The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People

by David Wallechinsky

  HIS PERSON: The youthful Disraeli, heavily in debt after stock-market losses and a disastrous publishing venture, became a writer out of sheer desperation. To call attention to his literary efforts, he set his black hair in ringlets and frequented the London salons of the 1830s clad in green velvet trousers, an embroidered canary-yellow waistcoat, silver-buckled black shoes, and white wrist lace. A master of flattery and the witty, foppish reply, Disraeli conned his aristrocratic friends into furnishing the colorful “inside” tidbits that he used for Henrietta Temple and other novels. In 1832, sensing a greater challenge, he entered the political arena. His unsavory reputation—for extravagance and sexual encounters—caused four successive defeats before he finally sat in the House of Commons in 1837. During the next decade Disraeli used his literary talent to advance his political, social, and religious convictions simultaneously, writing the trilogy Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847). After his political star brightened, he abandoned his peacock style of dress in favor of a dark suit, conservatively cut. Indispensable as a leader, yet distrusted by his colleagues, Disraeli was called both a man of genius and a self-serving opportunist during his long tenure in Parliament.

  LOVE LIFE: Disraeli’s modus operandi was simple and direct: “Talk to women as much as you can…. This is the way to gain fluency, because you need not care what you say, and had better not be sensible.” At age 21 he used the ploy to launch his first novel, Vivian Grey (1826-1827), while having an affair with Mrs. Sarah Austen, wife of a family friend. His barefaced flattery so charmed the impressionable lady that she not only fell madly in love with the callow youth but also persuaded her gullible husband to lend the young Jew turned Christian large sums of money. To keep the author’s identity secret (the novel’s characters were thinly disguised and unflattering portraits of prominent society figures), Mrs. Austen laboriously transcribed Disraeli’s entire holographic manuscript in her own distinctive handwriting before convincing a prominent publisher friend to buy it. Later, Disraeli would discard anonymity to trumpet his authorship of each new novel.

  Seeking an entrée into London’s drawing rooms in 1832, Disraeli utilized his mistress, Mrs. Clara Bolton, a vivacious, party-giving doctor’s wife with impressive literary and political connections. Within the year, he had exchanged her for the oversexed and dazzling Lady Henrietta Sykes, a mother of four who fluttered obediently into his reach. Their passionate affair throbbed steadily for the next four years, aided conveniently by Henrietta’s husband, Sir Francis, whose frequent out-of-town grouse shooting was combined with a roving eye for a pretty ankle. Henrietta’s initial worries over being found out were forever banished when she caught her husband dallying with her lover’s former mistress Clara. A triumphant Henrietta secured Sir Francis’ promise that their extramarital couplings would be mutually ignored. Disraeli moved in with Lady Sykes at her London residence, but her incessant sexual demands began to ruin his health. According to contemporary rumor, Disraeli struck a unique pact with Lord Lyndhurst, a notorious womanizer and then leader of the Tory party. Lyndhurst—who fervently believed in platonic relationships “after, but not before” sexual intercourse—supposedly was eager to take on the willing Henrietta and in return sponsored Disraeli’s political career.

  In 1839 Disraeli married Mary Anne Lewis, a wealthy widow some 12 years older than he. His year-long courtship nearly ended in disaster when he demanded she become his wife immediately to end snickers that he was merely her paid lover. Indignant, she threw him out, but the resourceful suitor spent the night composing a masterful 1,472-word plea for reconsideration. Tearfully, Mary Anne changed her mind even though his letter candidly admitted that originally he had been solely interested in her money and devoid of all “romantic feelings.” Surprisingly, their marriage became one of history’s greatest love matches, lasting over 33 years. As Mrs. Disraeli, Mary Anne kept all of London in a continuous state of shock with her titillating double-entendre remarks and her outrageous costumes, which defied the current fashion. But even as she played the role of a flirtatious featherbrain, Mary Anne shrewdly kept her husband constantly in the public eye, an accomplishment which greatly helped to retain Disraeli in office. She paid his enormous debts, personally cut his hair, and mothered him through endless crises. Dying of stomach cancer (both thought they were concealing the fact from each other), she gave her beloved “Dizzy” written permission to seek another mate after she was gone.

  In 1873, a year after Mary Anne’s death, Disraeli began his last affair, a bizarre romance with Lady Bradford. He chased her ardently for years, scribbling passionate notes daily while he listened absentmindedly to boring speeches in Parliament. His cause was hopelessly lost from the beginning; Lady Bradford was happily married and a grandmother. In desperation, believing forlornly that the status of brother-in-law might allow closer contact with Lady Bradford, he even proposed formally to her 71-year-old sister, Lady Chesterfield. Tactfully, she turned him down.

  HIS THOUGHTS: When William Gladstone publicly commented that Disraeli would “probably die by the hangman’s noose or a vile disease,” Disraeli promptly replied, “Sir, that depends upon whether I embrace your principles or your mistress.”

  —W.K.

  The Politics Of Sexual Sublimation

  MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI (Oct. 2, 1869 -Jan. 30, 1948)

  HIS FAME: He ranks with Jesus Christ and Buddha as a great religious teacher, a prophet with the spiritual force to transform the lives of his followers. Politically, his gospel of militant nonviolence—inspired by the passive resistance of his child-bride—brought independence to India and influenced the great nationalist revolutions of the 20th century.

  HIS PERSON: He was the youngest, smallest, and favorite child of the middle-aged prime minister of the minor principality of Porbandar in western India and the minister’s fourth wife. Soli-tary, shy, and sweet-tempered, homely with his big nose and jug ears, he enjoyed a close relationship with both his parents, particularly with his deeply religious mother.

  Gandhi and Kasturbai, both age 45

  The turning points of his childhood were his marriage at the age of 13, in the Hindu tradition, and the death of his father three years later, at the very moment Gandhi was sexually importuning his pregnant child bride. This left him with a lifelong sense of sexual guilt that would eventually be sublimated in political activism.

  At 18, after taking a vow not to touch wine, women, or meat, he went alone to study law in England for three years, a formative period for the young Indian. He had great difficulty satisfying his hearty appetite with British vegetarian cuisine. But despite temptation, particularly at the hands of middle-aged landladies eager to assuage his needs, he succumbed to nothing more than a temporary case of fashion-consciousness.

  Gandhi came into his own during 21 years spent in South Africa, arriving in 1893 as attorney for a Muslim firm and becoming a leader of the Indian community there through his protests against racial discrimination. He began to experiment with “nature cures” and communal living. And at the age of 37 he took the Hindu vow of brahmacharya, or celibacy, to free himself for a lifetime of political and religious leadership.

  Gandhi called his political philosophy satyagraha, a combination of truth and force, which has been variously translated as passive resistance or militant nonviolence. By means of civil-disobedience campaigns and symbolic protest demonstrations—and later by dramatic public fasts—he would counter might with right and return good for evil, compelling the strong to acknowledge the force of the weak.

  In 1915 Gandhi returned to India to take on the question of colonialism. Rejecting all Western influences, he established a simple, austere lifestyle in his ashrams, or communal retreats. He adopted the spinning wheel as a symbol of traditional self-sufficiency, making homespun cloth to replace imported fabric. And he devised a series of symbolic confrontations with the British which culminated in 1947 in Indian independence. Soon afterward, while working to bring peace between Hindus and
Muslims, he was assassinated by a Hindu fanatic.

  With his small, frail body—naked except for a loincloth and metal-rimmed spectacles—Gandhi confronted the key issues of his time: tradition and modernization, colonialism and nationalism, identity and faith. The one question he was never able to resolve, and which would continue to plague him into old age, was sex.

  CHILD MARRIAGE: Marriage at the age of 13, Gandhi recalled, meant at first only the acquisition of a “strange girl to play with.” It also meant that, assuming the traditional authority of the Hindu husband, he might dictate when and where his bride might play. But Kasturbai Makanji, also 13, was stubborn and strong-willed; she spent nearly half of her first two years of marriage at home with her parents. She was submissive only when it came to sex.

  For Gandhi, who had been coached by his brother’s wife, marriage launched a period of lascivious sexual self-indulgence. He was constantly preoccupied with erotic urges, and his schoolwork suffered. Kasturbai remained illiterate (“lustful love left no time for learning”) and Gandhi would henceforth seek intellectual companionship elsewhere.

  Sex was always a source of guilt and conflict for Gandhi, as epitomized by the circumstances of his father’s death. He shared the Hindu concern with digestion and excretion, and the worship of semen as the vital life force, loss of which is debilitating to body and mind. Celibacy, in fact, is not uncommon among older Hindu males. But for Gandhi, who was highly sexed and in his mid-30s when he adopted it, it involved a great struggle.

  A combination of factors motivated Gandhi’s final resolve to forswear sex. Abstinence is the only morally acceptable form of birth control, he believed, and after five sons (one died in infancy) he wanted no more children. He wished to conserve all his energy for a life of service. Also, as psychohistorian Erik Erikson points out, racial repression in colonial South Africa may have reminded him of the sexual chauvinism in his marriage.

  In Gandhi’s thinking, there was a parallel between sexual and political exploitation. His philosophy of passive resistance, he wrote, was inspired by the indomitable Kasturbai. “Her determined resistance to my will … made me ashamed of myself and cured me of my stupidity in thinking I was born to rule over her.” Celibacy was simply a form of nonviolence between the sexes. But until her death in 1944, while she and Gandhi were serving time in prison for civil disobedience, Kasturbai reserved a peasant distrust of the women who surrounded her husband. For although the traditional Hindu vow required a celibate to avoid the opposite sex altogether, Gandhi spent the rest of his life tempting fate.

  GANDHI’S WOMEN: He was a great flirt who adored women, William Shirer wrote. Moreover, they were useful to his movement. Beginning in South Africa with 17-year-old Sonja Schlesin, he had a long line of secretary-nurses who served him with great devotion and slavish obedience. Over the years, in addition to taking dictation, these women assumed the duties of massaging him, bathing him, and even sleeping with him.

  Some of Gandhi’s women were famous in their own right, for example, Sarojini Naidu, “the Nightingale of India,” a poet from a wealthy, cosmopolitan Brahmanic family. She became one of Gandhi’s most devoted converts, enjoying a relationship of great personal affection with the Mahatma, or “Great Soul,” whom she called “our Mickey Mouse.” (“You will never know how much it costs us to keep that saint, that wonderful old man, in poverty,” she joked.)

  Such was Gandhi’s appeal that women came from far and wide. Madeleine Slade, a 33-year-old Englishwoman, daughter of an admiral, and a former devotee of Beethoven, arrived in 1925 to prostrate herself at Gandhi’s feet. “You shall be my daughter,” he welcomed her. But Mirabehn, as she was renamed, was in love and wanted more; Gandhi simply advised her to sublimate her love in service instead of “squandering” it on him. There remained a special empathy between the two, William Shirer observed, while biographer Louis Fischer described their relationship as “one of the remarkable platonic associations of our age.” Not all of Gandhi’s relations with the opposite sex, however, were entirely platonic.

  GANDHI’S GIRLS: The struggle to remain sexually pure, he wrote, was “like walking on the sword’s edge.” He continued to be tormented by nocturnal emissions, which he confessed publicly as a form of atonement, into his late 60s. Then there was the scandal of the naked young girls he slept with, to keep him warm and “test his resolve.”

  He had been experiencing “shivering fits” in the night, so he asked young women in his inner circle—all virgins or young brides—to warm him with their bodies. Sushila Nayar, who first arrived at the ashram at 15 and went on to become Gandhi’s physician, masseuse, secretary, and bedmate, thought no more of it than of sleeping with her mother. But for some of the others it was an ambivalent experience. Abha Gandhi, the wife of a grandnephew who began sleeping with the Mahatma when she was 16, eventually was asked to remove all her garments. Her husband was so upset that he offered to keep the old man warm himself. Gandhi refused his offer, saying he wanted Abha for the brahmacharya experiment as well as for the warmth.

  Some of Gandhi’s girls were motivated by jealousy of one another and their fear of losing favor. Manu Gandhi was a distant cousin, raised from childhood by Kasturbai, who bathed and shaved the Mahatma and from the age of 19 slept with him. He would lean on her and Abha, his “walking sticks,” when he went out; and during his fasts Manu would monitor his vital signs and administer enemas. “She rejoiced in her servitude and was proud of her special place in his affections,” Gandhi biographer Robert Payne wrote of Manu.

  “The, more they tried to restrain themselves and repress their sexual impulses,” Raihana Tyabji, one of Gandhi’s disciples, said about the women in his entourage, “the more oversexed and conscious they became.” Ironically, Gandhi once scolded Raihana, also a celibate and a healer, for sleeping naked with one of her patients. In fact, in matters of sex as well as politics, the Mahatma simply wrote his own rules.

  —C.D.

  Mysterious Bed Partner

  ADOLF HITLER (Apr. 20, 1889-Apr. 30, 1945)

  HIS FAME: One of the most powerful leaders of the 20th century, Adolf Hitler was also the titular head of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, or Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei. (The shortened name “Nazi” is derived from the syllables Nat and zi.) His infamous dictatorship, lasting for only 13 years, created a permanent shift in world politics and was directly responsible for the deaths of over 30 million people.

  HIS PERSON: Born at Braunau am Inn (Austria-Hungary), Hitler originally dreamed of becoming an artist, but twice (1907, 1908) flunked the entrance examinations for Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts. The future dictator of Nazi Germany moved frequently around the Austrian capital to evade military service, while he supported himself by painting postcards and posters. When WWI began, he enlisted in a Bavarian infantry regiment and survived four years of front-line combat, serving with distinction (wounded, gassed, twice awarded the Iron Cross). In 1920 Hitler joined the German Workers’ party and turned the tiny, ineffective group into a formidable, paramilitary organization. At Munich on Nov. 8, 1923, he tried to force the Bavarian government into a full-scale revolution against the Weimar Republic, but his beer hall putsch failed and Hitler was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for high treason. Released nine months later, he emerged with a rambling manuscript outlining his plan for Germany’s domination of the world. Titled Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”), it became the Nazi party bible.

  Aided by Germany’s internal chaos and worsening economic condition, Hitler schemed his way into authority and in 1933 was named chancellor. His hypnotic oratory won him the enthusiastic support and adoration of the masses. Political opponents were either brutally murdered or permanently jailed. He purged potential threats to his leadership from within his private army of 100,000 men—the brown-shirted Sturmabteilung (“Storm Troopers”)—by ordering the bloody massacre (June 30, 1934) called the “Night of the Long Knives.” His policy of Aryan supremacy sent over 6 mil
lion European Jews, Gypsies, and political dissidents to the gas chambers and crematoriums. Hitler rearmed Germany, reoccupied the Rhineland, took over Austria, and seized Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland as preliminary steps toward conquering first Europe, then the world.

  On Sept. 1, 1939, his armored columns rolled across the Polish border, triggering WWII. Der Führer (“the Leader”) personally directed overall military strategy, often rejecting the advice given by his experienced top commanders. When battlefield casualties numbering in the millions provoked an unsuccessful assassination plot on his life in 1944, he sadistically condemned the men responsible to a slow—and deliberately prolonged—death by piano-wire strangulation while hung on meat hooks. As they were about to expire, they were cut down, revived, and then rehung—repeatedly. (The gruesome spectacle was filmed in graphic detail for Hitler’s later enjoyment.) In 1945, with his armies facing total collapse on both the eastern and western fronts, Hitler fled to a concrete bunker beneath the Berlin Chancellery. There on April 30 he committed suicide, ending a reign he had boasted would last for a thousand years.

  SEX LIFE: Dr. Leonard L. Heston, professor of psychiatry at the University of Minnesota, investigated Hitler and came to one conclusion.

  Sexual deviations of several kinds have been suggested, but the fact remains that very little is known about Hitler’s sex life. Ignorance has fostered blatant speculation. The evidence is: He was regarded as sexually normal by his physicians and by those who knew him through the war. Eva Braun, his mistress, was thought by all to be a thoroughly normal young woman. Hitler was an emotional person who certainly grieved deeply and appropriately following the death by suicide of an earlier mistress, Geli Raubal. Eva Braun voluntarily came to Berlin during the last days, elected to marry Hitler, and then to die with him. Hitler was certainly capable of sustaining for a lengthy period a relationship involving profound affectional ties. Saying more would be sheer speculation.