The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People

by David Wallechinsky

  —I.W.

  The Tireless Frenchman

  GUY DE MAUPASSANT (Aug. 5, 1850-July 6, 1893)

  HIS FAME: He gained celebrity in his native France and throughout the world as the author of 300 popular short stories including, “La Maison Tellier” [“The Tellier House”] and “Sur l’Eau” [“On the Water”] and six novels, including Bel-Ami and Pierre et Jean.

  HIS PERSON: Two occurrences in Maupassant’s youth, spent near Dieppe, France, scarred him for life. One was the separation of his parents when he was 11 years old. Raised by his strong, neurotic mother, Maupassant adored her, hated his father, despised all husbands, and remained a bachelor. The other was the discovery that he had syphilis, which he had either inherited or contracted. He claimed he was cured of it, but in fact he wasn’t, and in his later years it destroyed him. Living in Paris and studying law, he began to write on the side, with his mother’s friend Gustave Flaubert as his stern mentor. Quitting law, Maupassant worked for 10 years as a government clerk, mostly for the Naval Ministry. When he was 30, his first published short story, “Boule de Suif” (“Ball of Fat”), caused a sensation, and three years later he published his first novel, Une Vie (“A Life”), called by Leo Tolstoi “the best French novel since Les Misérables.” After that, writing steadily, Maupassant became rich and famous, ultimately possessing four dwellings and two yachts. He was a powerful man, able to row a boat 50 mi. in a single day. But syphilis brought him down in the end. He became ill, began to hallucinate, and tried to cut his throat. Committed to a Paris insane asylum, he died there at the age of 42.

  Maupassant, age 40

  SEX LIFE: Guy de Maupassant was one of the most prodigious lovers in modern French history. In a quarter of a century of steady lovemaking, he reportedly had sexual intercourse with thousands of young women. He was prouder of his sex exploits than of his books. He possessed three qualities that made him a much-sought-after lover: the ability to go on and on in his couplings without coming, the ability to have multiple orgasms, and the ability to bring most women to a climax. He credited his carnal successes, above all, to his intelligence. He said, “Most people are inclined to think that the lower classes … are better lovers than those who live sedentary lives. I don’t believe that…. It needs brains to give another the greatest possible amount of pleasure.”

  From age 12 to 15 he masturbated “occasionally.” Then he had his first love affair. “When I was about 16 I had a girl, and the delight she gave me cured me of self-abuse.” He never forgot the feel of her loins or the way she gasped, “Enough, enough!” Later, he enjoyed consorting with prostitutes, and at the peak of his fame preferred wealthy young society women, favoring those who were married and Jewish.

  Maupassant was very matter-of-fact about his endurance and insisted that successive sex bouts did not exhaust him. “I’m as tired after 2 or 3 times as I am after 20,” he once said. “I’ve counted 20 and more. Surely you know that in 2 or 3 times you exhaust your stock of semen, so you can go on afterward without further loss.” When Flaubert doubted his endurance, Maupassant had a bookkeeper accompany him to a Paris brothel as a witness, and there he “had six girls in an hour.” Another time, to impress and “stagger” Bobukin, a visiting Russian writer, Maupassant picked up a dancer at the Folies Bergère, took her to a nearby brothel, and in front of his visitor had sexual intercourse with her six times in a row. When he finished with her, he went across the hall and had sex three more times with a young prostitute.

  SEX PARTNERS: Whenever Maupassant saw an attractive woman, he wanted her. In 1889, on his only visit to London, he was taken to lunch at an Earl’s Court restaurant by Henry James. Noting a beautiful woman at the next table, Maupassant asked James to “get her” for him. James was never more horrified. Most women Maupassant wanted only once, but there was a handful that he saw frequently. All of them were married. One affair—with Marie Kann, a wealthy young brunette—lasted eight years. Maupassant wrote her 2,200 steaming love letters. Another of his long-lived affairs was with Blanche Roosevelt Macchetta, born in Sandusky, O., who married a Milan nobleman and became a marchesa. She was a shapely redhead who made a brief singing debut at Covent Garden in London, then became a published novelist. She bedded down with Maupassant regularly at his country retreat in Étretat and admitted enjoying “the maximum of sensual pleasure” with him. For variety, Maupassant sometimes liked his women on the kinky side. After Gisèle d’Estoc, who affected close-cropped hair and men’s clothes, had had an affair with Emma Bouer, a trapeze artist with the Cirque Medrane, and had stabbed her in a fight, Maupassant took up with Gisèle. Often Gisèle shared her broad-hipped lesbian ladies, as well as hashish or ether, with him.

  QUIRKS: One day journalist Frank Harris went for a walk in the country with Maupassant. As Harris recalled it:“I suppose I am a little out of the common sexually,” he [Maupassant] resumed, “for I can make my instrument stand whenever I please.”

  “Really?” I exclaimed, too astonished to think.

  “Look at my trousers,” he remarked, laughing, and there on the road he showed me that he was telling the truth.

  HIS THOUGHTS: “The only woman I really love is the Unknown who haunts my imagination. She must be intensely sensuous, yet self-controlled; soulful, yet a coquette: to find her, that’s the great adventure of life and there’s no other.”

  —I.W.

  The Last Samurai

  YUKIO MISHIMA (Jan. 14, 1925-Nov. 25, 1970)

  HIS FAME: The most colorful and prolific author to emerge in postwar Japan, Mishima wrote numerous plays, stories, novels, and journalistic pieces which earned him a worldwide reputation. Among his most famous works are Confessions of a Mask (novel, 1949), The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (novel, 1956), “Patriotism” (short story, 1960; film Yukoku, 1966), and The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (novel, 1963).

  HIS PERSON: Mishima’s father was a minor bureaucrat who deeply admired Hitler and Nazism. His mother was a second-class citizen in a household dominated by her dictatorial mother-in-law. Mishima was literally a prisoner in the possessive old woman’s darkened sickroom until he was 12 years old; he grew into a brilliant, languid, morbid youth obsessed with fantasies of blood and pain.

  Mishima, the year before he ended his life

  He began to write during adolescence, and at 16 was already a central figure in the new romantic school of Japanese literature, having shunned his given name, Kimitake Hiraoka, and adopted his now famous pen name to conceal his writing from his antiliterary father. Later in life the author would write out “Yukio Mishima” in Japanese so that the characters also read “mysterious devil bewitched with death.” As he told friends, “It’s eerie, but that’s the way to write my name.”

  Exempted from military service because of poor health, he worked in an aircraft factory during WWII. Afterward he studied law at the insistence of his father. Then he accepted a prestigious civil service job in the finance ministry, but quit in order to devote himself exclusively to writing. In 1949 Confessions of a Mask, a masterful autobiographical novel dealing with homosexuality, appeared, and Mishima became an international celebrity. He delighted in shocking the Japanese public and affected a hip, westernized demeanor. He was overjoyed when people mistook him for a gangster and relished the image so much that he played the lead in a Japanese film called Tough Guy.

  In spite of his homosexuality, Mishima took a wife and had two children. He was fascinated with the physical activity he had missed as a boy and became an avid body-builder, attaining the fifth-rank black-belt grade in Japanese swordsmanship and the second-rank black belt in karate as well.

  His many Western friends delighted in his imitations of Brando and Bogart. However, he retained an inner core of fanatic Japanese nationalism and became the leader of a private army of some 100 young, right-wing zealots, known as the Shield Society. In 1970 he led four members of this toy army in a suicide raid upon the office of a general of the Army Self-Defense Forces in Tokyo and took
the general hostage. There, from a balcony, he exhorted a regiment of soldiers to revert to the prewar militarism and emperor worship he so admired. When the troops laughed at him, he disemboweled himself in the ancient ritual of seppuku, or hara-kiri. He was beheaded with his 17th-century samurai sword by a follower, who then committed suicide.

  SEX LIFE: As a boy he drew pictures of beautiful knights dying of their wounds, and was appalled to learn that a picture he had mooned over represented Joan of Arc and not a young man, as he had thought. From that day forward he hated the sight of women in men’s clothes and once angrily reprimanded his wife for appearing in slacks. At 12 he had his first orgasm, while looking at a picture of St. Sebastian bound and pierced by arrows. At about the same time he fell in love with a male classmate and developed three fetishes which stayed with him until death: masculine armpit hair, sweat, and white gloves.

  He became a frantic masturbator, finding release in Marquis de Sade-like fantasies of death and cannibalism. In his youth he attempted to interest himself in the company of women, and while studying law was briefly involved with a woman to whom he assigned the fictional name Sonoko. On the day she married someone else, Mishima got thoroughly drunk for perhaps the only time in his life. With the celebrity he earned from Confessions, he more or less came out of the closet, and often entertained friends at Brunswick, a gay café on the Ginza in Tokyo. He favored young roughnecks, and on a trip to New York in 1952 he cruised gay bars looking for his ideal white male. From New York he went to Rio, where he spent the month before Carnival time. There he haunted city parks in the afternoons and often took young boys of 17 or so back to his hotel. When a friend asked how he managed to communicate with the youths, Mishima answered that in the world of homosexuality “you don’t need a common language.” He added that he was interested in the process of courting females but was entirely disinterested in performing “the final act” with a woman. As if to demonstrate the truth of this statement, Mishima later phoned his friend for help because a Japanese woman was trying to seduce him in his hotel room.

  The author flew from Rio to Paris, where he became good friends with the composer Toshiro Mayuzumi. Mishima asked Mayuzumi to take him to a “bar for pederasts” and later got angry at the composer because Mayuzumi, who could speak French, monopolized all the boys.

  Women tended to shy away from Mishima because of his odd physical appearance. He was 5 ft. 2 in., with a weight lifter’s torso set on top of skinny, underdeveloped legs. A crew cut revealed that his head was shaped like a light bulb. In a magazine poll, 50% of the female readers questioned stated that they would rather kill themselves than marry the famous novelist. The girl who did become his wife in 1958, Yoko Sugiyama, was faced with the enmity of Mishima’s mother, Shizue, who jealously treated him more like a lover than a son. Even in the presence of company, Mishima would address Shizue in intimate terms, causing a great deal of wonder about the extent of their mother-son relationship. Mishima regarded his pretty, round-faced wife as a near equal and often invited her to mix with his friends, thus breaking Japanese tradition. His only rule was that she not disturb him while he worked.

  After he became a celebrity, Mishima found himself pursued by what he called “the literature virgins.” He liked to tell the story of how he had almost been smothered to death in the breasts of a tall American woman who insisted on dancing with him at an embassy function.

  However, Mishima’s true erotic interest was in a painful, gory death, and sooner or later everyone who knew him heard him say that seppuku was “the ultimate form of masturbation.” The author’s companion in suicide was a 25-year-old “soldier” named Masakatsu Morita, who was once referred to by friends as Mishima’s “fiancé.” Morita, who was also fascinated by death, had pledged his life to Mishima.

  HIS THOUGHTS: “I am desperate to kill a man. I want to see red blood.”

  —M.S.

  Philosopher With A Whip

  DONATIEN ALPHONSE FRANÇOIS DE SADE (June 2, 1740-Dec. 2, 1814)

  HIS FAME: Because Sade was imprisoned by royal decree for staging orgies during which he whipped and sodomized young women, his name has become synonymous with unlimited sexual license—especially the license to derive pleasure from inflicting pain. His life spawned the word sadism.

  HIS PERSON: After two brief incarcerations for “outrageous debauchery,” the young and handsome Marquis de Sade, lieutenant governor of four royal provinces, was forced to transfer his quest for strange pleasures from Paris to his ancesteral château in the south of France. When five Marseilles prostitutes accused him of attempting to sodomize and poison them, his mother-in-law obtained a lettre de cachet (a royal order for indefinite detention without trial) and eventually put him away in 1777 for 12 1/2 years.

  In prison he became a prolific writer, churning out conventional works as well as frenzied erotica. At last the French Revolution freed him when the Constituent Assembly abolished lettres de cachet. He was now Citizen Sade, a pamphleteer, orator, and living legend for having incited, from his tower cell, the historic storming of the Bastille. Promoted to revolutionary judge during the Reign of Terror, he found himself incapable of demanding his mother-in-law’s execution when her case came before him. He was denounced as a moderate, escaped the guillotine only by luck, and turned to a theatrical career. In 1801 he was prosecuted by the Napoleonic regime’s censors, ostensibly for his erotic novel Justine but actually for a pamphlet lampooning Napoleon and his wife, Josephine. He was found criminally insane and lived out his life at the Charenton asylum, where the director allowed him to stage dramas in which he often acted the part of the villain.

  SEX LIFE: On the evening of Oct. 18, 1763, Jeanne Testard, 20, a fan maker and part-time prostitute, entered a house of assignation with an elegant, auburn-haired young nobleman. He led her to a small inner room draped in black; its walls, on which religious art mingled strangely with pornography, featured a large collection of whips. Later, he explained, she would flog him with one of them, and she could choose one with which to be flogged. Meanwhile, perhaps an enema or a little sodomy? She declined both, but was forced at gunpoint to smash a crucifix.

  Unfortunately for Sade’s future victims, his in-laws, the Montreuils, were influential at court. After 15 days in jail, Sade professed repentance and was released. The Paris police warned brothel keepers not to supply him with any more prostitutes for his private orgies. As a result he began to pick up amateurs. On Easter Sunday, 1768, he accosted Rose Keller, a thirtyish widow lately reduced to public begging, politely conducted her to a house in the suburbs, and made her strip and lie facedown on a couch. He then began to beat her with a whip of knotted cords, pausing several times to rub a white ointment into the lacerations. Her screams for pity seemed only to energize him, until he stopped with an appalling, orgasmic cry.

  Keller was able to escape and find help. Although she was bribed into silence by Sade’s family, the authorities had already taken evidence. Sade was jailed as an example to the many other sexually depraved aristocrats. He earned a quick release by getting his wife, the uncomplaining Renée-Pélagie, pregnant again when she visited him at the jail. Paroled, he was ordered to live quietly on his estate in the south. He and his family went there, and for company invited his wife’s lively younger sister, Anne-Prospère, who was soon his wife in all but name. That winter a private world of pleasure was created in the old château of La Coste; erotic spectacles were staged and the entire household, including not only Sade’s sister-in-law but his wife, took part willingly in elegant indecencies. Too elegant, it seems, for when Sade visited nearby Marseilles to collect a debt, he instructed his valet Latour to procure several young women for the most violent orgy yet. Four water-front prostitutes, aged 18 to 23, were subjected by Sade to a complicated ritual in which each was in turn beaten and ordered to beat him; in between beatings they were offered various combinations of anal and vaginal intercourse with Sade and, alternately or simultaneously, Latour. All the women were continual
ly offered handfuls of anise-flavored bonbons. That same evening Sade attempted a similar orgy with another prostitute. Hours later she and one of the girls used earlier were vomiting uncontrollably; they had overdosed on Spanish fly, a common aphrodisiac of the time. Sade and Latour fled the city but were condemned to death in absentia and executed in effigy. Caught and jailed in Sardinia, Sade escaped and lived the next few years as a fugitive.

  In May, 1774, the lettre de cachet obtained by Mme. de Montreuil seemed about to lapse with the accession of a new king. Sade lost no time in realizing his latest fantasy: He would lure young girls to the château and personally undertake their sex education. Anne-Prospère had now left him, but his wife, Renée-Pélagie, was his ally in everything. With her support he engaged an experienced procuress who recruited five 15-year-old girls and a small boy, supposedly for domestic service. There were orgies that Renée-Pélagie may have directed. The outcome was more tragedy: two girls escaped, one needing medical treatment; the parents of three began legal action; the procuress had a baby by Sade, quit, and was jailed by lettre de cachet (Mme. de Montreuil’s work) to stop her from talking, and the baby died of neglect. Undaunted, Sade found older replacements through a corrupt local monk, who assured anxious parents that the “discipline” at the château was well up to convent standards.