The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People

by David Wallechinsky

  HIS FAME: One of the most significant and popular American composers, Gershwin wrote the musical score for such classic musicals as Funny Face (1927), Of Thee I Sing (1931), and Porgy and Bess (1935). A posthumous film biography, Rhapsody in Blue (1945), helped to cement and preserve his fame.

  HIS PERSON: Born Jacob Gershvin in a tough Jewish section of Brooklyn, Gershwin gave no hint of his extraordinary talent during his early years. But at the age of 10 he happened to hear the sounds of a violin drifting through an open window and instantly succumbed to the charms of music. “It was, to me, a flashing revelation of beauty,” he later said. Enraptured, Gershwin took up the piano. In 1913 he quit school to become a staff pianist with a Tin Pan Alley publishing firm and soon began issuing his prolific stream of compositions. His 1919 hit, “Swanee,” sung by Al Jolson, established his fame and allowed him to pursue more ambitious undertakings, including scoring Broadway shows and Hollywood movies, often with his older brother, Ira, as lyricist.

  Despite his successes, Gershwin was plagued by nervous and digestive disorders. He rigidly limited his diet to easily digested foods—cereals and the like. To combat constipation and chronic depression, he entered psychoanalysis with Dr. Gregory Zilboorg. He saw Zilboorg five times a week for a year, and they got along so well that they even went on vacation to Mexico together.

  Gershwin was hardly all gloom and constipation, however. He was the life of many parties and enthusiastically plunged into a variety of projects, from juggling to painting. His vitality remained undiminished until his sudden death, at 38, from an inoperable brain tumor.

  SEX LIFE: Gershwin brought his full enthusiasm to sex. Women by the score were attracted to his dark, athletically trim good looks. He slept with many of them, but, unsated by the flood of women who pursued him, he also indulged in frequent trips to brothels, where he gladly bought more sex. He even asked a friend how one went about “keeping” a woman. When informed of the cost involved, he dropped the subject.

  A scorecard of Gershwin’s lovers would list hundreds, even thousands, of partners, and he often bragged of his conquests and his bedtime prowess; for example, he occasionally enjoyed sex with two women at the same time. Aware of his sexual reputation, he once offered to bestow upon a young woman the privilege of sleeping with him before her marriage. She declined. But one trip to a bordello undid his boasting. While having his pleasure in a Parisian brothel, a pair of his friends—unbeknownst to Gershwin—bribed the madam for a look through a peephole which gave a clear view of Gershwin’s performance. What they saw, they reported later, was mechanical sex hastily consummated. Gershwin’s interest in lovemaking, despite a multitude of lovers, was perfunctory. But that is not unexpected. Although he believed that sex stimulated his creativity, Gershwin’s chief interest—always—was music. Once while at a party, for example, Gershwin sat with a pretty girl ensconced on his lap. Invited to play a few tunes on the piano, Gershwin bolted from his chair so rapidly that the young lady tumbled to the floor. He had simply forgotten her presence when music was mentioned. In another instance, after learning a woman he had loved had married another, Gershwin commented, “If I wasn’t so busy, I’d be upset.”

  Ironically, despite his vigorous pursuit of sexual pleasures, Gershwin retained some prudishness. His sister Frances discovered that part of his nature when she once said “darn” in public and Gershwin slapped her for uttering the expletive. And he frequently rebuked her for wearing her skirts above her knees.

  SEX PARTNERS: Because of Gershwin’s many lovers, his biographers inevitably seek to identify the woman of his life, the one he loved best. Dozens of candidates for the woman are championed, including composer Kay Swift, to whom he dedicated his Song-Book compositions; actress Paulette Goddard, whom he urged to leave her spouse, Charlie Chaplin; French starlet Simone Simon, who presented Gershwin with a gold key to her Los Angeles home; and dancer Margaret Manners, whose son took the name Alan Gershwin and, in 1959, authored an article for Confidential magazine entitled “I Am George Gershwin’s Illegitimate Son.” Was he? The evidence on both sides is unconvincing. But it would still be irrelevant to the issue at hand, since there are no signs Manners played a major role in Gershwin’s life. Only one fact is certain: Gershwin never loved one woman enough to marry her.

  With some insight, wit Oscar Levant, a close Gershwin friend, once quipped, “Tell me, George, if you had to do it all over again, would you fall in love with yourself again?” Levant’s sharp tongue perhaps cuts unfairly. Gershwin did love himself. But he loved music even more.

  HIS THOUGHTS: “I think that the reason why I’ve never gotten married is that I’m always looking for a woman like my mother—and there just isn’t another like her.”

  “Why should I limit myself to only one woman when I can have as many women as I want?”

  —R.M.

  Lady Day

  BILLIE HOLIDAY (Apr. 17, 1915-July 17, 1959)

  HER FAME: “Strange Fruit” was the first hit record of this black singer of jazz and blues, who became famous for her passionate and touching vocal renditions, which transformed even the most banal lyrics into sheer poetry. As her career blossomed, she progressed from Harlem nightclubs to concert stages with jazz greats Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, and Count Basie, and from live performances to movie roles.

  HER PERSON: Billie wrote, “Mom and Pop were just a couple of kids when they got married. He was 18, she was 16, and I was 3.” Pop was an itinerant guitarist, and, although they were poor, Mom would feed any musician who drifted through Baltimore. A childhood experience traumatized Billie; her great-grandmother died in her sleep, and her stiffened arm had to be broken in order to release the just-awakened Billie from its grasp.

  Eleanora Fagan Holiday was a tomboy, and her father called her Bill. She called herself Billie after her favorite movie actress, Billie Dove. She attended school only through the fifth grade, and she secretly loved comic books as an adult. After a lifetime of tragic heroin addiction, police harassment, and jail terms, she died at age 44 of heart and liver failure.

  SEX LIFE: Ten-year-old Billie was sentenced by a judge to a Catholic reform school. Her crime: being raped by a middle-aged neighbor, Mr. Dick. The event was “bloody and violent,” as was her first voluntary sexual encounter two years later with an older musician on her grandmother’s parlor floor. Around that time she started running errands for a whorehouse, where she heard her first jazz records. As a teenage prostitute in New York City, she preferred white customers because the blacks took too long. A black man she refused to service tipped off the cops about her, and she was jailed for prostitution. Later she admitted to having had lesbian relations in prison, but claimed she had taken a passive role.

  In her first singing job she refused to pick up customers’ tips from the table in the customary manner—using her vaginal lips—and the other girls started calling her “Lady.” Yet she wore no underwear onstage, and one night she expressed her sentiments to an unappreciative audience by raising her skirts as she stalked off.

  “Lady Day” could really sing the blues with passion, and the men she chose to sleep with gave her violent inspiration. She liked them big and pretty. Of one drummer she remarked: “They don’t call him ‘Big Sid’ because he’s six foot three, you know.” In her 20s she had many musician-lovers and often sang with her pretty face marred by black eyes and her body covered with bruises. If her friends warned her away from a bad character, she usually went after him with more determination than ever. Men used her and spent her money; before long she had a reputation as an easy mark.

  LOVE LIFE: The dates of various events in Billie’s life are cloudy; for example, that of her engagement to a young pianist named Sonny White. Their relationship was no rougher than most of Billie’s casual affairs, but both of them supported their mothers and eventually the problems involved ended the romance.

  Tenor sax player Lester Young was the best friend Billie ever had. His obbligato solos matched Billie’s moods so perf
ectly that the records they made together are considered her finest. Lester shortened her last name and called her “Lady Day”; she affectionately called him “Pres,” short for “President Roosevelt.” It is interesting that through all their years together—recording, on the road, nightclubbing—their friendship was never physical. The music they made together shows that Lester touched Billie as no other man could, and years later, when they had parted ways, an old Lester told a writer, “She’s still my ‘Lady Day.”’

  In 1941 Billie met her husband-to-be, handsome businessman Jimmy Monroe. Jimmy “smoked something strange.” When their marriage began to founder, she thought that joining Jimmy in his opium smoking would restore the lost magic, but before she was 30 she was separated from him and living with trumpeter Joe Guy, then 25 years old. That relationship was a triangle—Joe, Billie, and her heroin.

  Drug busts and touring eventually separated them, and Billie’s next choice of a lover, John Levy, proved a disaster. Levy managed a nightclub and gave her a singing job when nobody else would. He bought her nice clothes, gave her wholesale jewelry, and gradually took over her finances. Although she was making $3,500 a week, she had to beg him for pocket money. Levy eventually left Billie and her band stranded and broke during a tour in the South.

  The year 1956 brought a second marriage for Billie, to Louis McKay, a club owner and her manager. She was devoted to Louis, but they filed for divorce in California in late 1958. “Lady Day” died before the divorce decree was finalized.

  —J.M.

  The Virtuoso

  FRANZ LISZT (Oct. 22, 1811-July 31, 1886)

  HIS FAME: Renowned as the foremost piano virtuoso of his era, Liszt revolutionized the piano recital genre and spent a lifetime promoting the musical arts in Europe.

  HIS PERSON: The son of a Hungarian nobleman’s servant, Liszt was a child prodigy. The European aristocracy, for whom he would spend his life playing, was impressed by the boy’s talents and financed his musical education. Acknowledged as the greatest pianist of the day, he led an exciting life traveling from Portugal to Turkey to Russia, and achieved widespread fame in the process. In 1848, at the peak of his career, he accepted the directorship of the Weimar court theater. During the next 13 years he instilled new life into European music, not only with his concerts and operatic productions but also through his encouragement of such new composers as Richard Wagner. After leaving Weimar, Liszt spent eight years living and working in Rome, where he became an abbé of the Roman Catholic Church. (This entitled him to perform the rite of exorcism.) The next 17 years he spent playing, teaching, and directing in Rome, Weimar, and Budapest. Liszt’s genius brought him such great wealth that midway in his career he ceased to work for money, devoting his efforts instead to fund-raising for worthy causes. In his waning years, the rigors of traveling for these charitable enterprises weakened him, and in 1886 he died of pneumonia in Bayreuth, Germany.

  Throughout his career, Liszt demanded respect from his aristocratic audiences and constantly sought to elevate the status of artist above that of superservant. On one occasion he refused to play for Isabella II after he was denied a personal introduction to her majesty because of Spanish court etiquette. Another time he halted a performance in mid-flight and, with head bowed and fingers poised above the keyboard, waited until Czar Nicholas I of Russia ceased speaking. Despite these flashes of hauteur, his passionate style ensured his popularity. Striding forcefully to the stage, his long mane of whitening hair flowing behind him, he would tear off his doeskin gloves and toss them dramatically to the floor, seat himself as he flipped back his coattails, and address the keyboard with lips pressed and eyes blazing.

  LOVE LIFE: Like the rock stars of today, Liszt was smothered with feminine adulation. His appearances caused a sensation as his female admirers sought souvenirs; one lady even stripped the cover from a chair that had held the revered posterior. Lovers were his for the taking, and he had dozens, especially among the noblewomen who made up his audiences and pupils.

  Crushed at 17 when he was forced to break off a budding romance with Caroline di Saint-Crieg, one of his aristocratic piano pupils, Liszt withdrew into a period of fierce practice that yielded the extraordinary skills that were to bring him society’s adoration. His earliest substantial liaison was with the Countess Adèle de la Prunarede, but he broke off the affair upon learning that the countess had a second lover. Liszt’s first long-term relationship began in 1835, when Countess Marie d’Agoult left her husband and children in Paris to join Liszt in Switzerland, where she bore him three children. (Their daughter Cosima later became Richard Wagner’s wife.) In 1839, however, the couple separated, their relationship strained by Liszt’s loss of interest and his friendship with Frédéric Chopin’s mistress George Sand, a cigar-smoking writer of risqué novels who loved to sit under the piano while Liszt played. When the countess challenged Sand to a duel at one point—the chosen weapon was fingernails—Liszt locked himself in a closet until the ladies calmed down.

  Liszt’s name was soon linked with that of Lola Montez, a hot-blooded and beautiful-bodied Spanish dancer who had achieved notoriety by baring her breasts when introduced to King Ludwig I of Bavaria. When Liszt tired of their stormy affair, he deserted Montez while she was napping in a hotel room and left money to pay for the furniture he knew she would destroy in her rage. Liszt’s sexual peccadilloes were the talk of European musical society. His mistresses included the eccentric Italian-born Princess Christine Belgiojoso, who once had the body of a deceased lover mummified and kept it at home in a cupboard; the Russian Baroness Olga von Meyendorff, known as the “Black Cat” because of her tight-fitting black clothing; the young Polish Countess Olga Janina, who threatened to shoot and poison Liszt when he broke off their relationship; and the famous courtesan Marie Duplessis, who inspired Camille.

  The longest affair of Liszt’s life, extending through his Weimar and Roman periods, was with Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein. This intellectual Polish noblewoman left her Russian husband and her feudal estates to join Liszt in Weimar, where she spent hours lying on a bearskin rug wearing a turban and smoking a hookah while Liszt played the piano. Liszt hoped to marry the princess and went to Rome to seek papal approval for her divorce, an approval thwarted by her Russian husband’s influential connections. By this time Liszt’s feelings toward Carolyne had begun to cool, and he was relieved that the divorce was denied.

  Liszt’s sexual exploits continued into his autumn years, and he was frequently involved with a pupil young enough to be his granddaughter. He claimed, however, that because of his reverence for virginity he had never “seduced a maiden.” Even though he feared impotence—and used a variety of stimulants to prevent its onset—he had a longer list of lovers than almost any of his contemporaries. Liszt’s only comment was, “I didn’t take a big enough bite of the apple.”

  —J.Z.

  Warmhearted Wunderkind

  WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (Jan. 27, 1756-Dec. 5, 1791)

  HIS FAME: Considered the purest example of “raw genius” in history, Mozart was the greatest musical technician of all time and one of the world’s supreme creative artists. Master of all forms, he composed over 600 works, including choral and chamber works, symphonies, sonatas, concertos, and operas. Critics call his Don Giovanni and The Marriage of Figaro the most perfect operas ever written.

  HIS PERSON: This most prodigious of all child prodigies, born in Salzburg, Austria, began music lessons at four with his violinist father, Leopold, a stern but loving disciplinarian. Composing from the age of five, Mozart at six astonished the royalty of Europe as he and his gifted sister made the first of many arduous concert tours. A virtuoso on violin, organ, and harpsichord, he was called “Wunderkind” (“marvelous child”) and showered with attention. Yet he remained completely natural and affectionate.

  His adult life was a sharp contrast to his younger years. Short, pale, insignificant in appearance, he could not command the interest of aristocratic and ecclesiasti
cal patrons as a serious and mature composer. He never found an official post that paid enough to enable him to devote himself fully to the major works he longed to write. Precious time was wasted giving perfunctory lessons and grinding out charming potboilers. His life was a long losing struggle against jealous rivals, illness, and poverty. He and his wife, Constanze, did not live within their financial means. Pleasure-loving, they were unable to keep money from vanishing, not the least because of their generous handouts to every comer.

  Mozart died at 35 of kidney disease brought on by overwork and malnutrition. He was in debt to his tailor, the druggist, the upholsterer, as well as his friends. Working feverishly, he tried unsuccessfully to finish his great Requiem before his own funeral. A heavy rainstorm prevented his wife and friends from accompanying the coffin to the graveyard. Not until 17 years later did Constanze realize that Mozart’s remains had been dumped into an unmarked pauper’s grave.

  LOVE LIFE: Pampered by women as a child, he was precociously aware of their looks. He once wrote his father, “Nature speaks as loudly in me as in any man, perhaps more forcefully than in many a big strong oaf.” Mozart enjoyed flirting, saying that if he had had to marry every girl with whom he flirted, he would have been a husband 100 times. At 21 he carried on a playfully indecent correspondence—full of double meanings—with his favorite cousin, Maria Anna Thekla Mozart.