The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People

by David Wallechinsky

  Frieda was known to indulge in harmless dalliances with Italian peasants and Prussian officers, while Lawrence, the working-class guru of sex, was occupied with his rich benefactresses. These included the eccentric Lady Ottoline Morrell, who was supposed to reign over Lawrence’s utopian colony of Rananim (founded on “the complete fulfillment in the flesh of all strong desire”) but instead ended up as the sinister Hermione in Women in Love; Cynthia Asquith, an unattainable patrician beauty whom Lawrence is said to have made love to through his writings and paintings; and Mabel Dodge Luhan, an American heiress and writer who gave Lawrence a 166-acre ranch in New Mexico but failed in her attempt to “seduce his spirit.” (“The womb in me roused to reach out and take him,” wrote Mrs. Luhan, who was not physically attracted to Lawrence but sought physical union with him because the “surest way to the soul is through the flesh.”)

  In fact, Lawrence was something of a puritanical prude. He was offended by lewd tales and considered sexual intercourse indecent anytime except in the dark of night. He probably also suffered from impotence, which would have been aggravated by his exhausting bursts of creative energy and by his worsening tubercular condition. Dorothy Brett, one of his most devoted followers, has described how Lawrence climbed into her bed one night but was unable to consummate the relationship. Lawrence’s “sexual potentialities,” according to another friend, were “exclusively cerebral.”

  “Even if we can’t act sexually to our complete satisfaction,” Lawrence wrote apropos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, “let us at least think sexually, complete and clear…. This is the real point of this work. I want men and women to be able to think sex, fully, completely, honestly and cleanly.”

  HOMOSEXUALITY: Lawrence professed to be shocked by the effete homosexuality of the British intelligentsia, but would say, “I believe the nearest I have come to perfect love was with a young coal miner when I was about 16.” Occasionally frustrated in his relations with women, he exalted a sort of mystical communion of men, a “blood brotherhood.” He was also fascinated by the male physique, which he celebrated in the nude wrestling scene in Women in Love. In fact, Lawrence seems to have had more of his mother in him than his father; women may have worshiped him, but men considered him effeminate and joked about his domestic virtues. The messiah of sex was happiest when he was peeling potatoes or scrubbing floors, as the writer Norman Douglas once pointed out, not without malice. Lawrence’s friend and biographer Richard Aldington said, “I should say DHL was about 85 percent hetero and 15 percent homo.”

  HIS THOUGHTS: “You mustn’t think I advocate perpetual sex. Far from it. Nothing nauseates me more than promiscuous sex in and out of season.”

  —C.D.

  The Call Of The Wild

  JACK LONDON (Jan. 12, 1876-Nov. 22, 1916)

  HIS FAME: Owing to such works as The Call of the Wild, Jack London was the most successful writer to emerge at the onset of the 20th century in America. He remains one of the most widely translated American authors, especially in the Soviet Union, where his socialist philosophy has had wide appeal.

  HIS PERSON: Survival was taking shape as the theme of his life while he was still in the womb. “A Discarded Wife: Why Mrs. Chaney Twice Attempted Suicide,” ran the San Francisco Chronicle headline seven months before Jack’s birth. “Driven from House for Refusing to Destroy her Unborn Infant—A Chapter of Heartlessness and Domestic Misery,” it continued. The unborn baby was Jack. The abandoned mother-to-be was Flora Wellman and she was not Mr. Chaney’s wife. Flora and W. H. Chaney, two beyond-the-fringe occultists of San Francisco, had been cohabiting during Flora’s conception period, but Chaney claimed he was impotent at the time and furthermore did not want this out-of-wedlock child. Despite the publicity and the turmoil, Flora had a successful delivery, and Jack was raised on the tough waterfront by his stepfather, John London. An independent youth, he set out at 14—using his stepfather’s surname—to see the world. He rode the rails as a hobo (and once spent a month in jail because of it), explored the Klondike for gold, and hunted seal in Siberia. Though he made California his home, the lure of travel and adventure never stopped calling him. He visited the slums of London, sailed the South Pacific, and was a war correspondent during the Russo-Japanese War. Refusing his doctor’s orders to change his drinking habits and his lifestyle, he died from an overdose of morphine and atropine at the age of 40.

  London with Charmian Kittredge

  LOVE LIFE: “Prince of the Oyster Pirates,” they called him when he sailed San Francisco Bay. It was with the “Queen of the Oyster Pirates,” a girl named Mamie who came with the boat he bought at age 15, that he enjoyed his first sexual encounter.

  Latently homosexual was how Joan London described her father’s relationship with his best friend, George Sterling. But there was nothing latent about his heterosexual relations. His friends called him “the Stallion,” and one biographer characterized him as “a sexual anarchist.” The essence of man-woman sex for London was embodied in a story he told of meeting a woman on a train and romping in bed with her for three days while the train chugged east and a maid baby-sat the woman’s child. When the train stopped, London bade the woman a final farewell, having got all he wanted.

  London desired two things from a wife: a son and tolerance for his infidelities. The first great love of his life, the pale and delicate Mabel Applegarth, would also have given him a dictatorial mother-in-law. Mabel was one of the first “nice” girls London met in Oakland in the 1890s. She was from what he called the “parlor floor of society,” as opposed to the “cellar,” and he worked hard to raise himself to her social status. It was never high enough for her mother, though, and after London had courted Mabel unsuccessfully for several years, his ardor cooled.

  The woman he married in 1900 gave him two daughters and a divorce. Bess Maddern, who was a good friend of Mabel’s, could not tolerate his straying. (He believed that resisting the temptations of the flesh was a waste of willpower.) Bess named Anna Strunsky, Jack’s longtime friend in the Socialist movement and his co-writer on The Kempton-Wace Letters, as the other woman, and the couple separated in 1903. Bess never suspected that the other woman was in fact Charmian Kittredge, who acted as Bess’ confidante during the separation.

  Jack married Charmian in Chicago in 1905, as soon as he had been granted a divorce in California. Illinois, which did not recognize divorce until a year after such decrees were granted, declared the marriage to Charmian invalid. In the uproar that ensued, the lecture tour Jack was on at the time was canceled, his books were banned in various parts of the country, and an organization called the Averill Women’s Club passed a resolution condemning both college football and Jack London.

  To London, Charmian was worth the tempest. She could box and fence like a man, enjoyed travel, and earned one of the highest appellations Jack could pin on a female—“Mate-Woman.” But they did not live happily ever after. In 1911, when Charmian gave birth to a sickly daughter who lived only three days, a bitterly disappointed London became “one wild maelstrom,” embarking on nightly debauches to assuage his grief at not being able to father a son. Charmian was aware of a world filled with “slim-ankled potential rivals” and began playing a game friends called “breaking it up,” wherein she would not allow him to be alone with another woman for more than two minutes. But women continued to fling themselves at “God’s own mad lover,” as the blue-eyed, curly-haired, muscular writer referred to himself. The Londons’ marriage deteriorated to a state of bitter coexistence. It was during his last few years, when his kidneys began to fail, that they journeyed to Hawaii, where Jack, depressed and ill though he was, met the last love of his life. He fell hard but never revealed a single detail about the woman. (George Sterling later told Joan London of the existence of that affair—but nothing else.) London couldn’t bring himself to demand a separation from Charmian, having more or less given up on life. The Londons spent their final years sleeping in separate wings of their home in Glen Ellen, Calif., with
Jack vowing that he would take to his bed any woman who might give him the son that he had always wanted. When he died, Charmian, who had suffered chronic insomnia through her fear of losing him to another woman, slept for a day and a half.

  ADVICE: “A man should love women, and lots of them.”

  —D.R.

  A Double Life

  W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM (Jan. 25, 1874-Dec. 16, 1965)

  HIS FAME: The most widely read British author since Charles Dickens, Maugham gained world renown for his novels, especially Of Human Bondage, The Moon and Sixpence, Cakes and Ale, and The Razor’s Edge. He was also celebrated for numerous short stories, notably “Miss Thompson,” upon which the play Rain was based, and for his plays.

  HIS PERSON: Because his father was English solicitor to the British embassy in Paris, Maugham was born in France and French was his first language. When he was eight years old, his mother died of tuberculosis, and two years later his father died of stomach cancer. The loss of his mother scarred him forever. The orphaned boy was sent to England and placed in the care of his father’s brother, a clergyman in the small town of Whitstable. The atmosphere seemed alien, bleak, and loveless, and Maugham suffered. Attending the strict King’s School in Canterbury, he developed a stammer. Because of ill health, he was sent to Germany, where he enrolled in Heidelberg University. There his interest in literature grew, and he secretly began to write. At 18 he returned to England and was pressured by his uncle to take up medicine. Maugham reluctantly entered the medical school of St. Thomas’ Hospital in London.

  W. Somerset Maugham (l) Gerald Haxton

  After five years, he was a doctor and on his own. Now he turned full-time to writing. He wrote and published short stories, and at 23 had already published his first novel, Liza of Lambeth. In the decades that followed he turned to playwriting, and when he was 34 he had four hit plays running in London at once. At 41 he returned to the novel and brought out his autobiographical Of Human Bondage, a modern classic.

  He traveled constantly—to the South Seas, China, India, Italy, North Africa, Mexico. During WWI he served as a British espionage agent in Switzerland and Russia. In 1928 he bought a Moorish residence on the French Riviera, the Villa Mauresque at St.-Jean Cap Ferrat, his home for the rest of his life. Here he entertained his equals, greats of the world like Winston Churchill, H. G. Wells, and Noel Coward. Maugham’s appearance, at his peak, was that of a natty gentleman, 5 ft. 7 in., with dark hair and mustache. His manner was diffident and remote, yet (despite his stammer) he was a witty storyteller. In his last years he was not afraid of death. “Death, like constipation, is one of the commonplaces of human existence,” he told a friend. “Why shy away from it?” He didn’t. In his 92nd year, partially demented, often angry, sometimes euphoric, he died of lung congestion and too many years.

  LOVE LIFE: Maugham was bisexual. While most gossip made him out to be largely homosexual, one of his oldest friends, author Beverley Nichols, said he “was not predominantly homosexual. He certainly had affairs with women…. He had no feminine gestures nor mannerisms.”

  SEX PARTNERS: At age 16, while studying in Heidelberg, Maugham had his first sexual encounter. His mate was 26-year-old Ellingham Brooks, an attractive Cambridge graduate with a private income, who devoted himself to travel and reading. Returning to London, Maugham was afraid to consort with male homosexuals there because copulating with them was a criminal offense. Only five years before, Oscar Wilde had been sent to jail for two years for practicing homosexuality. So, while still a medical student, he cast his eye on women. “One Saturday night,” he confessed, “I went down Piccadilly and picked up a girl who for a pound was prepared to pass the night with me. The result was an attack of gonorrhea…. Undeterred by this mishap, however, I continued whenever I could afford it.” Shortly after, Maugham shared a flat with a friend, Walter Payne, an accountant who was good at obtaining girls, “small-part actresses, shopgirls, or clerks in an office.” When Payne was through with each, he passed her on to Maugham, who would take her to dinner and then to bed. “There was no romance in it, no love, only appetite.” In the two decades to follow, Maugham had a number of sexual affairs with well-known women. One was Violet Hunt, a feminist who edited The Freewoman. Violet was 41 and Maugham 29 when she confided in her diary that she had seduced him. Another was Sasha Kropotkin, daughter of Pëtr Kropotkin, the Russian anarchist who lived in exile in London.

  There were two important mistresses in Maugham’s life. One he loved, and the other he married. The one he loved was Ethelwyn Jones, known as Sue Jones, whom he always referred to as “Rosie,” since he had used that name for her in his novel Cakes and Ale. A sparkling 23, the daughter of a successful playwright, she was a divorcée and a rising actress when Maugham met her. After a few dates, Maugham took her to his room and made love to her. He guessed she wanted to marry him. “I didn’t want to do that,” he wrote long after, “because I knew that all my friends had been to bed with her. That sounds as though she were something of a wanton. She wasn’t. There was no vice in her. It just happened that she enjoyed copulation and took it for granted that when she dined with a man sexual congress would follow.” Later, when Sue was doing a stage play in Chicago, Maugham had second thoughts. He pursued her and proposed. When she turned him down, he was stunned. But Sue was already pregnant by another man, and soon she married the son of the 6th Earl of Antrim.

  The other mistress, the one Maugham married, was Syrie Barnardo Wellcome. Her father, a German Jew, had founded the orphanages known as the Barnardo Homes. At 22, Syrie, a shapely, lively young lady, met and married 48-year-old Henry Wellcome, an American-born pharmaceutical giant. The marriage was a disaster. Syrie had an affair with Gordon Selfridge, also American-born and a London department store tycoon. Annoyed, Wellcome had her sign a deed of separation. Maugham met Syrie in 1911 and found her gay, smart, charming. By 1913 they were sleeping together. She wanted a baby by Maugham, and eventually he gave her one, a daughter named Elizabeth. Wellcome, who’d hired detectives to detail his wife’s adultery, now sued for divorce, naming Maugham as corespondent. Syrie tried to kill herself but survived. Once she was divorced, Maugham did what he felt to be the right thing. He married her on May 26, 1917.

  It was a poor marriage. All the love was on her side. She constantly wanted sex with him. He wanted no more with her. In a letter to Syrie, Maugham cruelly outlined his complaints: “I married you because I thought it the best thing for your happiness and for Elizabeth’s welfare, but I did not marry you because I loved you, and you were only too well aware of that.” She was too shallow for him, he felt, interested only in “frocks and furniture.” They went their own ways. She became a renowned interior decorator, doing houses for Tallulah Bankhead and Wallis Simpson. Syrie had her own big grievance. She had lost her husband to a man and to homosexuality. She asked for a divorce, and in 1929 she got it.

  Unexpectedly, Maugham had found his greatest love in France during WWI. Gerald Haxton was born in San Francisco but had been raised in England. He was slightly taller than Maugham, brown-haired, blue-eyed, pock-marked, somewhat dissipated in appearance. Many women thought him handsome. Some men thought him evil. Haxton was 22 and Maugham 40 the night they met. Maugham asked him what he wanted out of life. Haxton said, “Fun and games. But I’ve not got a cent. So I want someone to look after me.” They went up to Haxton’s quarters, undressed, and got into bed. After they’d made love, Maugham whispered, “You needn’t worry about the future, Gerald, because I’ll look after you.” For almost 30 years, until Haxton’s death of edema of the lungs, Maugham looked after him. Haxton served as Maugham’s secretary-companion on the Riviera and during his travels. Throughout the years Haxton—a drunkard, gambler, liar—held a strange dominance over the author. But he was cherished by Maugham as caretaker and lover. And in their travels, because he was a good mixer, Haxton provided Maugham with raw material for some of his best characters and stories. Also, to give his employer sexual variety, Haxton turned procu
rer. In 1924 Haxton found Maugham some lovely teenage boys in Mexico. In Indochina, Maugham had the happiest love encounter he had ever known, with a young boy in a sampan. In New York, in 1943, the 69-year-old Maugham had an affair with 17-year-old prep school poet and admirer David Posner. In his thorough biography, Maugham, author Ted Morgan quotes a letter from Posner on Maugham’s lovemaking. “He wasn’t particularly virile, but he was full of lust. He was rather businesslike about sex, but it’s equally true that there were occasions when he spent a long time just fondling…. He profoundly disliked women sexually … he was very disturbed once when he saw me with a girl.”

  After Haxton’s funeral Maugham took on a new secretary-companion. This was Alan Searle, a sweet, kind young man who’d been a hospital social worker and had once had an affair with Lytton Strachey. Searle adored Maugham, waited on him hand and foot, and considered him the best lover he’d ever known. In 1962, Maugham, upon hearing that his daughter Elizabeth might have him confined for incompetence, followed the advice of a French lawyer and adopted Alan Searle as his son, disowning Elizabeth as his legal daughter. Elizabeth hauled her father into court in Nice, proved her legitimacy, and had Searle’s adoption nullified. On his deathbed, Maugham’s last words were spoken to Searle: “I want to shake your hand and thank you for all that you’ve done for me.”