful and loving to one another, calling each other pet names in private: Toklas was “Pussy,” Stein “Lovely.” But the relationship was not without passion, as related by Stein in a 1917 piece, “Lifting Belly,” a long rhapsody of lesbian love. In the following poem to Alice, “Caesars” and “cow” are symbols of sexual pleasure.

  Kiss my lips. She did.

  Kiss my lips again she did.

  Kiss my lips over and over and over again she did….

  I’ll let you kiss me sticky….

  I say lifting belly and then I say lifting belly and Caesars.

  I say lifting belly gently and Caesars gently. I say

  lifting belly again and Caesars again…. I say lifting

  belly Caesars and cow come out. I say lifting belly

  and Caesars and cow come out.

  Can you read my print?

  Alice answers yes.

  In 1946, suffering from cancer, Stein insisted upon surgery. About to be wheeled into the operating room, Stein turned her head to Alice Toklas and said, “What is the answer?” Toklas did not reply. Stein nodded and said, “In that case, what is the question?” These were her last words to her beloved. Gertrude Stein died that night under anesthesia. She died convinced she was a genius, one of three geniuses she had known, the other two being Pablo Picasso and Alfred North Whitehead. At one time she had suggested another, saying, “Einstein was the creative philosophic mind of the century, and I have been the creative literary mind of the century.”

  Alice Toklas lived on without her for another 21 years, heartsick and lonely. At 89 Alice said simply to a friend, “I miss her; I still miss her very much.”

  —M.W. and the Eds.

  The Abstract Lover

  VIRGINIA WOOLF (Jan. 25, 1882-Mar. 28, 1941)

  HER FAME: One of the major writers of the 20th century, Woolf is known, along with Proust and Joyce, as a pioneer of modern fiction. She was also the focal point of a gathering of English avant-garde intellectuals who met as the Bloomsbury group from 1905 to 1920.

  HER PERSON: Born of beauty (her mother, Julia Duckworth, was famous for it) and brains (Sir Leslie Stephen was one of England’s leading literary figures), Virginia inherited both. Tall and thin, she was both elegant and fragile, with deep-set eyes and a classic, ethereal kind of beauty. Writing was her passion in childhood, and it remained the reigning passion of her life. Virginia had a quality of other-worldliness which alienated her from people. The problem was compounded by periodic bouts of insanity—when she would hear voices and hallucinate—which forced her to retreat from society for months on end. She had four major breakdowns and was on the verge of one each time she completed a novel. At age 25 she began meeting with her brothers’ Cambridge friends (the circle later known as Bloomsbury), where she became famous for her wit and fascinating flights of imagination.
Though Virginia had many suitors, she did not marry until she was 30. The following year she completed her first novel and had her most severe breakdown, which lasted almost two years. After the breakdown she remained relatively stable for a while and quite productive, writing at least one book every two years. A well-respected writer from the beginning, she became a best-selling novelist in her 40s. At the height of WWII, having just completed another novel, Virginia felt herself going mad once more. Unable to face another breakdown, she filled her pockets with stones and drowned herself in the River Ouse. She was 59.

  Woolf, age 21

  LOVE LIFE: Two half brothers, Gerald and George Duckworth, provided Virginia’s unfortunate introduction to sexuality. When she was six, Gerald, then in his 20s, stood her on a ledge and explored her genitals with his hand, an incident she never forgot. During her adolescence George would come into her room at night, fling himself down on her bed, and kiss, fondle, and caress her. Virginia, a young Victorian, endured his habits in mortified silence until she was 22.

  Not surprisingly, though Virginia flirted with men, she fell in love with women. At 16 the object of her affection was Madge Vaughan, a beautiful, dark, romantic woman who shared Virginia’s literary tastes. They had an intimate friendship, but Madge soon married. At 20 Virginia began a passionate correspondence with 37-year-old Violet Dickinson, an old friend of the family. Her letters to Violet sound like those to a lover in a physical sense, addressed to “My Violet” or “My Woman,” signed “Yr. Lover.” They are full of endearments, demands, and longings, and such sentiments as “When you wake in the night, I suppose you feel my arms around you.” Oddly enough, however, the actual sexual element was missing, as it was from most of Virginia’s relationships. Her 10-year intimacy with Violet remained a purely emotional affair. Lytton Strachey, called “the arch-bugger of Bloomsbury” by Virginia’s nephew Quentin Bell, proposed to Virginia in 1909. She was well aware of his homosexual preference but accepted him anyway, perhaps because of his wit and reputation as a formidable intellect. However, he retracted the proposal the next day. “I was in terror lest she would kiss me,” he said. Their friendship was salvaged, and it was Strachey who suggested to political activist and writer Leonard Woolf that he court Virginia.

  At 30 Virginia married Woolf, who was part of Bloomsbury, only to discover that she was frigid. “I find the climax immensely exaggerated,” she said. Sexual relations ceased shortly after the honeymoon, though they remained in many ways happily married for 28 years. Virginia loved Leonard more than anyone, unless it was her sister, Vanessa, whose womanliness she also envied. (Of herself, she once said that she was “not one thing or another, not a man or a woman.”) After her marriage she settled into a life of asexuality and writing. At first Virginia yearned for the motherhood and passion so beautifully embodied by Vanessa, but later she made up her mind on both of those issues: “I slightly distrust or suspect the maternal passion. I don’t like profound instincts—not in human relationships.” Indeed, her adolescent attitudes toward sex and passion remained with her for the rest of her life: “This vague and dream-like world [of writing], without love, or heart, or passion, or sex, is the world I really care about, and find really interesting.”

  Still, there were always affairs. When Virginia was 40, the 30-year-old lesbian Vita Sackville-West fell in love with her, and the feeling was soon mutual. Vita was a beautiful writer whose aristocratic lineage went back 400 years. Her affair with Virginia lasted five years, and they slept together about a dozen times. This was Virginia’s only physical homosexual affair. It was also her longest-lasting sexual relationship. Remarkably, the sexual aspect of their affair was not cause for shock, guilt, or any particular elation. Nor did Leonard mind, since their marriage was not threatened. As Vita wrote a friend concerning Virginia’s sexuality: “She is not the sort of person one thinks of in that way. There is something incongruous and almost indecent in the idea.” And as Virginia wrote Vita: “It’s a great thing being a eunuch as I am.”

  Whatever sexuality Virginia possessed was channeled into her writing. During her affair and subsequent close friendship with Vita, she produced her best novels—Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando (a fictionalized biography of Vita, which Vita’s husband, Harold Nicolson, called “the longest and most charming love letter in history”), and The Waves. After their affair slacked off, composer Ethyl Smith fell violently in love with Virginia, but the pursuit was largely unsuccessful. Virginia wrote two more novels before committing suicide. In her suicide note to Leonard, she said, “I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.”

  HER THOUGHTS: “It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly, or man-womanly.”

  —J.H.

  Born Free

  MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT (Apr. 27, 1759-Sept. 10, 1797)

  HER FAME: This British author was an advocate of woman’s rights in an era when women were kept, as she said, “in silken fetters.” She wrote novels, children’s stories, and, among other “miscellaneous” works, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, which has been a continuing inspiration to feminists of the 19th and 20th centuries.

  HER PERSON: “The first of a new genus,” she called herself, and she was. She supported herself as a writer, belonged to an influential intellectual circle in London, lived openly with two men, and, also openly, bore a child out of wedlock—all at a time when a respectable woman was supposed to marry and hold her tongue.

  During her lifetime she assumed responsibility for what she called the Wollstonecraft “standing dish of family cares.” As a child she had stood between her parents to protect her mother from the blows of an alcoholic husband (he once hung a dog in a drunken rage), and Mary had slept outside her parents’ door at night when it was likely that violence might erupt and she would be needed. She also nursed her mother during her last illness and rescued her sister Eliza from an unhappy marriage.

  At 15 she had vowed “never … to endure a life of dependence.” To earn a living, she spent two years as a companion to a wealthy woman, ran a day school, and was governess for the daughters of an Irish lord. Meanwhile, wearing her green eyeshade and spectacles, she was writing, and in 1787 her first book was issued by Joseph Johnson, a London publisher, who became her good friend and introduced her to Tom Paine, Joseph Priestley, William Blake, and other famous men. Her Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) made her reputation; her Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) brought her notoriety. The views she espoused—e.g., social and sexual equality with men, full educational rights for women—shocked many, including Horace Walpole, who dubbed her a “hyena in petticoats.”

  A hyena she wasn’t; her manner was charming, her voice soft. Though she considered anger to be her worst fault, self-pity probably was. She was fervent, proud, and prone to melancholy and depression. Twice she attempted suicide, and at least once considered herself on the brink of madness. Tallish, with a good body, she had fair skin, long eyelashes, auburn hair, and almond-shaped hazel eyes.

  She lived in France for two years, during the time of the Reign of Terror, and was a member of the Girondin circle (the Girondins lost their power while she was there) and the lover of the American Gilbert Imlay. Back in London, she ended up living with, and then marrying, William Godwin. Mary died from complications following childbirth. When Fanny, Mary’s daughter by Imlay, killed herself at 22, she was wearing her mother’s corset, monogrammed “M.W.” Mary’s daughter by Godwin, named for her mother, was to become Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. Before eloping, young Mary and her lover, Percy Bysshe Shelley, paid final tribute to Mary Wollstonecraft by joining hands over her grave.

  LOVE LIFE: Early in her life Mary had passionate, though probably nonsexual, relationships with women. She was essentially modest, shocked by the “jokes and hoyden tricks young women indulged themselves in,” and she felt that “women are in general too familiar with each other.” However, she wrote possessive, loving, jealou
s letters to Jane Arden, a childhood friend, and her relationship with Fanny Blood, whom she met when she was 16 and Fanny was 18, was “a friendship so fervent, as for years to have constituted the ruling passion of her mind,” according to William Godwin. Mary and Fanny lived in the home of Fanny’s parents and ran a school together. Fanny was in love with Hugh Skeys. He finally married her in 1785 and took her to Lisbon, where she died during childbirth. Her death threw Mary into a long depression.

  Mary tended to like young romantic men and middle-aged geniuses like painter Henry Fuseli, a member of Joseph Johnson’s circle, who was short, melodramatic, married, and bisexual. It is unlikely that Mary slept with Fuseli, though she was obsessed with him. She didn’t entirely approve of his character. “I hate to see that reptile vanity sliming over the noble qualities of your heart,” she once wrote him. When she asked his wife, Sophia, if she might live with them as “an inmate of the family,” Sophia threw her out. Meanwhile Mary turned down a number of marriage proposals and coined the phrase “legalized prostitution” as a synonym for marriage.

  Gilbert Imlay, first of the two major loves of her life, was an American frontiers-man and writer, somewhat shady, tall and lean, with a “steady, bold step.” It was probably in a Left Bank hotel room that Mary first had sexual intercourse, at the age of 33 or 34. “I don’t want to be loved like a goddess, but I wish to be necessary to you,” she told Imlay. When he was off on business, she wrote him love letters rhapsodizing on his glistening eyes and the “suffusion that creeps over your relaxing features.” In May, 1794, Fanny was born, and their passion faded after that. Mary followed Imlay back to London, where he was having an affair with an actress. Mary proposed a ménage à trois, but the other woman would have none of it. Twice Mary tried suicide, once by jumping into the Thames from Putney Bridge in the rain. “I would encounter a thousand deaths, rather than a night like the last,” her suicide note to Imlay read. “May you never know by experience what you have made me endure.” She was rescued by boatmen.