The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People

by David Wallechinsky

  V.—Virginie Kubly, a tall married actress whom he worshiped from afar while a teenager in Grenoble. Seeing her approach in a park, he fled from the “burn” of her closeness. He never spoke to her.

  Aa. and Apg.—Angela Pietragrua (“Gina”), a married Milanese with flashing eyes whom he met in Milan in 1800. He was too shy to tell her of his love. In 1811, again in Italy, he pursued and finally made love to her. To mark the occasion, he had his suspenders embroidered: “AP 22nd-September, 1811,” and wrote, “It seems to me that perfectly pure pleasure can come only with intimacy; the first time, it’s a victory; in the three following, you acquire intimacy.” Their affair was studded with quarrels, signals (half-open windows), and barriers (two nuns sleeping in an adjoining bedroom). Gina’s performance in bed with another man, which he watched—unbeknownst to her—through a keyhole, made him think of “puppets … dancing before my eyes.” Initially it made him laugh, then depressed him. They broke up in an art gallery with Gina “clinging to my garments and dragging herself on her knees…. assuredly she never loved me more than on that very day.”

  Ad.—Adèle Rebuffel, whom he met while having an affair with her mother. She was then a child of 12. In his four-year pursuit of Adèle, the furthest he got was to put hand on her breast.

  M.—Mélanie Guilbert (called Louason), an actress with whom he lived in Marseilles from the summer of 1805 to the spring of 1806. On an outing in the countryside, he saw her bathe nude in a river, a vision like the painted nudes that aroused him when he was a boy. After she went back to Paris, he wrote, in disillusionment, “I desired passionately to be loved by a melancholy and slender woman who was an actress. I was, and I didn’t find sustained happiness.”

  Mi.—“Minette,” or Wilhemine von Griesheim, blond daughter of a Prussian general, who rebuffed his advances.

  Al.—Angéline Béreyter, an opera singer with whom he had a three-year affair, during which she taught him songs from various operas. Sometimes she had as many as nine orgasms a night, but he complained that their physical happiness robbed him “of much of my imagination.” In another list of his lovers, he said he never loved her.

  Aine.—Alexandrine Daru, wife of his cousin Pierre, double-chinned and decent, who never gave in to his blandishments, which included caressing her gloves as though they were her hands and tracing an A in the sand.

  Mde.—Mathilde Viscontini Dembowski (“Métilde”), a sympathizer with the revolutionary movement in Milan, whom he loved unrequitedly from 1818 to 1821. For her he turned down other women—though not all, as a case of gonorrhea he contracted in 1819 attests. Once he undertook to follow her to another town, where he contrived to pass by her in a disguise consisting of green spectacles and a large overcoat. She inspired his book On Love, a “scientific” study of love, in which he explained his concept of “crystallization”—love so powerful it transforms one’s beloved into a perfect being. The book sold 17 copies in its first ten years of publication. By the end of 1820, his pursuit of Métilde reached “le dead-blank.”

  C.—Countess Clémentine Curial (“Menti”), married, 36 to his 41 when their affair began. Once for three days, he stayed cooped up in a cellar, while she brought food and emptied his chamber pot and provided sex. In love with someone else, she ended the relationship in 1826, causing him great pain. When she was 47, he tried to revive their affair, but she said, “How can you love me at my age?” and refused to consider it.

  G.—In 1830, Giulia Rinieri, a 19-year-old aristocratic virgin, attempted to seduce Stendhal, saying, “I am perfectly aware, and have been for some time, that you are old and ugly,” and then she kissed him. After hesitating for several months, he slept with her, then later that year asked for her hand in marriage but was rejected.

  Ar.—Alberthe de Rubempré, married, witty, a little crazy, in love with the occult. Their affair lasted six months, but he was in love with her a “month at most.” After he died, she tried, in a séance, to summon up the shade of “poor Henri.”

  HIS ADVICE: Aug. 1, 1801, from his diaries: “Like many others, I’m embarrassed when it comes to _____ a respectable woman for the first time. Here’s a very simple method. While she’s lying down, you start kissing her lightly, you titillate her, etc., she begins to like it. Still, through force of habit, she keeps on defending herself. Then, without her realizing what you’re up to, you should put your left forearm on her throat, beneath her chin, as if you are going to strangle her. Her first movement will be to raise her hand in defense. Meanwhile, you take your _____ between the index and middle finger of your right hand, holding them both taut, and quietly place it in the _____…. It’s important to cover up the decisive movement of the left forearm by whimpering.”

  —A.E.

  The Tormented One

  AUGUST STRINDBERG (Jan. 22, 1849-May 14, 1912)

  HIS FAME: Considered Sweden’s greatest playwright, Strindberg revolutionized the world’s theater with a prolific outpouring of critical writings and dozens of plays that still are performed today, including the masterful Miss Julie.

  HIS PERSON: The fourth child born to his parents—who had wed just a few months before his birth—Strindberg had a tormented youth. His father declared bankruptcy, and the family’s poverty forced Strindberg to wear ill-fitting hand-me-downs and consequently suffer the taunts of his schoolmates. Strindberg adored his mother, but she clearly favored her eldest son over August and the others. Yet worse was to come. In 1862, when Strindberg was 13, his mother died. Within a year his father remarried, and Strindberg found himself in continuing conflict with his aloof father and a stepmother whom he jealously hated.

  An obvious genius, Strindberg was bored at the University of Uppsala. He failed to earn a degree and turned to writing for his livelihood. Supplementing his meager literary earnings by working as a librarian, Strindberg labored long on Master Olof, his first play, and was crushed when the Swedish Royal Theater rejected it. He persisted at his writing, but for consolation turned to alcohol—he was a prodigious drinker—and to mystical pursuits including alchemy (he claimed he had discovered how to transform baser metals into gold). Those around him suspected that he was sinking into madness. He proclaimed that the spirit of Edgar Allan Poe, who had died in the year Strindberg was born, had migrated into his body. Through it all, however, his powerful, often viciously satirical writing continued, and it had won him, by the time of his death, the general respect of his fellow Swedes, who regarded him as their most brilliant writer.

  SEX LIFE: Brought up in a family that adhered to Pietism, a gloomy hellfire Lutheran movement, Strindberg found that his early thoughts of sex were colored by his religious devotion. It horrified him when, at age 14, he stumbled upon a slim volume entitled Warning of a Friend of Youth against the Most Dangerous Enemy of Youth. Because he had masturbated, he feared he was “condemned to death or lunacy at the age of 25.” To regain salvation, he immersed himself in a theology class. It was during this time that he had his first adolescent infatuation. The object was the 30-year-old daughter of Strindberg’s landlord, a very cultured woman who was a member of the emotional Pietist sect. Ephemeral as that crush was, it paved the path for dozens more, and also for Strindberg’s escape from the religious doctrines he found unsatisfying.

  His independence growing, the blond-haired, blue-eyed teenager took to passing his evenings by dancing and flirting with a parade of young girls. He especially adored the fragile brunettes, perhaps because they reminded him of his beloved mother. Strindberg himself was aware of the possible link: “Are my feelings perverted because I want to possess my mother? Is that an unconscious incest of the heart?” Incestuous in origin or not, Strindberg’s burning desire was to have a tranquil, married home life with a wife more devoted to him than his mother had been. He would have been happy, he once mused, if at 16 he had married a pleasant woman and taken a simple job.

  SEX PARTNERS: While Strindberg married three times, the peaceful home life he yearned for was never his. Despite his avo
wed preference for old-fashioned women—he stridently denounced Henrik Ibsen’s Doll’s House for fomenting female emancipation—his enduring lovers were complex, ambitious, and independent.

  When he met Siri von Essen, his first wife, it was—as it always would be for Strindberg—love at first sight. At the time, she was married to an army officer and coincidentally lived in Strindberg’s boyhood home. Whereas Siri’s rakish husband thought her frigid, Strindberg thought her chastely pure. Their two-year affair ended in marriage. Unhappily for Strindberg, Siri wished to pursue her theatrical ambitions, and as she won success as an actress, she lost Strindberg. He accused her of having affairs with both men and women and implored his friends to spy on her. Strindberg and Siri fought frequently and loudly. After 14 years and four children, their marriage ended in divorce, and Siri—to Strindberg’s sorrow—retained custody of the children.

  A year later he was romancing Frida Uhl, an Austrian journalist. Their embattled courtship augured the nature of their tempestuous marriage. Just days before the ceremony, the wedding was nearly halted because Strindberg (mistakenly) thought Frida had been the model for a scandalous painting of a bare-backed odalisque, or harem girl. With this rift mended, the marriage went forward, but only to dissolve within two years, owing in part to Strindberg’s obsession with what he perceived to be Frida’s promiscuity. They had one child, a daughter, who remained with Frida.

  Strindberg was smitten by his last wife, Harriet Bosse, when he saw her acting the part of the playful Puck in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. A few social meetings fired his desire for her, even though Harriet was 30 years younger than the 52-year-old playwright. “Would you like to have a baby by me?” he asked. She agreed, they wed, and she soon produced Strindberg’s sixth child. But Harriet, like Siri, wanted an acting career, and Strindberg—as ever—wanted a domesticated wife. Again he imagined infidelities. When, after the birth of their child, Harriet bought a new cloak to show off her restored figure, Strindberg snappishly inquired if she had bought the garment “to walk the streets.” She cried. They made up. That cycle, and the battles, continued for three years until this marriage, too, ended in divorce. Harriet kept the baby, a daughter, to whom Strindberg remained devoted until his death from stomach cancer eight years later.

  HIS THOUGHTS: “We are all in quest of her, our mother. I imagine I shall always remain tied to mine. She died too early, and even while she lived, she did not give me my full share of love. I have something owing me.”

  “I am thoroughly independent, save in one point. I cannot make children alone. I need a woman for that.”

  —R.M.

  The Remorseful Lover

  LEO TOLSTOI (Sept. 9, 1828-Nov. 20, 1910)

  HIS FAME: A writer, social reformer, and moral thinker, Leo Tolstoi is best known today as the author of such epic novels as War and Peace and Anna Karenina. He also wrote short stories and nonfiction. Popular throughout his long career, Tolstoi ranks as one of the world’s greatest fiction writers.

  HIS PERSON: Born into an aristocratic Russian family, Tolstoi was orphaned as a child and raised by relatives. He left Kazan University to manage the family estate but preferred the social whirl of Moscow and St. Petersburg, where he lived a profligate life. Disgusted with his aimlessness, Tolstoi went to the Caucasus in 1851 and joined the army. While there, he worked on his first novel, the semiautobiographical Childhood. When it was published a year later, Tolstoi became a literary celebrity.

  Tolstoi when he was writing War and Peace

  In 1862, at the age of 34, Tolstoi married 18-year-old Sofya (Sonya) Andreevna Behrs, who bore his 13 children and encouraged him to write. Although his novels and short stories made him rich and famous, and his family life was relatively happy, Tolstoi became dissatisfied with himself. During the last stages of work on Anna Karenina, he experienced a moral and spiritual crisis. He questioned the purpose of life and even contemplated suicide when the crisis came to a head in the late 1870s. His anguish ended after he became a Christian and discovered that faith in God could give meaning to one’s existence and could unite people into a brotherhood of universal love and justice. He adopted the Sermon on the Mount as his personal credo. In order to live according to his new convictions, Tolstoi adopted peasant dress, worked as a farm laborer, and tried to dispose of his property. He eventually transferred his estate to his wife and children and gave Sonya the right to publish his earlier books. Turning away from his previous literary style, Tolstoi concentrated on writing moralistic fiction and social and religious essays. His teachings attracted many followers, called Tolstoyans.

  To Tolstoi’s great resentment, Sonya was unwilling to join him in his ascetic lifestyle. The household was in constant turmoil, and in 1910, at the age of 82, Tolstoi finally left his wife for good. Ill prepared both spiritually and physically for such a journey, he collapsed at the small railroad station of Astapovo. As he lay dying in the stationmaster’s house, Sonya was not allowed to come to his bedside until he was unconscious and could no longer recognize her. Seven days later he was dead.

  SEX LIFE: Tolstoi lost his virginity at the age of 16 in a way that was considered commonplace for a man in the 1800s—to a prostitute. As he recounted it later, “The first time my brothers dragged me to a brothel and I performed the act, I sat down afterward at the foot of the woman’s bed and cried.”

  Throughout his life, Tolstoi’s remorse and his sexual desires fed upon each other. “Regard the company of women,” he wrote in his diary, “as a necessary social evil and avoid them as much as possible.” He did not heed his own advice. As he later admitted to Anton Chekhov, he was “insatiable.” While living on his estate in 1849, he seduced one of the servants, a dark-eyed virgin named Gasha. “What does all that mean?” he asked himself with distaste. “Is what has happened to me wonderful or horrible? Bah! It’s the way of the world; everybody does it!” A short time later he became involved with another servant. At the age of 69 he remembered “Dunyasha’s beauty and youth … her strong womanly body. Where is it? Long since, nothing but bones.” He also had an incestuous desire for a distant aunt, Alexandra Tolstoi. He called her “delicious” and “unique” and even dreamed of marrying her. “Where is one to look for love of others and self-denial, when there is nothing inside oneself but love of self and indulgence?” he wrote to her. “My ambition is to be corrected and converted by you my whole life long without ever becoming completely corrected or converted.”

  Prosperous and successful as a writer, Tolstoi began to look for a wife, even though he was not very confident of his appearance. (He had a broad nose, a toothless mouth, thick lips, and half-closed eyes.) After discarding Axinya, his peasant mistress of three years who had given him a son, he decided to marry Sonya Behrs, a young, serious girl who was proud to be the wife of a famous author. But the marriage was doomed to unhappiness when, shortly before the wedding, he forced Sonya to read his diary, where every one of his sexual exploits was described in explicit detail. He wanted her to know everything about him, but she interpreted his action as meaning that he had only a physical love for her. Their first night together was a confrontation between a satyr and a virgin bride. Two weeks after their wedding night, Sonya wrote that “physical manifestations are so repugnant,” and throughout her married life she was never able to enjoy sex fully. His wife’s innocence and apprehension only inflamed Tolstoi’s lust. The seducer of coarse farm girls was to come to enjoy family life immensely, glorifying familial harmony and stability in the first of his masterpieces, War and Peace. Although he wrote in defense of individual freedom, he was a tyrant under his own roof and believed that a woman should devote herself to her husband’s happiness. Sonya did her best to please him. She took care of the household and assisted him while he wrote. She copied War and Peace over seven times before he was satisfied with the draft.

  In 1889 Tolstoi stunned Sonya with The Kreutzer Sonata, a work in which he urged people to renounce sex and adopt celibacy. Marriage, he
explained, must be avoided, since a Christian should abstain from all sex. After the book’s appearance, Sonya was mortified to find herself pregnant. “That is the real postscript to The Kreutzer Sonata,” she wrote angrily. Try as he would to follow his new beliefs about sex, Tolstoi failed—again and again. His sexual drive remained undiminished, as indicated by Sonya’s references to his passion in her diary. Not until he was 82 could he admit to a friend that he was no longer seized by sexual desire. Tolstoi blamed Sonya for making him want her and for letting him fall into sin. For her part, Sonya loathed his moral hypocrisy and disliked his constant advances. The fact that he smelled like a goat and had feet covered with sores and dirt did not make him more attractive to her. He later described to Maxim Gorky the remorse he felt about sex: “Man can endure earthquake, epidemic, dreadful disease, every form of spiritual torment; but the most dreadful tragedy that can befall him is and will remain the tragedy of the bedroom.”

  Seven years after the first publication of The Kreutzer Sonata, Tolstoi and Sonya suffered another marital crisis when Sonya fell in love with a longtime family friend, pianist and composer Sergey Tanayev. Her gay manner and the girlish attentions she paid to Tanayev infuriated Tolstoi. He called the relationship her “senile flirtation” and referred to her as a “concert hag.” Hurt and humiliated, he was greatly relieved when her innocent passion began to wane a year later.

  Tolstoi gradually confided less and less in Sonya, and she began to feel that he had rejected her as a wife, except for the sexual aspect of their relationship. They bickered more and more, their quarrels occasionally ending with threats by Sonya to run away and kill herself. Despite Tolstoi’s guilt feelings, the mornings after nights of sex were about the only harmonious times they enjoyed. When she suspected that Tolstoi and his favorite disciple, Chertkov, were drafting a will bequeathing Tolstoi’s works to the public, she became hysterical and accused her 81-year-old husband of having homosexual relations with Chertkov.