The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People

by David Wallechinsky

  Hemingway liked to dominate his women, believing that the man “must govern” sexual relationships. Three of his four wives appear to have accepted that rule. The exception was his third wife, Martha Gellhorn, who said afterward that “Papa” Hemingway had no redeeming qualities outside of his writing. (Hemingway called their marriage his “biggest mistake.”)

  In his letters, Hemingway told of having many unusual bed partners, including a black harem he maintained while on an African safari. His strident womanizing led contemporaries to question his manhood. Some observers, including former mentor Gertrude Stein, implied that he was a latent homosexual. In fact, on one occasion in Spain, while walking to the bull ring with his friend Sidney Franklin, the Brooklyn-born matador, Hemingway spotted a very obvious homosexual across the street “just minding his business.” Hemingway snorted, “Watch this.” He strode across the street and without warning smashed his fist into the man, knocking him down and hurting him. Satisfied, Hemingway rejoined Franklin. However, there is certainly no evidence to suggest that Hemingway ever had a homosexual relationship; he himself commented that he had been approached by a man only once in his life.

  “‘Course, Hemingway’s big problem all his life, I’ve always thought,” Sidney Franklin once told author Barnaby Conrad, “was he was always worried about his picha [penis]. The size of it, that is.” “Small?” Conrad wondered. Sidney Franklin “solemnly held up the little finger of his left hand with his thumbnail at the base,” Conrad reported. “He appraised it with a critical eye; then he raised his thumbnail up a fraction of an inch in reevaluation. ‘’Bout the size of a thirty-thirty shell,’ he said.”

  Papa Hemingway was a straight man in bed, and he preferred women who “would rather take chances than use prophylactics.” He abhorred any sexual arrangement that violated his sense of propriety. He wasn’t always the best performer and sometimes experienced stress-induced impotence.

  SEX PARTNERS: Hemingway boasted of his sexual prowess, claiming he had made love to a wide variety of women, including Mata Hari, Italian countesses, a Greek princess, and obese prostitutes in Michigan, where he spent many youthful summers. He also claimed he had made love to some of Havana’s most outrageous prostitutes, who bore such nicknames as Xenophobia, Leopoldina, and the International Whore. In truth, his relationships were considerably more chaste than he portrayed them, and his attitudes toward sex were almost prudish. His “loveliest dreams” were inhabited by Greta Garbo and his friend Marlene Dietrich. In real life he preferred submissive, shapely blondes or redheads. Friends and acquaintances thought him “a Puritan,” and Hemingway himself blushed when accosted by a prostitute, feeling that only those “in love” could make love. Married four times (and producing a total of three sons), he always regarded his divorce from first wife, Hadley Richardson, as a “sin” he could never expiate. Although their first few years together were nearly ideal, their marriage was doomed when Hemingway met and fell in love with Pauline “Pfife” Pfeiffer, a beautiful sycophant who was to become his second wife. Hadley agreed to a divorce only after she had forced Pauline and Ernest to stay apart for 100 days.

  Hemingway’s second marriage lasted 12 years on paper but far less in reality. The relationship ended for sexual reasons; after Pauline twice gave birth by Caesarean section, they had been forced to practice coitus interruptus because her Catholicism precluded the use of prophylactics.

  Hemingway met his third wife, Martha Gellhorn, while reporting on the Spanish Civil War from Madrid. They were quickly drawn to each other, but their passions cooled after marriage, and they were divorced five years later, in 1945. It was Ernest’s shortest marriage and a cosmic mismatch. Ernest did not like Martha’s independence (she was an accomplished writer in her own right) or her sharp tongue. He wanted blind adoration and submission, which Martha could not give any man.

  Hemingway’s fourth wife, Mary Welsh, was in many ways made to order. She was patient, worshipful, and beautiful (and nine years younger than Hemingway). He called her his “pocket Rubens.” The marriage lasted for the remainder of Hemingway’s life largely because Mary overlooked his often difficult behavior. Hemingway continued to enjoy a number of dalliances and made no effort to keep them secret.

  As a young man he had preferred older women (Hadley was eight years his senior). From middle age on, he enjoyed the company of much younger women. A number of these women seemed to be models for Hemingway’s fictional characters—one may have inspired Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises and the other may have inspired Renata in Across the River and into the Trees, but none won his heart completely. He never let them get too close lest they try to run his life. “I know wimmins,” he told one friend, “and wimmins is difficult.”

  QUIRKS: Hemingway had several unusual theories about sex. He believed that each man was allotted a certain number of orgasms in his life, and that these had to be carefully spaced out. Another theory was that if you had sex often enough, you could eat all the strawberries you wanted without contracting hives, even though you were allergic to the fruit.

  HIS ADVICE: From Death in the Afternoon: “If two people love each other, there can be no happy end to it, for one of them must die and the other remain bereft.”

  —J.A.M.

  The Indefatigable Egotist

  VICTOR HUGO (Feb. 26, 1802-May 22, 1885)

  HIS FAME: Hugo was known to his contemporaries as a champion of the Romantic movement, to literary critics primarily for his poetry, and to general readers then and now for his epic novels Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

  HIS PERSON: “Victor Hugo was a madman who believed himself to be Victor Hugo,” said the poet Jean Cocteau in summing up the extravagances and contradictions of a man who was larger than life both in literature and in love. This supremely self-centered genius championed the rights of the poor and the downtrodden at the same time that he emblazoned his walls with the motto Ego Hugo (“I, Hugo”). He amassed a fortune, yet insisted on being buried in a pauper’s coffin.

  He was one of the literary center-pieces in a nation and a century rich in writers, and a political force in a time of turmoil and change. An immense man of gargantuan energy and robust health, he slept less than four hours a night, wrote standing up, and boasted that he never had a thought or a sensation that was not grist for his writer’s mill.

  His disillusionment with the Second Empire of Louis Napoleon drove him into exile in 1851, and for nearly 20 years he lived and worked on the Channel Island of Guernsey, creating a bizarre and ornate personal environment of architectural whimsy, made up of secret staircases, hidden rooms, and eccentric decorations. Here he wrote feverishly and explored the occult.

  When he finally returned to France, he was again active in politics and literature, vigorous almost to the end. His dying words echo the contradictions of his life: “I see a black light.”

  SEX LIFE: When Hugo married at the age of 20, he was a virgin, but on his wedding night he coupled with his unsuspecting young wife, Adèle Foucher, nine times. She became exhausted by his sexual athleticism, and after five difficult pregnancies in eight years, she called a halt to their sex life. The marriage was shaken further when Adèle fell in love with Hugo’s friend, the famous literary critic Sainte-Beuve. Although the affair probably was not consummated, it nearly led to a duel between the two men.

  The rupture with Adèle only temporarily disrupted Hugo’s sex life. In fact, his appetite had merely been whetted by his wife. He had been married 11 years and was world-famous for The Hunchback of Notre Dame when in 1833 he began an affair with the raven-haired, dark-eyed beauty Juliette Drouet. An actress and the mistress of a series of famous and wealthy men, she taught him the varieties of sensual pleasure. He was soon able to boast, “Women find me irresistible.”

  And obviously they did. He began one of the most amazingly active sex lives ever recorded. It was not unusual for him to make love to a young prostitute in the morning, an appreciative actress before lunch, a compli
ant courtesan as an aperitif, and then join the also indefatigable Juliette for a night of sex. He maintained a certain level of activity almost to his deathbed; diary entries at the age of 83 record eight bouts of love over the four months before his death.

  SEX PARTNERS: He craved affairs with women who were passionate, witty, and challenging, but he often settled for sheer numbers. His powerful personality and his fame were strong aphrodisiacs, and he enjoyed a dazzling parade of willing partners. They were almost exclusively young; in fact, as he grew older, often young enough to be his granddaughters. He was perfectly open to having liaisons with married women, but not if they were living with their husbands. Any other woman, or girl, who was young, amenable, and attractive was fair game.

  Juliette, who was the great love of his life, tolerated his prodigious activity. But by the time she was in her 30s her beauty had begun to fade—no doubt in part because of the cloistered existence Hugo forced upon her. By 1844 she had been temporarily displaced by Léonie d’Aunet, a young noblewoman who had run away with a painter. The affair turned into a shocking scandal when Léonie’s jealous husband arranged to have the couple tailed by the police, who caught them in flagrante delicto. Although Hugo escaped punishment by claiming his privileges as a member of the peerage, Léonie was thrown into jail for adultery. Upon her release from prison, Hugo divided his time equally for a while between Juliette and her. Eventually Juliette’s absolute devotion won out, however, and Léonie was deposed.

  Juliette’s reinstatement as his primary love did not in any way limit the scope of Hugo’s conquests. She herself estimated that he had sex with at least 200 women between 1848 and 1850. Even at age 70 he managed to seduce the 22-year-old daughter of writer Théophile Gautier, and it is possible that he was carrying on an affair with Sarah Bernhardt simultaneously.

  Despite the myriad women who claimed his attentions, Hugo always returned to Juliette as his “true wife.” Their love affair lasted 50 years. During most of that time they had to live separately. When possible, Hugo visited her every day. As for Juliette, her devotion was unswerving. She wrote him 17,000 love letters. At age 77 she died in his arms, and although his sex drive continued during the remaining two years of his life, her death seemed to break his spirit at last.

  QUIRKS: Rumors abounded during his lifetime, as they have since, that he carried on an incestuous relationship with his daughter Léopoldine, but no conclusive proof of this exists. He was apparently a voyeur and something of a foot fetishist, and he was turned on by intrigue and mystery. He often admitted his mistresses through secret staircases and entertained them in hidden rooms even when this was not really necessary.

  HIS THOUGHTS: “Love … seek love … give pleasure and take it in loving as fully as you can.” And, to his young grandson, who walked in on the 80-year-old Hugo in the embrace of a young laundress: “Look, little Georges, that’s what they call genius!”

  —R.W.S.

  The Gay Romantic

  CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD (Aug. 26, 1904 -Jan. 4, 1986)

  HIS FAME: British-born Christopher Isherwood, novelist, screenwriter, playwright, and essayist, is probably best known for his quasi-autobiographical “Berlin novels,” one of which, Goodbye to Berlin, introduced the character Sally Bowles and was the basis for the hit musical Cabaret. The slender, 5-ft. 7-in. Isherwood spent time in pre-Hitler Germany and chronicled much of the decadence of that society in his fiction. With his good friend W. H. Auden, with whom he collaborated on several plays, Isherwood left Europe in 1939 and immigrated to the U.S. He settled in California and began working on films, including The Loved One. An American citizen since 1946, Isherwood is a student of Vedanta and has written extensively on the various aspects of Hindu philosophy. He is also an active supporter of gay liberation, having openly admitted to his homosexuality in his book Kathleen and Frank.

  Isherwood, 48, with 18-year-old Don Bachardy

  LOVE LIFE: Asked when he first came to the realization of his own homosexuality, Isherwood replied, “Quite early—by the time I was 10 or so, in the sense of being physically attracted to boys at school. I managed to have orgasms with them while we were wrestling and I guess some of them had orgasms, too, but we never admitted to it. I fell in love a lot during my teens, but never did anything about it. I was very late in getting into an actual physical affair. That happened while I was in college.”

  It was his partner’s idea. When Isherwood protested, the other young man locked the door and sat on his lap.

  “Other experiences followed, all of them enjoyable but none entirely satisfying,” according to Isherwood. This was because he was suffering from an inhibition common to upper-class homosexuals of the time; he couldn’t relax with his British peers. He needed “a working-class foreigner.”

  Isherwood found his answer in Berlin when he visited Auden in 1929. The fact that the Germans were “simple and natural about homosexuality” was a welcome change. In one of Berlin’s homosexual bars he found the type of blue-eyed blond boy who represented for him “the whole mystery-magic of foreignness.”

  After returning to England, he was hired as a tutor for a young boy in a remote village on the coast. Isherwood’s autobiography, written in the third person, recounts the scene.

  “While Christopher was there, he had his first—and last—complete sexual experience with a woman…. They were both drunk…. She liked sex but wasn’t the least desperate to get it. He started kissing her without bothering about what it might lead to. When she responded, he was surprised and amused to find how easily he could relate his usual holds and movements to this unusual partner…. He also felt a lust which was largely narcissistic; she had told him how attractive he was and now he was excited by himself making love to her…. Next day, she said, “I could tell that you’ve had a lot of women through your hands.”… He asked himself: “Do I now want to go to bed with more women and girls? Of course not, as long as I can have boys. Why do I prefer boys? Because of their shape and their voices and their smell and the way they move. And boys can be romantic. I can put them into my myth and fall in love with them. From my point of view, girls can be absolutely beautiful but never romantic. In fact, their utter lack of romance is what I find most likeable about them. They’re so sensible.”

  Back in Germany in 1930, Isherwood met the boy whom he was to call Otto Nowak in Goodbye to Berlin. Otto was a bisexual with a highly dramatic nature and “a face like a very ripe peach.” By 1932 the affair had cooled and Otto was replaced by 17-year-old Heinz. After Hitler came into power, Heinz and Isherwood wandered around Europe from country to country, living like a “happily married heterosexual couple” until 1937, when Heinz risked a visit to Nazi Germany, where he was arrested and imprisoned for draft evasion and homosexuality. Heartbroken, Isherwood returned to London and allowed himself to be comforted by a variety of young men.

  He also had the companionship of Auden. About his relationship with Auden, Isherwood has written:Their friendship was rooted in schoolboy memories and the mood of its sexuality was adolescent. They had been going to bed together, unromantically but with much pleasure, for the past 10 years, whenever the opportunity offered itself…. They couldn’t think of themselves as lovers, yet sex had given friendship an extra dimension.

  When Isherwood went to Hollywood in 1939, he met Aldous Huxley and Swami Prabhavananda. For a while he stayed at the swami’s monastery, where he and the other devotees pledged themselves to celibacy. But Isherwood did not completely forswear his love life. His boyfriends during the 1940s included William Caskey, a young photographer from Kentucky with whom he lived for several years.

  In 1953 Isherwood met 18-year-old Don Bachardy, who collaborated with Isherwood on a play and some film scripts, and lived with him in Santa Monica for the rest of his life.

  Isherwood has always maintained that he is very happy with his sexual preference. Although Auden once baited him by calling him a “repressed heterosexual,” Isherwood offers his own definition of what it
means to be a homosexual. “It seems to me that the real clue to your sex-orientation lies in your romantic feelings rather than in your sexual feelings. If you are really gay, you are able to fall in love with a man, not just enjoy having sex with him.”

  —C.H.S.

  Ireland’s Lost Sheep

  JAMES JOYCE (Feb. 2, 1882-Jan. 13, 1941)

  HIS FAME: Irish novelist and poet James Joyce was one of the most important innovators in modern literature, owing to his use of interior monologue, or “stream of consciousness.” Among his greatest works are Ulysses, Finnegan’s Wake, Dubliners, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

  HIS PERSON: When the elder Joyce, a Dublin tax collector, sank into alcoholism and eventually lost his job, young James was withdrawn from an exclusive Jesuit-run boarding school, and for two years the brilliant boy educated himself. At age 17 he entered another Jesuit institution, University College in Dublin, and briefly considered becoming a priest, but rejected the idea because it required a vow of celibacy.