The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People

by David Wallechinsky

  Joyce in Zurich

  Joyce fell in love with a semieducated Dublin chambermaid, Nora Barnacle, on June 16, 1904, the date to which he assigned all the happenings in his novel Ulysses. Refusing to be married by “a clerk with a pen behind his ear or a priest in a nightshirt,” Joyce took Nora as his common-law wife, and they left for the Continent in October, 1904. They eventually married in 1931, at the urging of their daughter, Lucia.

  Joyce earned a precarious living by teaching conversational English and writing reviews in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris. Until 1912 he made rare visits to Dublin, which he considered stifling to artists like himself. After years of drudgery—and a series of 25 painful operations for iritis, glaucoma, and cataracts, which left him at times nearly blind—he finally began to enjoy a comfortable income from his writing. Lanky, bespectacled, and shy, Joyce never permitted himself an off-color remark in the presence of a lady. Yet he became famous for his unbuttoned prose, and in December of 1920 Ulysses was banned for its obscenity in the U.S. and England.

  SEX LIFE: In his student days Joyce haunted Dublin’s seedy “Nighttown” red-light district, where he lost his virginity at age 14. In his early 20s he gave up prostitutes, saying he longed to “copulate with a soul.” The soul mate he chose, Nora Barnacle, remained his lifelong companion. He saw himself as a weak child in need of Nora’s motherly discipline and once wrote to her: “I would be delighted to feel my flesh tingling under your hand…. I wish you would smack me or flog me even. Not in play, dear, in earnest and on my naked flesh. I wish you were strong, strong, dear, and had a big full proud bosom and big fat thighs. I would love to be whipped by you, Nora love!”

  The small-breasted, boyishly built Nora adapted well to the role of dominatrix, addressing Joyce as “simpleminded Jim” and describing him to others as “a weakling.” While Joyce’s work earned him worldwide praise, Nora made no secret of her disdain for his writing. Despite the fact that Ulysses became famous for its psychological penetration of the female mind, Nora asserted that Joyce knew “nothing at all about women.” Still, Nora was faithful to him throughout their long relationship, even though she confided to friends that Joyce wanted her to go to bed with other men “so he’ll have something to write about.”

  Joyce was never at a loss for words in his letters to Nora. In 1909, when he was away from Ireland on business, he wrote her lusty letters packed with scatological endearments and praises for her soiled underwear: “The smallest things give me a great cockstand—a whorish movement of your mouth, a little brown stain on the seat of your white drawers … to feel your hot lecherous lips sucking away at me, to fuck between your two rosy-tipped bubbies.” When he didn’t hear from her, he wrote again with words of apology: “Are you offended, dear, at what I said about your drawers? That is all nonsense, darling. I know they are as spotless as your heart.” Nora’s drawers, and what was in them, kept Joyce’s pen quite busy. He was a dyed-in-the-wool underwear fetishist and even carried a pair of doll’s panties in his pocket. Fortified by liquor, he would sometimes slip the tiny underpants over his fingers and cakewalk them across a café table, to the bewilderment of onlookers.

  The author spent much of his time in cafés and bars, chatting with other writers and artists. It is believed that Joyce was less interested in exchanging ideas with his intellectual peers than in avoiding intercourse with Nora; drinking himself flaccid provided an effective means of birth control.

  While teaching English in Paris, Joyce fell passionately in love with one of his students, Amalia Popper, the daughter of a wealthy Jewish businessman. It was an unrequited love affair that was thwarted by Amalia’s father, who gently warned the author not to take advantage of his position of authority. The experience kindled in Joyce a nagging desire for a dark, Semitic woman.

  In early 1919 Joyce found his ideal in a Zurich woman named Marthe Fleischmann. He described to a friend the circumstances under which he first saw Marthe: “She was in a small but well-lit room in the act of pulling a chain.” Through this unabashed first encounter, Marthe had unwittingly endeared herself to the coprophilic Joyce, who later that night explored “the coldest and hottest parts of a woman’s body.”

  MEDICAL REPORT: During Joyce’s early forays into Nighttown he contracted syphilis, which he treated himself by cauterizing the chancre. The treatment eliminated the symptom but not the disease, and it is believed that the author’s chronic eye trouble stemmed from it. However, he died in Zurich as the result of complications that followed surgery for a duodenal ulcer.

  HIS THOUGHTS: “Love is a cursed nuisance when coupled with lust also.”

  —M.J.T.

  “Public Lover Number One”

  GEORGE S. KAUFMAN (Nov. 16, 1889 -June 2, 1961)

  HIS FAME: Unquestionably the most prolific and successful playwright of the American theater from the mid-1920s to the late 1940s, Kaufman had at least one play in performance on Broadway every year for over 20 years. Most noted for his satire, he was both a director and a writer, coauthoring two Pulitzer Prize-winning plays, Of Thee I Sing (1932) with Morrie Rys-kind and You Can’t Take It with You (1936) with Moss Hart. He also coauthored The Man Who Came to Dinner (1939) and three of the Marx Brothers’ most successful movies, The Cocoanuts, Animal Crackers, and A Night at the Opera.

  HIS PERSON: The third of four children and the only male to survive infancy, George was born in Pittsburgh, Pa., to middle-class Jewish parents who “managed to get in on every business as it was finishing and made a total of four dollars.” He went to public schools in Pittsburgh, then moved with his parents to Paterson, N.J. He tried law school for three months but dropped out and went through a succession of ill-suited jobs, including selling hatbands and pump ribbons. Outside of his salaried positions he did much better, making frequent contributions to the newspaper column of Franklin P. Adams, which soon led to his own column. Later he became drama editor for The New York Times (1917-1930).

  The man whom the American press would eventually label “Public Lover Number One” certainly never looked the part. He was tall and lanky, had poor posture, always wore wire-rimmed glasses, and sported a bushy pompadour hairdo. At age 28 he married Beatrice Bakrow, who remained his wife and closest confidante until her death in 1945. Four years later, at age 59, he married 35-year-old Leueen MacGrath, an extremely beautiful Irish actress.

  Kaufman was almost puritanical, seldom if ever using profanity, shying away from dirty stories, and taking great offense at any mention of the sex act. He hated to write love scenes, always deferring the privilege to his collaborators. A perfect Victorian gentleman, he exuded a quiet strength and a brilliant wit. Groucho Marx once remarked that “the perfect woman would look like Marilyn Monroe and carry on a conversation like George Kaufman.”

  SEX LIFE: In 1905, when he was 14 years old, Kaufman and six of his friends made a pact and signed their names to an oath swearing to remain virgins until they married. Although Kaufman didn’t wed until he was 28, he kept his vow. Bea Bakrow commented later, “We were both virgins, which shouldn’t happen to anybody!” Bea became pregnant during their first year of marriage and carried the baby well beyond term, giving birth to a stillborn child. The experience was so traumatic for Kaufman that he and Bea were never again sexual partners. They agreed to remain married, for in all matters other than sexuality they were well matched and content with each other. However, they also agreed to allow each other complete freedom in choosing sexual partners. In order to pursue his extramarital affairs in a comfortable manner, Kaufman rented a small apartment on 73rd Street in New York, which he maintained for many years. When his adopted daughter, Anne, heard about the apartment and its function years later, she said, “I wonder if Mummy furnished it?”

  Once Kaufman had fulfilled the obligation of his adolescent vow, he wasted little time exploring the delights of the feminine body. Shortly after his stillborn child’s birth, he opened up a charge account with Polly Adler, the famous madam of A House Is Not a Home fame. His a
ccount was not typical, however, for he never visited her business establishment. The call girls selected for him were instructed to wait under a specified street lamp between 73rd and 74th streets in New York’s Central Park. Kaufman would walk by, return, and begin a conversation, then invite his young friend to dinner, and finally return with her to his 73rd Street apartment and attempt to “seduce” her. Naturally, he was always successful, noting her phone number before she departed and promising to meet her again. No money ever changed hands or was even mentioned. At the end of the month he would receive a bill from Miss Adler for services rendered.

  As Kaufman’s fame grew, he quickly learned that successful Broadway writers and directors did not have to pay beautiful women to sleep with them, and he capitalized on this fortuitous situation. Always discreet, always a gentleman, he dated some of the most beautiful women on Broadway: chorus girls, rising or established stars, and dancers. His appeal went far beyond that due to his fame. Kaufman never promised women parts in his plays in return for favors. He seemed to understand women, was charming, urbane, witty, warm, and honest. He paid attention to the woman he was with and remained her friend long after the fire of passion was extinguished. And although he seldom told stories about his many affairs, he couldn’t resist recounting to his friends the evening he spent with one chorus girl, who throughout their lovemaking kept yelling, “Oh, Mr. Kaufman! Oh, Mr. Kaufman!” His friend Max Gordon called him a “male nymphomaniac.”

  Kaufman met movie actress Mary Astor in New York in the spring of 1933. He dazzled her and she “fell like a ton of bricks.” To Kaufman, their relationship was just another sexual friendship, but to Mary Astor it was love. She knew that her love was not reciprocated, but she was thrilled each time they were together. “I am still in a daze—a kind of rosy glow,” Mary wrote in her diary. “It is beautiful, glorious, and I hope my last love. I can’t top it with anything in my experience.” The blue-covered diary, one of a series Mary Astor had kept for five years, candidly recounted her love trysts with Kaufman. Unfortunately, the diary fell into the hands of her husband, Dr. Franklyn Thorpe, whom she was divorcing and who tried to use its contents against her during a bitter child-custody trial. The existence of the diary was brought to public attention in July, 1936, when it was reported that Mary Astor had had an affair with a mystery man named George. Early speculation centered on George Gershwin or writer George Oppenheimer as Mary’s lover—until Dr. Thorpe’s lawyers finally revealed that the George referred to in the diary was George S. Kaufman.

  By this time various versions of the diary were showing up in print. One excerpt in particular caused a great sensation: “He fits me perfectly … many exquisite moments … 20—count them, diary, 20…. I don’t see how he does it … he is perfect.” One New York newspaper suggested the passage might refer to “the number of clubs she and Kaufman visited one night,” and playwright Moss Hart claimed the subject matter dealt with the string of Broadway hits Kaufman had enjoyed. But most Americans thought otherwise, and overnight George S. Kaufman became known as “Public Lover Number One.” A publisher in the Midwest offered $10,000 for any photo of Kaufman in a swimming suit or gym trunks. When he was subpoenaed to appear at the trial, Kaufman fled Hollywood for New York and refused to talk to the press until the case was over. “You might say I did not keep a diary,” he told reporters. Mary Astor and her husband reached a settlement in court, and soon the story dropped from the headlines.

  Kaufman’s wife, Bea, was embarrassed by the attention she and her husband received, but she stood by him throughout the ordeal. He continued his pursuit of beautiful women, but now he preceded his seduction with the line “Do you keep a diary?” Apparently he himself was not averse to putting his sentiments down in writing. Stage and film actress Claire Luce turned over a sealed envelope to the J. Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. Written on the envelope were her words: “To be opened 50 years from the above date. Contents: 68 tender and intimate pieces of correspondence from George S. Kaufman 1938-1953.”

  When Bea Bakrow died in 1945, Kaufman was grief-stricken and for some time withdrew from society. It was not until he met and married actress Leueen MacGrath in 1949 that he once again joined the social world of New York. Kaufman then devoted his energies to writing a play to showcase his beautiful wife’s acting ability. As his health weakened, he urged her to take lovers. They divorced in 1957, but Leueen returned to Kaufman in the years just before his death, refusing to marry him again because people would think it was for financial gain. She remained with him until his death in 1961 and shared the bulk of his estate with his daughter.

  HIS THOUGHTS: “The trouble with incest is that it gets you involved with relatives.”

  —S.B.

  Prodigal Son

  D. H. LAWRENCE (Sept. 11, 1885-Mar. 2, 1930)

  HIS FAME: David Herbert Lawrence wrote the most outspoken novels of his day, books banned for their explicit descriptions of sexual activity. Women in Love (1920) had to be privately printed, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) had to be expurgated until a landmark 1959 court decision allowed publication of passages featuring illicit intercourse. Today, few eyebrows would be raised by the following scene:For a moment he was still inside her, turgid there and quivering. Then as he began to move, in the sudden helpless orgasm, there awoke in her new strange thrills rippling inside her. Rippling … like a flapping overlapping of soft flames, soft as feathers, running to points of brilliance, exquisite … and melting her all molten inside….

  Lawrence at age 38

  HIS PERSON: Lawrence was the too dearly loved son of a proud, possessive mother who scorned her coarse husband, a Nottinghamshire coal miner. The frail and sickly “Bert” grew up surrounded by doting women, suffering agonies of frustrated “animal” feelings in the repressive late-Victorian atmosphere. At the age of 16 he suffered a severe sexual trauma, followed by pneumonia, after being cornered and threatened with exposure of his private parts by a rowdy group of factory girls.

  “I loved my mother like a lover,” Lawrence admitted after her death in 1910. Employed by day as a schoolteacher, he spent his nights working out his mother fixation in his early masterpiece, Sons and Lovers (1913), a classic variation on the Oedipus theme. Trying to exorcise his mother’s influence, he elaborated a philosophy of sex as the motive force of life, a kind of morphia inducing a pseudoreligious state of grace.

  Always thin and consumptive, never particularly virile, with tousled hair, a “flaming” red beard, and eyes “intense as blue stars,” Lawrence attracted by the force of his personality a succession of wealthy, titled patronesses. “Income on two legs” he called these women, who subscribed to the Lawrencean sexual mystique and subsidized his nomadic lifestyle. (The writer repaid their devotion by satirizing female “culture vultures” in his novels.) So acutely sensitive that he could not tolerate the nerve-jangling excitement of city life, Lawrence roamed all over rural England and southern Europe. He also traveled to Ceylon, Australia, the American Southwest, and Mexico, which he described in travel essays. From 1928 until tuberculosis struck him down at age 44, Lawrence was constantly on the move. He was like John the Baptist, “crying in the wilderness,” one devotee wrote.

  LOVE LIFE: Lawrence’s young manhood was dominated by the struggle (recounted in Sons and Lovers) between his first sweetheart, Jessie Chambers, and his mother, both possessive women who wanted to “wheedle the soul” out of him. He was first initiated into the “mystery of sex” at 23 by the local pharmacist’s wife, Alice Dax, who has described how, finding him stuck over a poem, she “gave Bert sex” to prompt his creative imagination. Jessie may have surrendered to him physically, but the two were never able to overcome their sexual timorousness together. Lawrence abandoned Jessie for another friend, the more sexually alluring Louie Burrows, whom he had known since he was 15. “Strong and rosy as the gates of Eden,” she too proved to be too “churchy” for the writer’s taste.

  Although all three women had good reason to
feel ill used by Lawrence, so powerful was his influence on them that Jessie Chambers lived her whole life in the shadow of Lawrence’s rejection, Alice Dax remained celibate in his memory, and Louie Burrows married only after his death.

  In 1912 Lawrence fell in love and ran away with Frieda Weekley, a member of the aristocratic German Von Richthofen family, who was at the time of their meeting married to one of Lawrence’s professors. Lawrence “touched a new tenderness in me,” explained the buxom blond Frieda, who abandoned her husband and three children to follow and later marry the impoverished writer six years her junior. “There was nothing for me to do but submit.”

  Actually, Frieda was a handsome Aryan “giantess” of a woman, who had enjoyed sex with an earlier lover, Freudian psychologist Otto Gross. Anything but submissive, Frieda enjoyed a brawling love-hate relationship with Lawrence, a lifelong contest of wills punctuated by public quarrels and broken crockery. This because Lawrence, the messiah of sexual liberation, also espoused male chauvinism. (“I do think a woman must yield some sort of precedence to a man,” he once said to British author Katherine Mansfield. “Men must go ahead … women must follow, as it were, unquestioningly.”) He even counseled beating recalcitrant wives. But Frieda, who was more than her husband’s equal physically, refused to submit to such treatment. Sexually, also, there was evidence of incompatibility. They were never able to achieve simultaneous orgasm, complained Lawrence, who accused his wife, and all women, of having “sex on the brain”—a curious complaint for a man who was himself obsessed by the subject. But the Lawrences seem to have met one another’s deepest-seated emotional needs. Frieda, who wore the long full skirts, aprons, and closely fitted bodices of his beloved mother, functioned as the writer’s earth mother, a source of warmth and succor. “And I hope to spend eternity,” Lawrence wrote in a poem, “with my face down-buried beneath her breasts.”