The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People

by David Wallechinsky

  On Apr. 14, 1796, she boldly paid a call on William Godwin, the moral radical philosopher, whom she had met at an intellectual gathering five years before. (At that first meeting he had disliked her for talking too much, saying Thomas Paine couldn’t even get a word in.) A genius with a head too large for his body, Godwin was known for his integrity and kind heart. It was a case of “friendship melting into love,” he later said. That summer they became lovers, though after their first night together, she felt that he had acted “injudiciously,” and decided to return to her role as a “Solitary Walker.” He convinced her to continue the affair. It was domestic and joyous; they sent notes to each other constantly. In November she wrote, “I have seldom seen so much live fire running about my features as this morning when recollections—very dear, called forth the blush of pleasure, as I adjusted my hair.” That month she missed her period. (She probably knew of no method of birth control other than Godwin’s “chance-medley system,” a kind of rhythm method he may have introduced her to.)

  Against their basic principles (neither was religious), they were quietly married in church on Mar. 29, 1797. They did not live together. Mary wanted her husband “riveted in my heart” but not “always at my elbow,” yet she was jealous when a Miss Pinkerton flirted with him.

  Their child, Mary, was born Aug. 30 with the help of a midwife. (Mary gave the job to a midwife rather than a male doctor as a form of feminist protest.) However, the placenta wasn’t expelled and a male physician was called in. He tore the placenta in pieces from her uterus with his hands, a procedure that caused her great agony and probably gave her puerperal fever. Puppies were brought in to suck off her excess milk, because she was too ill to breast-feed her child. When she was given opium for pain, she said, “Oh, Godwin, I am in heaven,” and he, who had been tenderly nursing her, replied, “You mean, my dear, that your physical symptoms are somewhat easier.” She died Sept. 10.

  HER THOUGHTS: “I think there is not a subject that admits so little of reasoning as love.”

  “The heart is very treacherous, and if we do not guard against its first emotions, we shall not afterward be able to prevent its sighing for impossibilities.”

  “A master and mistress of a family ought not to continue to love each other with passion … to indulge those emotions which disturb the order of society … a neglected wife is, in general, the best mother.”

  —A.E.

  V

  The Pen is Prominent

  Caffeinated Casanova

  HONORÉ DE BALZAC (May 20, 1799-Aug. 18, 1850)

  HIS FAME: French master of the realistic novel, Balzac was a genius fueled by coffee, lust, and ambition. He wrote some 97 works, including two dozen volumes of La Comédie Humaine (“The Human Comedy”).

  HIS PERSON: Balzac endured a miserable childhood in Tours with an indifferent mother. She sent him off to boarding school and soon gave birth to a “love child” whom she openly preferred to him. After completing law studies at the Sorbonne and working three years as a law clerk, Balzac locked himself in an attic in 1819 and started his writing career. It would be another 10 years before he established his reputation with Les Chouans. In the interim, he was a hack writer, launched a short-lived printing concern, and speculated in a Sardinian silver-mining operation which drove him beyond the brink of debt. Throughout his life he remained imprudent about money.

  Balzac liked this 1848 picture for its “truthfulness”

  Inspired by a desire to be the Napoleon of novelists—near his desk was a marble bust of the late emperor—Balzac began his typical workday at midnight. Dressed in a monastic white robe, he would write, wearing out a quantity of goose-quill pens and pausing only to drink several dozen cups of coffee in the next 16 hours. One could not write, he believed, without quantities of black coffee. Between books he would reach other extremes, eating orgiastically and engaging in simultaneous love affairs as he charted a course through high society.

  His reputation as a novelist who “understood” women grew, and so did the number of his female admirers. Portraits do not reveal him to be especially attractive; he stood 5 ft. 2 in. and was grossly overweight. His dark hair dripped pomade and he wore even the best clothes badly. He had dirty fingernails and picked his nose in public. For his charm to shine through, however, he had only to speak; all of his conversation sparkled with vitality and wit. A lover of worthless and often useless antiques, he collected canes with handles of gold, silver, and turquoise. Inside one handle, he claimed, was the nude portrait of a “secret mistress.”

  Balzac’s literary genius captured the essence of bourgeois life. He converted simple “romance” into a record of human experience. On his deathbed, he is said to have cried, “Send for Bianchon!”—a doctor he created in La Comédie Humaine. To the end, Balzac was different; of all the great writers to have died of drinking, he was probably the only one for whom the fatal brew was coffee.

  SEX LIFE: “A woman is a well-served table,” Balzac observed, “which one sees with different eyes before and after the meal.” By all accounts Balzac devoured his lovers as voraciously as he enjoyed a good dinner. Young girls bored him. He preferred mature women and launched virtually every affair by saying, “I never had a mother. I never knew a mother’s love.”

  Despite his bizarre appearance, he had no trouble finding willing women and he was a virtuoso at juggling his numerous affairs. (It is surprising that he had time for such dalliances, given his immense literary output.) A number of the 12,000 letters he received from female admirers contained explicit propositions, many of which he accepted. He struck a responsive chord in these readers with his sympathetic delineations of unappreciated matrons. Biographer Noel Gerson refers to Balzac’s virile and experimental bedroom manner. Apparently he had been instructed by many courtesans over the years. “He slept with aristocrats, courtesans and trollops indiscriminately,” wrote Gerson, “displaying in his love life the same dazzling diversification that appeared in his writing. His yearning for romance, like all of his other appetites, was insatiable.” Considering his indifference to fidelity, it is noteworthy that he also had at least two very tender and enduring affairs of the heart.

  SEX PARTNERS: Balzac boasted of his chastity during his early days of writing, but at 23 he was introduced to sexual passion by Laure de Berny, a 45-year-old grandmother. Madame de Berny was prototypical of the lonely older woman with an inner fire so frequently depicted in his work. Their relationship lasted 15 years.

  In the beginning of this affair, Balzac also found time to carry on with a wealthy widow, the blond Duchesse d’Abrantes. He met her in 1825, when she was 40, and set his sights on making love to this woman who had slept with Prince Metternich. Another of her charms was her fortune—always an irresistible feature in a woman—and she paid some of his mounting debts. The two reigning passions of his life—women and fame—were in part fueled by a desire for the money they could provide. He became increasingly promiscuous with age and always maintained the energy required for his demanding double life as lover and artist.

  In 1832, however, he suffered rejection at the hands of the Marquise de Castries, one of the most beautiful aristocrats in France. She was perhaps the first woman of note who simply could not overcome the revulsion she felt at his appearance. Balzac got his revenge by ridiculing her in his novel La Duchesse de Langeais. The episode left him feeling vulnerable and depressed; he was 33, and his debts were mounting. Madame de Berny was aged and he felt the need for a protectress more than ever. Then he received an intriguing letter from the Ukraine signed “The Stranger.” Balzac replied and discovered the writer, Evelina Hanska, was married to a baron. The following year Balzac and Evelina secretly met in Switzerland; they found each other plumper than they had hoped, but no matter. They fell in love. For years they conducted a passionate correspondence. Evelina promised to marry him when her elderly husband died. Occasionally they would meet in various European cities for lovemaking that was, as he described it, “honey and fir
e.” Balzac did not deny himself the attentions of other women, however, and throughout this time he dallied with 24-year-old Marie Louise du Fresnay, who bore him a child. She passed the infant off as her husband’s. He also had a two-month affair with the most “divinely beautiful” woman he had ever seen, the notoriously promiscuous Lady Ellenborough. Another affair—with Frances Sarah Lovell, the reputedly “highly sexed” wife of Count Guidoboni-Visconti—lasted five years. She affectionately called him “Bally,” paid many of his debts, and bore him a child. Throughout all of this philandering Balzac kept up his association with various prostitutes, sometimes two at a time. In 1841 Evelina Hanska’s husband died, and Balzac, troubled by his coffee-assaulted stomach, was finally willing to settle down. But Evelina, who was now pregnant with Balzac’s child, refused to marry him. The child was stillborn. Balzac moved in with another mistress, Louise Breugnol, and his health began to fail. When he was near death, Evelina took pity on him and, 17 years after they first met, they were wed. Balzac would die five months later, with his wife asleep in the next room.

  HIS ADVICE: “It is easier to be a lover than a husband, for the same reason that it is more difficult to show a ready wit all day long than to say a good thing occasionally.”

  —G.A.M.

  Never-Neverland

  J. M. BARRIE (May 9, 1860-June 19, 1937)

  HIS FAME: Known today only as the creator of the beloved Peter Pan, “the boy who would not grow up,” J. M. Barrie was a literary giant in his lifetime. He wrote a number of best-selling novels and a steady stream of plays that wee performed to packed houses.

  HIS PERSON: Wrote James Matthew Barrie, “To be born is to be wrecked on an island.” Perhaps this is an apt description for one whose long life was peppered with the tragic deaths of those he loved. The first occurred when Barrie was six, growing up in the little Scottish village of Kirriemuir. His father was a handloom weaver, and he and his wife, Margaret Ogilvy (it was a Scottish custom for a married woman to keep her maiden name), had 10 children. Margaret’s favorite, David, was 13 when he died after an ice-skating accident. His death plunged her into a black depression. Little Jamie Barrie did all he could to cheer his mother; he tried to be so much like his brother “that even my mother should not see the difference.” Once he even put on the dead boy’s clothes and imitated his whistle, hoping to fool his mother with his disguise.

  As Barrie grew up, his dream of becoming a writer solidified, and by age 25 he was a London journalist. Success came quickly as he turned to novels and plays, churning out a prodigious amount of work. Soon London was at Barrie’s feet, worshiping the shy little playwright (he was barely over 5 ft. tall) who had become an immensely wealthy and famous man.

  In addition to his work, Barrie amused himself with his cricket team, the Allahakbarries (“Allah akbar” is Arabic for “Heaven help us”), which was made up of noted writers and artists such as A. Conan Doyle and P. G. Wodehouse. Barrie’s primary pleasure, however, was in his numerous friendships with children. Despite these diversions, his personal life was usually troubled. His mother died, one of his sisters died, and another sister’s fiancé died after falling off the horse Barrie had given him as a wedding present.

  These tragedies contributed to Barrie’s lifelong reserve. Only children always felt comfortable with the tiny man with the deep, rumbling Scottish voice. His behavior often intimidated adults, for he would lapse into silences that went unbroken for hours and he swung regularly from dark depression to charming gaiety. One of Barrie’s better traits was his unstinting generosity. He gave abundantly to friends and strangers in need, often doing so anonymously.

  Barrie died at the age of 77, finally worn down by emotional duress and by the physical ailments that had long troubled him—a constant cough (he was forever puffing on his pipe), colds, headaches, and insomnia. His last words were “I can’t sleep.”

  LOVE LIFE: Barrie had one of the most profound cases of mother fixation ever recorded. When he was 36, he wrote a book called Margaret Ogilvy, a sentimental memoir of his mother. The book was so personal and adoring that one critic called it “a positive act of indecency.”

  In addition to being completely wrapped up in his mother, Barrie was woefully self-conscious about his height, and this strongly affected his attitude toward the opposite sex. When he was 18, he made these notes in his notebook (in which he often wrote in the third person):He is very young-looking—trial of his life that he is always thought a boy.

  Greatest horror—dream I am married—wake up shrieking.

  Grow up & have to give up marbles—awful thought.

  Barrie wrote of being crushed that women found him “quite harmless,” and summed up his misery in this outpouring:

  Six feet three inches … If I had really grown to this it would have made a great difference in my life. I would not have bothered turning out reels of printed matter. My one aim would have been to become a favorite of the ladies which between you and me has always been my sorrowful ambition. The things I could have said to them if my legs had been longer. Read that with a bitter cry.

  Barrie frequently got crushes on actresses, but he did little in the way of pursuing them. In 1892 he was looking for a second leading lady for his new play, Walker, London. He wanted a woman who was “young, quite charming … and able to flirt.” He gave the part to 29-year-old Mary Ansell, who met all the requirements.

  Mary and Barrie began to see a great deal of each other. There are two versions of what ensued. In one, Barrie, after keeping Mary anxiously waiting, finally proposed. He then fell seriously ill with pneumonia—a matter of national concern—and Mary rushed to his side and nursed him back to health. In the other version, she refused to marry him many times. When he fell ill, she went to him at his mother’s behest, and they were married on what was expected to be his deathbed. The wedding took place on July 9, 1894.

  What followed on the fateful honeymoon is a matter of speculation. It has been much rumored that Barrie was completely impotent—he was jokingly labeled “the boy who couldn’t go up”—but no one knows for sure. One biographer states that Mary told her friends that the marriage was never consummated. In Andrew Birkin’s excellent biography, J. M. Barrie and the Lost Boys, Mary is said to have confided to a friend that she and her husband had “normal marital relations” in the early days of their marriage. John Middleton Murry, a friend of Mary’s, wrote in a journal that Barrie was guilty of “unmentionable sex behavior towards Mary.”

  Wherever the truth lies, it does not point to sexual harmony between the Barries. Nevertheless, the couple settled down to married life, and Mary turned her frustrated maternal instincts toward Porthos, their big brown-and-white St. Bernard, who was the model for Nana in Peter Pan. While Mary tried to amuse herself with clothes and house-hunting, Barrie plunged himself into his work, which he never discussed with his wife. He remained silent for hours in her company and, in fact, rarely spent any time with her.

  What hours they did pass together were spent walking Porthos in London’s Kensington Gardens. On one such stroll, Barrie met two handsome, charming little boys wearing red berets, out walking with their nurse. They were four-year-old George Davies and his three-year-old brother Jack. They were the sons of Arthur Llewelyn Davies, a good-looking, struggling young barrister, and his wife, Sylvia, a marvelous, enchanting woman, sister of actor Gerald du Maurier and daughter of author George du Maurier. Sylvia had another boy, Peter, and would soon add two more to her brood, Michael and Nico.

  Thus began the truly great love affair in J. M. Barrie’s life. Barrie “adopted” the Davieses. He visited them daily, bought them presents, flirted sweetly with Sylvia (whom he worshiped), and entertained the boys with the stories of fairies and pirate adventures that were to become Peter Pan. Years later Barrie told the boys, “I made Peter by rubbing the five of you violently together, as savages with two sticks produce a flame.” Barrie’s “adoption” disgruntled Arthur Davies, but he remained a gentleman. What could he
do? Barrie, as he had written of himself, was “quite harmless,” and the boys loved “Uncle Jim.” What Mary Barrie felt about all this can be imagined. To add to the irony, Barrie was working on a novel, Tommy and Grizel, and switched from Mary to Sylvia as his model for Grizel.

  In 1907 tragedy struck. Arthur died of a terrible disease of the jaw, having been previously disfigured by facial operations. Barrie was at his side throughout the ordeal, and at the courageous Sylvia’s side as well. It was understood that Barrie would assume financial responsibility for the family.

  Two years later, as Barrie sat working at his desk in his summer cottage, a second blow fell. The gardener informed him that Mary Barrie (now in her 40s) was having an affair with Gilbert Cannan, a 24-year-old barrister and writer and a friend of the Barries. A stupefied Barrie confronted his wife, who denied nothing and asked for a divorce. In a letter to her friend H. G. Wells, she wrote, “He seems to have developed the most ardent passion for me now that he has lost me; that frightens me.” In 1909 the couple filed for divorce; it was granted the following year. Barrie was shattered. In an attempt to keep publicity from further upsetting the miserable playwright, a petition was prepared asking the press to treat the matter discreetly. It was signed by Henry James, H. G. Wells, and Arthur Wing Pinero, among others.