The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People

by David Wallechinsky

  During the last 20 years of her life, Emily scarcely left her childhood home. She began to dress exclusively in white, moving like a diaphanous ghost in a Gothic legend, all the while distilling her intense inner life into short poems which read like telegrams sent by the mind’s eye. After her death from Bright’s’s disease, her family found some 1,800 poems and a wealth of correspondence. Published posthumously, her work included love poems and love letters from the 30-year-old poet to an anonymous “master.” “Wild Nights—Wild Nights!” she had written, inviting intense speculation over spinster eccentricity; “Were I with thee / Wild Nights should be / Our Luxury! … Rowing in Eden—/ Ah, the Sea! / Might I but moor—Tonight—/ In thee.”

  LOVE LIFE: A mystery of the first order, the identity of Emily Dickinson’s “master” has given rise to volumes of biographical, literary, even psychoanalytic detective work. The mystery was deepened by Dickinson family lore that Emily “met her fate” in the person of the Rev. Charles Wadsworth, an eloquent preacher whom she encountered on a rare visit to Philadelphia. Wadsworth was married, as were the other possible “masters,” but he had the virtue, as far as the family was concerned, of being physically removed from Amherst. The supposed lovers met only twice, briefly, but Emily continued to correspond with her “dearest earthly friend”—largely about spiritual matters.

  According to another source, Emily’s star-crossed lover was a brilliant young army officer who was also the husband of her friend Helen Hunt Jackson. A somewhat more plausible candidate was Samuel Bowles, editor of the Springfield Republican, with whom Emily corresponded for years and to whom she sent many of her love poems. But while the poet undoubtedly displayed an exaggerated affection for the editor, she may also have had professional motives. A few of her poems were published anonymously by Bowles, who took the liberty of “correcting” them, so little did he esteem the poet’s skill or reciprocate her feelings.

  Whoever the “master” was, it is known that at the age of 48 Emily enjoyed a “December romance” with 64-year-old Otis Lord, a distinguished jurist and lifelong friend of the family, whose wife had just died. One biographer has even constructed a convincing case for Lord’s being the elusive “master,” speculating that a secret passion may have blossomed 14 years earlier when Emily was undergoing medical treatment in Cambridge and the judge was holding court nearby. If Lord was Emily’s “master,” she was his Ophelia in the Shakespearean symbolism in which they communicated. (“Exultation floods me,” Emily wrote. “I cannot find my channel, the creek turns sea at thought of thee.”) The two never married, whether because their love was frowned upon by both families, or possibly because they had become too set in their separate ways.

  But Emily was in any case probably incapable of consummating her sexual passion, according to one psychoanalytic biographer. Suffering from an unresolved Oedipal conflict, an abnormally prolonged period of “sexual latency,” and an uncertain self-image as a woman due to her estrangement from her mother, she is said to have compensated by working out an elaborate love fantasy in her writings.

  Finally, it has even been argued that Emily’s “master” was really a “mistress.” Citing her ardent correspondence with her female friends and the occasional use of feminine pronouns and bisexual symbolism in her love poetry (“Ourselves were wed one summer, dear” was addressed to her friend Kate Scott Turner), proponents of this view hold that Emily was a lesbian and that her life was ruined by the restrictions of a heterosexual society.

  —C.D.

  The Snow Princess

  EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY (Feb. 22, 1892-Oct. 19, 1950)

  HER FAME: At the age of 20 Millay became an overnight literary sensation with the publication of her poem “Renascence.” She went on to produce some of the greatest love poetry in the English language. Writing from a uniquely feminine point of view, she enjoyed popular as well as critical acclaim. In 1923 she received a Pulitzer Prize, the first ever awarded to a woman.

  HER PERSON: The eldest daughter of a divorcée, Millay grew up in a remote town on the Maine seacoast as “Vincent,” the surrogate man of the family. Her mother was a free-spirited woman who worked as a nurse to raise her three daughters as a tight little band of creative women. Thanks to a benefactress, the young poet was able to enter Vassar College—belatedly—when she was 21. Rebelling against this “pink and gray college” where men were excluded, she smoked secretly, disregarded campus rules, and escaped after graduation to the uninhibited freedom of New York’s Greenwich Village. There she worked intermittently as an actress while writing poetry and the pseudonymous magazine articles which paid the rent. “My candle burns at both ends,” Millay wrote in A Few Figs from Thistles (1920), and it became the epigraph of the dawning decade. The petite red-haired poet, half Irish and half Yankee, was, at her best, an enchantingly beautiful fairy-tale princess. But she was also intense, high-strung, and prone to mental and physical breakdown. In 1923 she married Eugen Boissevain, an importer of Dutch-Irish ancestry, who waited on her hand and foot during the 25 years of their marriage. “Anybody can buy and sell coffee,” Boissevain explained. “It seemed advisable to arrange our lives to suit Vincent.”

  Millay, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1933

  SEX LIFE: Millay had an intoxicating effect on both men and women. Her sexual ambivalence revealed itself when she was young in attachments to older women. “Anybody reading this would think I was writing to my sweetheart,” she wrote to her mother. “And he would be quite right.” A young doctor once suggested that her recurrent headaches might stem from “an occasional erotic impulse towards a person of [her] own sex.” Millay replied, “Oh, you mean I’m homosexual! Of course I am, and heterosexual too, but what’s that got to do with my headache?”

  Her first serious lover, the playwright and radical Floyd Dell, described her as a “Snow Princess, whose kiss left splinters of ice in the hearts of the mortal men who loved her.” Equally fearful of desertion and of the confines of traditional femininity, incapable of emotional surrender, she rejected Dell and a rapid succession of other lovers. At one point Dell unsuccessfully tried to persuade her to enter therapy to deal with what he called her “sapphic tendencies,” which to him meant her compulsive plunging into one love affair after another.

  An exception to her usual pattern was poet Arthur Davison Ficke, who was already married and hence safely unattainable. They consummated their passion during a whirlwind 36 hours in the midst of WWI and then remained lifelong admirers. However, to Millay it seemed only proper that Ficke would always be unattainable. When he proceeded to fall in love with another woman after divorcing his first wife, she accepted it complacently and even became friendly with his new sweetheart.

  Another lover was author and literary critic Edmund Wilson, who became infatuated with the poet at first encounter. “Edna ignited for me both my intellectual passion and my unsatisfied desire, which went up together in a blaze of ecstasy that remains for me one of the high points of my life,” Wilson wrote in his memoirs. He was able to joke about her many lovers (the “alumni association,” he called them), and on one occasion Wilson and his friend John Bishop playfully divided her in half for the evening, Wilson embracing the lower part of her body and Bishop the upper half. But Millay’s extreme promiscuity wounded Wilson deeply. “What my lips have kissed, and where, and why,” she wrote in one poem, “I have forgotten….”

  Eugen Boissevain, whom she finally married, represented to her a safe harbor, the supremely indulgent parent figure. (The tall, handsome, spirited Boissevain had played the same subordinate role with his first wife, feminist Inez Mulholland, before her premature death.) He nursed Millay back to health, bought her a farm in the Berkshires and an island off the Maine coast, and managed every domestic detail down to washing his wife’s hair. “To be in love is a terrific and continuous excitement,” Boissevain once confided to Alan Ross Macdougall. “I want to keep that excitement, never being quite sure, never knowing, so that I can ask myself: Does
she love me? And have the answer: I don’t know.”

  Theirs was an “open marriage,” Boissevain insisted, but Millay was so fiercely protective of her privacy that the identity of the extramarital lover described in the sonnets in Fatal Interview (1931) remains unknown. In a sense, the identity of her lovers was subordinate to the feelings they engendered within her. As Edmund Wilson observed, “She did not … give the impression that personality much mattered for her or that, aside from her mother and sisters, her personal relations were important except as subjects for poems….” In the end she always returned to her deepest love—what she called her “soul’s chastity”—poetry.

  HER THOUGHTS:

  My candle burns at both ends;

  It will not last the night;

  But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—

  It gives a lovely light!

  —from Millay’s “A Few Figs from Thistles”

  —C.D.

  The Mad Poet

  EZRA POUND (Oct. 30, 1885-Nov. 1, 1972)

  HIS FAME: Pound was a master of poetic style and form. His most famous work is Cantos, an autobiographical multivolume epic 40 years in the making.

  HIS PERSON: An eccentric figure with a billowing cape, a “fox’s muzzle” beard, and one long, dangling earring, Pound affected a personal style as distinctive as his verse. After abandoning his doctoral studies at the University of Pennsylvania, he worked briefly as a professor of Romance languages at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Ind., then left for Europe in 1908. While teaching at London’s Regent Street Polytechnic Institute, he developed a nonacademic interest in one of his pupils, Dorothy Shakespear. They married in 1914. After WWI they moved to France, and later to Italy. Meanwhile, Pound was working on Cantos and lending invaluable support to Ernest Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and other struggling writers. He was also developing a reactionary philosophy which eventually led to his conviction that “usury is the cancer of the world” and that the Jews were the prime perpetrators of this evil. By the time the first rumblings of WWII were heard, he was acclaiming Mussolini as a genius and Hitler as “a Jeanne d’Arc, a saint.” Pound’s vehement denouncements of the American war efforts over Rome Radio resulted in his being indicted by the U.S. on 19 counts of treason. Arrested outside his home at Sant’ Ambrogio, Italy, in April, 1945, he spent six months in an American army stockade before being shipped back to the U.S. At his trial in Washington, D.C., in February of 1946, he was judged of “unsound mind” and was confined to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for the criminally insane. Finally released in 1958, he returned to Italy, worked sporadically for a few years, then lapsed into silence for the last decade of his life. At the end he lamented, “Everything that I touch, I spoil. I have blundered always.”

  Pound just before his 28th birthday

  LOVE LIFE: Getting engaged was one of Pound’s favorite pastimes as a young man. When he was 19 he established a liaison with 34-year-old concert pianist Katherine Ruth Heyman, who gave him an heirloom diamond ring. At about the same time, he became engaged to poet Hilda Doolittle (pen name H. D.), who recorded in her journal that Pound’s “fiery kisses” were “electric, magnetic.” Another young poet to fall under Pound’s sway was Hilda’s friend Frances Gregg. After his relationships with Frances and Hilda cooled, he became engaged to Mary Moore and gave her the diamond ring entrusted to him by Miss Heyman. Complications with the opposite sex continued to dog his steps. His landlady found a woman in his bed one morning after he had left for his teaching duties at Wabash College, and as a result of the incident Pound lost his job. Although he claimed that the girl was merely a destitute actress on whom he had taken pity, members of the community were outraged.

  Leaving the tangled skein of his romances behind him, Pound sailed for Europe, where he served as Katherine Heyman’s concert manager before meeting Dorothy Shakespear, whose mother was a close friend of the poet William Butler Yeats. Dorothy had all the requisites for a wife. She was “beautiful and well-off ” and had “the most charming manners.” But Pound was not destined to settle into a conventional marriage for long. In 1922, eight years after he had wed Dorothy, he was introduced to fellow American expatriate Olga Rudge, a pretty, dark-haired concert violinist in her mid-20s. She thought him “the handsomest man she had ever seen” and he considered her “a great goddess.” When the goddess became his mistress, Pound began leading a double life, spending winters with Dorothy and summers with Olga. In 1925 Olga gave birth to his daughter, Mary, and the following year Dorothy bore his son, Omar. In 1944, when the Germans forced Pound and his wife out of their home in the Italian seaport of Rapallo, they moved in with Olga in Sant’Ambrogio for the remainder of the war. Although no angry words were ever spoken in the household, Pound’s daughter recounts that the air was always heavy with tension because Dorothy and Olga despised each other. During the final stages of his life, as his health declined and he became increasingly reclusive, Dorothy proved physically unable to care for him. Consequently, his last years were spent with Olga, who would accompany him to the Montin trattoria in Venice. According to one restaurant employee, “he never said a word and always sat with his chin on his chest, sometimes muttering.” After his death at 87, Olga Rudge stayed on in Italy, and today, according to one Venetian, “she listens all day, at the loudest volume, to tapes of Ezra Pound reading his poetry; perhaps not having heard his voice much when he was alive, she wants to do so now.”

  HIS THOUGHTS: “It is more than likely that the brain itself is, in origin and development, only a sort of great clot of genital fluid held in suspense or reserve…. There are traces of it in the symbolism of phallic religions, man really the phallus or spermatozoid charging, head-on, the female chaos…. Even oneself has felt it, driving any new idea into the great passive vulva of London, a sensation analogous to the male feeling in copulation.”

  —The Eds.

  The Santa Claus Of Loneliness

  RAINER MARIA RILKE (Dec. 4, 1875-Dec. 29, 1926)

  HIS FAME: Rilke was a German poet whose lyric and finely crafted verses gained him international acclaim. His most famous works are the Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus.

  HIS PERSON: Born in Prague, Rilke was raised by his unbalanced mother as a girl for his first six years. Later his father sent him to a military school, but he dropped out because of poor health. He also quit a commercial school in Linz, Austria, and the University of Prague. Rilke published his first volume of poems at 19, then went to Munich to devote himself to writing. All his life Rilke traveled constantly in Europe, producing a steady stream of poetry. He also visited North Africa and Egypt, and he called Russia—where he met Tolstoi—his spiritual home. But actually he preferred Paris. For a time he was Auguste Rodin’s secretary. Then members of the European aristocracy took Rilke under their wing, putting him up in a series of villas and castles. Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe became his lifelong patroness in 1909. Rilke found in her the mother figure he had longed for, and to her he opened his heart. During WWI he briefly served as a clerk in the Austrian army. Intellectual and artistic women were always drawn to the graceful Rilke, although he was no Adonis. With his long head, large nose, receding cleft chin, and droopy mustache, he seemed “ugly, small, puny” even to Princess Marie. Rilke preferred the company of women, yet he would bolt as soon as he felt his solitude and work threatened. He practiced nudism, flirted with the occult, and believed in nature cures. Images of virgin girlhood, death, and roses run through much of his poetry. “The Santa Claus of loneliness,” as poet W. H. Auden called him, died near Montreux, Switzerland.

  LOVE-LIFE: “I am no good at love, because I did not love my mother,” Rilke once confessed. At other times he complained about the suffering and despair that his erotic relationships had brought. Because he found very little pleasure in sex, with many women he preferred the role of a good friend. But there certainly were exceptions.

  At 16, while at the commercial school in Linz, he had a love affair with an ins
tructor several years his senior, and they eventually ran away together. The next year he fell in love with and became engaged to Valerie von David-Rhonfeld, an aspiring artist a year older than he. Three years and 130 love letters later, Rilke broke off the engagement.

  In 1897 Rilke met Lou Andreas-Salomé, a well-known author and the daughter of a Russian general. Although she was married and 13 years his senior, they quickly became lovers. Rilke’s diary suggests that she may even have borne his child. Rilke, Lou, and her husband made a trip to Russia, and a short time later the two lovers returned to Russia, this time passing themselves off as cousins. This was Rilke’s most enduring relationship with a woman, not counting Princess Marie’s purely nonsexual friendship. Even after Rilke and Lou officially parted, they continued to see each other and corresponded for the rest of Rilke’s life. Lou, an amateur psychoanalyst, wrote years later that of the “many fears” in Rilke, his biggest was the girlish fear of his penis. She alluded to Rilke’s sexual infantilism and revealed that a physical difficulty with his genitals made erections painful for him. She also interpreted his fears as a “displaced, converted guilt over masturbation.”

  Rilke married German sculptor Clara Westhoff in 1901. Their daughter, Ruth, was born the same year. But the Rilkes soon went their separate ways without bothering to get divorced.