The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People

by David Wallechinsky

  Early in 1777, news arrived from Paris that Sade’s mother was dying. Although he had never cared for her, he set off at once. Since friends had warned him of Mme. de Montreuil’s intentions, it seems likely that, in his heart of hearts, he wanted to get caught, and he was. In prison Sade discovered two enduring sources of sexual satisfaction: masturbation and literature. His imaginary orgies were so successful that he never attempted real ones again. Renée-Pélagie, loyal throughout his imprisonment, divorced him on his release. He soon formed a lasting relationship with the young actress Marie-Constance Renelle; he lived with her for a while in a hayloft at Versailles, baby-sitting her little son and earning a few sous as a stagehand. She followed him to Charenton asylum, and seems not to have minded when this fat, rheumatic, partially blind old man enlivened his last two years there with a pretty young woman from the asylum’s laundry.

  SEX PARTNERS: By the end of young Sade’s military service as a cavalry officer, he was hiring one woman a day. His down-at-the-heels father was delighted when the bourgeois but wealthy family of Renée-Pélagie de Montreuil suggested her as a suitable bride; marriage would steady the boy, he thought. Meanwhile Sade had actually fallen in love with a count’s daughter, Laure de Lauris. She left him with a beautiful memory and a venereal infection.

  Renée-Pélagie was pious and frigid, but Sade favorably impressed her charming young mother and her blond and sexy younger sister (the story is told that he asked to marry the sister instead). His first arrest threw the entire family into shock. Almost with relief Mme. de Montreuil noted that, after his release, he followed the approved fashion and began keeping mistresses. There was Mlle. Colet, a popular actress at the Comédie Italienne; then another actress, the buxom Mlle. Beauvoisin, whom he took south and allowed to pass as his wife; then a poule de luxe (“fancy lady”), Mlle. Dorville; then several ballet dancers, one of them an expert flagellator. Renée-Pélagie knew nothing of these affairs, but Mme. de Montreuil did. What she did not know was that Sade had an isolated suburban fun house outside Paris where he regularly staged bisexual orgies; one of them, at which he had flogged four women and then served them dinner, was the talk of the sexual underworld. It was to this house that he took Rose Keller—for a job, according to her testimony, for a debauch, according to his.

  We know little of the Marseilles victims except their names and ages: Mariette Borelly (23), Marianette Laugier (20), Rose Coste (20), and Marianne Laverne (18), of the morning orgy; and Marguerite Costa (25), of the one attempted in the evening. Marguerite brought the first complaint, followed by the other four together. Of Latour, Sade’s partner in the affair, it is said that he was a nobleman’s son; Sade would switch roles with him socially as well as sexually, addressing him as “monsieur le marquis.” Latour and Anne-Prospère, who had stayed on at La Coste, accompanied Sade when he fled over the border to Italy. Renée-Pélagie, a woman of such saintly character that Sade must have worked hard indeed to corrupt her, was in the uncomfortable position of being her sister’s rival. When Sade was finally jailed, she became in good conscience what she had always tried to be to him: the perfect wife. The affair of the 15-year-old girls was so effectively hushed up that we cannot even be certain of their names. One of their successors was Catherine Trillet, known as Justine; promoted from the kitchen to Sade’s orgies, she would not leave him even when her father turned up brandishing a pistol. Her predecessor as household favorite was Gothon, Renée-Pélagie’s personal maid, who remained fond of him and sent him fruit and jam in prison.

  During his early prison years Sade enjoyed, by letter, a platonic relationship with Marie-Dorothée de Rousse, his former housekeeper; he had always tended to separate sex from friendship. For a few months after his release he lived with a widow of 40, la Présidente de Fleurieu, but left her for the more sympathetic Marie-Constance Renelle, of whom he wrote, “This woman is an angel sent to me by heaven.” In the asylum, with the director’s connivance, she passed as Sade’s daughter. Of his last mistress, Madeleine Leclerc, we know that she was only 12 when Sade’s eye first lighted on her and 15 when she became his mistress (he was 72), that her mother hoped the marquis would launch her as an actress, and that she shaved her pubic hair.

  MEDICAL REPORT: Sade claimed that the extreme thickness of his sperm made ejaculation painful for him. The diagnosis is unlikely, but the symptom may explain his algolagnia (i.e., pleasure in both receiving and inflicting pain).

  —J.M.B.E.

  The Non-Violent Sadist

  WILLIAM SEABROOK (Feb. 22, 1886-Sept. 20, 1945)

  HIS FAME: In the 1920s and 1930s Seabrook thrilled readers in Europe and America with books about his travels to exotic places. In The Magic Island (1929) he described his participation in voodoo rites in Haiti, and in Jungle Ways (1931) he told of eating human flesh in Liberia. His most lasting contribution was the 1935 bestseller Asylum, a frank description of the seven months he spent in a mental hospital, attempting to cure his alcoholism.

  HIS PERSON: Born on Washington’s Birthday in Westminster, Md., “Willie” Seabrook was the oldest son of a lawyer turned Lutheran minister. After working as a newspaper reporter, city editor, and advertising executive, Seabrook enlisted in the French army and was gassed at the Battle of Verdun. Returning to the U.S., he became a reporter for The New York Times and then a feature writer for King Features Syndicate. In 1924 he and his first wife traveled to the Middle East. His account of this journey, Adventures in Arabia, was an instant success and launched him on a career of writing travel books. Seabrook enjoyed his celebrity and was excited by getting to know famous people. He maintained friendships with Aleister Crowley, Isadora Duncan, Gertrude Stein, Man Ray, Aldous Huxley, Emma Goldman, Jean Cocteau, and Thomas Mann.

  Actually, he did not engage in a cannibal feast in Africa as he claimed. He recognized the meat served to him by a tribal chief as that of an ape and left Liberia frustrated because he had failed in his mission to taste a cooked human. Back in Paris, with the help of friends he acquired pieces of the remains of a young worker who had died in an accident. Seabrook had different parts roasted, broiled, and prepared as a ragout. He ate it all and then described the meal in Jungle Ways as if it had taken place in West Africa. After the book was published, word spread from Liberia that ape meat had been substituted for human flesh in the meal he had eaten there and Seabrook was forced to choose between being considered a sucker or a liar. He accepted the image of sucker until the publication of his autobiography in 1942 in which he confessed his role in the hoax.

  HIS WIVES: There were three. The first was Katie Edmondson, the daughter of a Coca-Cola executive. They were married for 22 years, although for most of those years they were more friends than a couple. She operated a famous coffee shop on Waverly Place in New York City’s Greenwich Village. And later she married the first husband of Seabrook’s second wife.

  Seabrook was introduced to novelist Marjorie Worthington at a bridge game in 1929. They lived together for five years before they married, and were married six years before they divorced. She was very jealous of his interest in other women and felt most at peace when they were both at work at their typewriters.

  A few days after Seabrook met Constance Kuhr, she convinced him to plunge his elbows into boiling water so that he would be unable to lift a glass of liquor to his lips. They were married the following year and she gave birth to Seabrook’s only child, William.

  SEX LIFE: As Marjorie Worthington described it in her biography, The Strange World of Willie Seabrook, “Lovemaking, for Willie, was a complicated process, all mixed up with his complexes, fetishes, and compulsions.” In fact, this hard-core Republican, Rotarian son of a preacher practiced a major sexual aberration, and a highly unusual one at that. He liked to tie up naked women and chain them to pillars or dangle them from the ceiling. He never hurt them and he paid them well, and he never made love to them. Seabrook claimed that a childhood in which he was pampered by five doting aunts had caused him to desire to torture women in a
relatively benign manner. As a child he found no shortage of pictures of women in chains in books of mythology and history. When he was nine years old, a neighbor girl let him tie her hands behind her back with the ribbon from her hair. However, his special brand of soft sadism remained in the realm of imagination until he returned to New York after WWI. Then he met Deborah Luris, a Greenwich Village puppeteer, who was willing, indeed eager, to fit into his fantasy. “When people uncork parallel or complementary chimeric wish-fantasies,” Seabrook wrote, “sparks generally fly. And so they did—for a week.” Wife Katie was completely tolerant and even encouraged him. Once he brought Deborah to a costume party dressed as a prisoner, with her hands chained behind her back. When Seabrook fell in love with Marjorie Worthington, it was not Katie who became jealous, but Deborah Luris.

  But it was Marjorie who had to endure Willie’s greatest indulgences, as he lapsed into extended periods of avoiding writing by drinking a quart and a half of liquor a day and transforming his fantasies into reality with a succession of willing young hired houseguests. Once, in Paris, Seabrook invited a group of distinguished French businessmen to his studio for cocktails. Marjorie served aperitifs while Mimi, a Montparnasse call girl, wearing only a leather skirt, hung by her wrists, suspended from the balcony on a chain. None of the Frenchmen spoke a single word to or about Mimi.

  Another time Seabrook asked Man Ray and his date to stay in his studio for four hours and watch over a girl he had chained to the newel of the staircase, while he and Marjorie went out to a dinner in the Seabrooks’ honor. As soon as the Seabrooks left, Ray unchained the girl and invited her to join them at the dinner table. During the meal she explained that Seabrook liked to sit and drink whiskey and look at her for hours. When he went to bed, he chained her to the bedpost and she slept on the floor like a dog. She thought that Willie was impotent and she couldn’t understand why Marjorie humored him.

  When Willie became interested in witchcraft and the occult, he set up a “research laboratory” in the barn on his farm in Rhinebeck, N.Y. Willie stocked the barn with a cage and a witch’s cradle and entertained a series of young women whom he called “research workers” and “apprentice witches.” Marjorie, fretting and suffering in the main house, called them “Lizzies in chains.” Some of the Lizzies stayed naked under voluntary domination in the barn for weeks, and Seabrook wrote of observing them experience mystical ecstasies like those of St. Theresa of Avila.

  Eventually they emerged unharmed and the people of Rhinebeck excused the strange comings and goings at the barn by saying that Seabrook was writing a book about whatever was going on inside. They were right. But the book, Witchcraft, upset Seabrook, and despite his studies he was unable to exorcise the demons within him. At the age of 59 William Seabrook committed suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping pills.

  —D.W.

  The Chameleon

  STENDHAL (Jan. 23, 1783-Mar. 23, 1842)

  HIS FAME: “Literary fame is a lottery. I am taking out a ticket whose winning number is 1935,” wrote Stendhal in his autobiographical work The Life of Henri Brulard. His “ticket” won. A French writer of the 19th century who wrote, he said, for the liberated “happy few,” he has been appreciated far more in the 20th century than in his own, particularly for his two “realist” novels, The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma.

  HIS PERSON: Someone once asked Stendhal what his profession was, and he answered, “Observer of the human heart.” The heart he observed was often his own; he described it with candor, accuracy, and much detail in his voluminous journals. It was partly because of his appearance that he was so self-conscious. Though he had a radiant smile and well-shaped hands, Stendhal was no beauty. He lost most of his hair at an early age and chose to cover his pate with a purplish wig; his nose was thick, his cheeks were fat, and his legs were short. In later life, he developed a paunch. Once he expressed the desire to be a tall, blond German.

  Stendhal at 57

  To compensate for his unprepossessing appearance, he cultivated a brilliant wit. “I’d rather be a chameleon than an ox,” was his motto, and a chameleon Marie Henri Beyle was, with more than 200 pseudonyms, among them Stendhal (his favorite), Dominique, Machiavelli B., Old Hummums, and Mr. Myself. In contrast, his writing was simple and direct, and he worshiped the truth.

  When a boy of 16, he left his hometown of Grenoble and his materialistic father, who had raised him “under a bell jar,” to study at the École Polytechnique in Paris. However, instead of enrolling, he lived in a garret and roved the streets expecting to find damsels to rescue. He himself was the one who was rescued—by a distant relative, Noël Daru, who found Henri ill, gave him a room in the Darus’ Paris home, and got him a secretarial job with the ministry of war. In 1800 Stendhal traveled to join Napoleon’s army in Italy, a country he adored for the rest of his life. Until 1814 he served on and off in the army; in 1812 he was with Napoleon during the retreat from Moscow. Battle disgusted him. After he rejected military life, he settled in Austrian-ruled Milan until 1821, when rumors claiming he was a French spy or an Italian revolutionary made him fear imprisonment. On returning to Paris, suffering from unrequited love for an Italian woman, Stendhal contemplated suicide, but he immersed himself in his writing instead. A return visit to his adopted homeland ended abruptly in 1828 when the Austrian police expelled him from Milan as a subversive. A magnanimous Stendhal nevertheless published his enthusiastic tribute to Italy, Roman Journal, the following year. In 1831, after the Austrians found him unacceptable for a post in Trieste, Stendhal accepted a consulship in Civitavecchia, located in the Papal States. Here he felt intellectually isolated and bored. Although his official duties were light during the next seven years, he started three books which he never completed.

  He died of a stroke at the age of 59, his chasse de bonheur (“pursuit of happiness”) over. As he had requested, his tombstone was engraved with Arrigo Beyle, Milanese, Visse, Scrisse, Amoò (“Henri Beyle, Milanese, He lived, He wrote, He loved”). It was a fitting epitaph for the creator of Beylisme, a method of deliberately cultivating the senses and the mind, which was expressed in the equation “Happiness = love + work.”

  SEX LIFE: Many of the women Stendhal loved were unattainable, including the first. He wrote, “I wanted to cover my mother with kisses, and that there not be any clothing…. I always wanted to give them to her on the breast.” She died when he was seven.

  As he walked with his tutor, his 12-year-old eyes “devoured” a good-looking nun who passed them. Noticing the boy’s reaction, the tutor thereafter changed their route. Stendhal was also erotically aroused by paintings (“To bathe like that with lovely women!” he mused, standing before a landscape showing nudes in a stream), music, nature, and the glimpse of his Aunt Camille’s thigh as she descended from a wagon.

  When he was grown, his love objects were often married women who refused to sleep with him. This did not lessen his relentless, though awkwardly shy, pursuit of them. And while he couldn’t always have what he wanted, he still enjoyed an active sex life. His first encounter, in Milan in 1800, was probably with a prostitute. He said of it, “The violence of my timidity and of the experience have absolutely killed my recollection.” However, he never forgot the result; a venereal disease, possibly syphilis, plagued him intermittently for the rest of his life. In the spring of 1806 he recorded another casual sexual encounter, this one with a serving maid in a doorway. Afterward, he accompanied her to her room for more sex, then left in the morning “thoroughly disgusted and ashamed,” but he also contemplated returning to her room to try anal intercourse.

  His sexuality was affected by his state of mind. Of one sexual failure (followed in the morning by victory), he said that anxiety “agitated my mind too much for my body to be brilliant.” In a depressed mood in the summer of 1821, he attended a party where the guests were young men and prostitutes. During the orgy, he was impotent with the prostitute Alexandrine—a “complete fiasco,” he said. She rejected his offe
r to bring her to orgasm manually, and then reported his impotence to the rest of the company, thus generating a story that circulated around Paris. His novel Armance was about an impotent man. Yet he wrote of having intercourse with a woman seven times in a row and of additional many-times-in-one-night bouts with other women. At 50 he confessed his interest was waning, that he could “quite easily pass a fortnight or three weeks without a woman.”

  Although he was overwhelmingly heterosexual, an appreciator of women, he was once attracted to a Russian officer sitting next to him in a theater. “If I had been a woman, this lovable officer would have inspired me with the most violent passion.”

  He died a bachelor.

  LOVE LIFE: In 1835, by the shores of Lake Albano, near Rome, Stendhal wrote in the sand the initials of his major loves:

  He mused on the “amazing follies and sillinesses” they made him commit and noted that he had not even possessed all of them. He loved one enough to list her twice. In his order, they most likely were: