The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People

by David Wallechinsky

  Gossip that Hitler might be homosexual was scoffed at by his colleague Albert Speer. “Such accusations have no truth in them. Hitler’s worries and long hours often made his sex drive taper off and he would request drugs … to help, but as to being a homosexual—no!” According to Glenn B. Infield, in his study of Hitler’s secret life, the Führer was normal. “The testimony of the women he slept with, and many are still alive, proves that he appreciated female flesh. They laugh at the accusation that he was a homosexual, and their evidence is convincing.”

  Eva Braun—photo by A. Hitler

  The preponderance of evidence suggests that Hitler’s longest and most publicized love affair—with Eva Braun, who was to become his wife—involved little more than sexual intercourse.

  Some 23 years younger than Hitler, Eva Braun became his mistress-in-residence in 1932. Intellectually a zero, the Bavarian beauty compensated for her lack of brains with a shapely, athletic body that had but one flaw: a vagina too small for normal sex. Eva underwent painful corrective surgery, doggedly enduring secret and lengthy postoperative treatments. (Her gynecologist promptly died in a car accident shortly after announcing that a full recovery had been achieved.) As Hitler’s mistress, Eva kept a confident but low profile, seldom appearing with her lover in public. In her diary she was less sure, writing that “he needs me only for certain purposes … this is idiotic.” Otto Skorzeny, Hitler’s chief of commandos, once reported a conversation in which Eva had confided, “He doesn’t even take his boots off, and sometimes we don’t get into the bed. We stretch out on the floor. On the floor he is very erotic.” Indoors, Hitler encouraged Eva to cavort in the buff by hinting that she seemed “too hot in her clothes.” He preferred to strip her himself, removing her garments with fumbling fingers that nearly drove her crazy with frustration. Outdoors, he insisted she swim or sunbathe nude, while he took photographs to add to his huge pornographic collection. Usually the shots were close-ups of her buttocks. He declared this peculiar angle was necessary to prevent her from being recognized if the prints should fall into “the wrong hands.”

  Trapped in his Berlin bunker, while the Russians were about to overrun the city, Hitler married Eva in the early morning hours of Apr. 29, 1945. The following day, in a suicide pact, Eva took her life with cyanide and Hitler ended his life with a bullet.

  SPECULATIONS ON HIS SEX LIFE: Underground rumors swept Germany during the 1930s suggesting that the real reason for the Nazi party leader’s fanatical devotion to duty was that he was impotent. Jokingly, the wags pointed to his typical pose at public functions, during which he clasped his hands protectively in front of his genitals, and wisecracked that he was “hiding the last unemployed member of the Third Reich.” The small group of women who became intimate with Hitler and survived the experience assured interrogators that he was anything but impotent.

  Subsequent to their affairs with the Führer, many of his mistresses either committed suicide or were murdered by the Gestapo to protect Hitler’s reputation. This appears to be a fact. What seems not to be absolute fact—maybe true, maybe not true—based mostly on shreds of gossip and guesswork—is that Hitler’s chosen females learned that their revered leader specialized in coprophilic sadomasochism.

  Hitler’s one true love appeared to be Angela “Geli” Raubal, the 21-year-old daughter of his half sister. In September, 1929, the attractive brunette went to join her mother, then the housekeeper at Hitler’s sumptuously furnished Prinzregentenplatz apartments in Munich. Forty-year-old “Onkel Adolf ” promptly appointed himself guardian-protector, gave her an adjacent bedroom, and jealously assigned guards to keep the Viennese girl a virtual prisoner, under continual observation. Flattered by the attention, Geli reveled in the uncle-niece relationship on public occasions, and privately they became lovers, but possibly with bizarre twists she didn’t expect. According to rumors, along with the coprophilic demand, Hitler claimed artistic privilege to draw precisely detailed, pornographic sketches of Geli, posing her in every obscene position he could devise. “My uncle is a monster,” she reputedly sobbed to friends; “you would never believe the things he makes me do.” Terrified, yet unable to escape, Geli endured the sadomasochistic perversions for two years. The chambermaids responsible for tidying up the bedroom could only gossip among themselves over the “very strange and unspeakable” abnormal sex relations that had taken place. As a compensation and to even the score, Geli not only seduced Hitler’s longtime companion and chauffeur, Emil Maurice, and made love with the willing security guards assigned to her, but she had sex with every young man with whom she could secretly establish a liaison. In 1931, unable to accept the gilded-cage captivity any longer, she shot herself through the heart, using Hitler’s personal 6.35-mm. Walthur pistol. Ironically for the millions of people who later died because of Hitler’s rule, a despondent Führer had to be closely watched to ensure that he, too, did not commit suicide.

  In the mid-1930s, Hitler met Renate Müller, then 29 and an established star in German movies. The petite, blue-eyed blonde—a typically Aryan beauty— accepted a command invitation for sex in the private quarters of Germany’s master. In October, 1937, the meetings ended abruptly. Renate Müller either jumped 40 ft. from her Berlin apartment window or was thrown out on Gestapo orders, after being charged with secretly having a Jewish lover.

  Other female intimates met equally tragic fates. In 1939 Englishwoman Unity Mitford shot herself while in Munich. With a bullet lodged in her brain, she lingered on as a human vegetable for 9 years. Earlier, Suzi Liptauer had hanged herself after an overnight rendezvous. Maria “Mimi” Reiter attempted a like fate but miraculously survived.

  The reasons behind these strange suicide attempts and deaths? Hitler’s unnatural bedroom behavior? Possibly. But unproved—and the truth remains unknown.

  MEDICAL REPORT: Soviet doctors, after performing an official autopsy on Hitler’s burned corpse, reported a curious fact: “In the scrotum, which is singed but preserved, only the right testicle was found. The left testicle could not be found in the inguinal canal.” Seemingly, Hitler was born with but one.

  Of the seven children conceived by his mother, Klara, four died prematurely, one was moronic, and another was hidden from public view as an idiot. Her marriage was so close to being labeled incestuous that the pope had to give the couple a special dispensation. This inbreeding led Hitler to fear that his own blood was “tainted.” He used leeches to “purify” it, and had numerous samples drawn so he could visually reassure himself. His pathological, festering hatred of the Jews was perhaps due to a suspicion that his paternal grandmother, Anna Maria Schicklgruber, had been seduced by her Jewish employer’s student son. While an unmarried servant girl, she had produced Hitler’s father, Alois.

  —The Eds.

  The Fornicating Fascist

  BENITO MUSSOLINI (July 29, 1883-Apr. 28, 1945)

  HIS FAME: Dictator of Italy for over 20 years, Mussolini was idolized by his countrymen. However, when Italy faced certain defeat by the Allies during WWII, the Fascist Grand Council demanded his “resignation,” and Il Duce’s (“the Leader’s”) reign came to an abrupt end.

  HIS PERSON: Mussolini was born in the northern Italian town of Dovia in the province of Forlì, the son of a blacksmith and a schoolteacher. An unruly child, he was expelled from two elementary schools after attacking fellow students with his penknife. Still, he was an intelligent boy and managed to get both an education and a teaching certificate. At age 18 he worked as a schoolteacher in a small village near his hometown, until his reputation as a young satyr cost him his teaching contract. Mussolini gained a modicum of fame as a Socialist orator, journalist, and general rowdy. By the time he was 26 he had been jailed six times for inciting violence against authority. He was expelled from the Socialist party for advocating war with Austria. When WWI began, Mussolini enlisted in the army and was wounded by shrapnel. When Benito came marching home again, he was doing the Fascist goose step.

  Mussolini founded t
he Fascisti to fight socialism and bolshevism, accumulating over 300,000 devoted followers. By 1922 the Fascists were powerful enough to intimidate King Victor Emmanuel III into appointing Mussolini, then 39, as the youngest prime minister in Italian history. Under Mussolini’s dictatorship, Italy’s economy was stabilized, public works were started, and the country prospered. But Mussolini’s desire for expansion, coupled with his ill-fated alliance with Hitler, proved fatal, and in 1943 he was ousted from power. Two years later, when he was no longer protected by the Germans, Mussolini and his faithful mistress, Clara Petacci, were shot to death by Italian partisans.

  A superstitious man, Il Duce might well have attributed his downfall to plain bad luck. He had a deathly fear of hunchbacks, cripples, and open umbrellas. He painted shamrocks on the hood of his red Alfa-Romeo and never ventured anywhere without a small statue of St. Anthony, the patron saint of healing, in his pocket. He fainted at the smell of either incense or ether, and though he was involved in several duels, not to mention battles, corpses made him squeamish. Blessed with a speaking voice that could charm the multitudes, Mussolini was less charismatic close up. He seldom bathed or changed his shirt, and he once offended Queen Elena of Italy by attending a reception with two days’ growth of beard. An avid fan of Wallace Beery, the Keystone Cops, and Laurel and Hardy, Il Duce enjoyed their antics at nightly film screenings.

  SEX LIFE: Initiated into the world of the flesh by a prostitute at age 16, Mussolini never tired of the pleasure women afforded him. During his teens, he admitted to “undressing every girl I see with my eyes.” When he did undress a woman, it was seldom all the way, since most of his early encounters took place on staircases, against trees, or on the banks of the River Rabbi. The undisputed master of the “quickie,” Mussolini as prime minister would receive female petitioners in his office and seduce them on a window seat or on the floor, rarely taking the trouble to remove his pants and shoes. He was loath to let women spend the night beside him, afraid they would laugh at his nightshirt. Actually, it would have been grossly unwise for any woman to laugh at him, since his violent nature ignored gender. When he was 18, he stabbed a woman with the pocket knife he always carried. And once when Clara Petacci angered him, he struck her soundly enough to send her flying against a wall. He viewed women as mere “objects to plunder,” and plunder them he did, sometimes seven in rapid succession. He only asked that they be plump and wear no perfume, criteria which were easily met by Italian peasant girls.

  SEX PARTNERS: In his teens Mussolini frequented prostitutes. But he soon discovered that he had a way with women and could charm them into bed for free. He seduced his cousin and several of her friends, as well as any country girl who caught his fancy. His first steady partner was Angelica Balabanoff, a Russian Socialist agitator 14 years his senior. She lost interest in the egotistical 19-year-old because she doubted his sincerity as a Socialist. While he was a schoolteacher in the town of Tolmezzo in the Alps, Mussolini carried on an affair with his landlady, a woman named Luigia. She was extremely jealous and would burn pages she found in his notebooks on which he had scribbled the names of women he had read about in history books. The fact that Luigia had a husband did not bother Mussolini.

  In 1909 he fell in love with Rachele Guidi, one of his former students, who was working as a barmaid in his father’s inn. As a Socialist, he was ideologically forbidden to marry, and when he proposed that they live together out of wedlock, Rachele’s mother would not hear of it. So Mussolini produced a pistol and said, “You see this revolver, Signora Guidi? It holds six bullets. If Rachele turns me down, there will be a bullet for her and five for me. It’s for you to choose.” At that, the signora gave them her blessing. They finally did marry several years later, during the First World War, for practical reasons. One of Mussolini’s mistresses, Ida Dalser, bore him a son and began calling herself Signora Mussolini. Moreover, she began running up bills using that name. So Il Duce wed Rachele and clarified the situation for all concerned. Ida died in a mental institution in 1937; her son, Benito Albino, was killed during WWII.

  Though a devoted family man, Mussolini was still a Fascist. He bossed and occasionally beat Rachele, and even threw things at his beloved daughter Edda. However, Rachele was equally capable of violence. When Il Duce returned home drunk one night and ran amok in their apartment, smashing what few furnishings they had at the time, Rachele warned him the next day, “If ever you come home again in that state, I’ll kill you.” Knowing she meant it, he gave up alcohol for good. On the other hand, Mussolini was never so intimidated by his mistresses. Magda Fontanges, a French journalist with whom he had an affair, wrote in Liberty magazine that one of Mussolini’s first acts of courtship was to choke her jokingly with a scarf.

  Of all Il Duce’s mistresses, the dark beauty Clara Petacci was by far his favorite. Their relationship lasted over 10 years. Although he loved her dearly, he was permanently bound to Rachele and his family and refused to leave them. Clara understood this and managed to console herself with the luxurious apartments Mussolini provided for her. It was in one of these love nests that Rachele finally confronted Clara. Livid throughout the brief meeting, Rachele sarcastically noted the luxury in which her husband kept his “whore,” and told Clara that one day “they’ll take you to Piazzale Loreto”—a meeting place for down-and-out prostitutes. It was an accurate prediction, for the Piazzale Loreto was the place Clara’s and Il Duce’s bodies were hung by their heels after their execution. For a while, Clara’s skirt dangled around her face, until it was tied in place for the sake of modesty. She and Mussolini had spent their last night together in a farmhouse, and although the partisans would have let her live, she insisted on dying with her lover. Loyal to the end, she flung herself in front of Mussolini at the instant the first shots were fired.

  MEDICAL REPORT: Mussolini contracted syphilis while living in Tolmezzo, perhaps from his landlady Luigia. He was so distressed about having the disease that he almost shot himself. A friend intervened at the last minute and convinced him that it would be wiser to see a doctor. He was never cured, and it has been speculated that his bungled war efforts resulted from brain damage caused by the disease. Syphilis, unless properly treated, is known to result in megalomania and exaggeration of emotions, traits which were plainly visible in Il Duce’s character.

  HIS THOUGHTS: “Woman is to me an agreeable parenthesis in my busy life; they never have been more, nor can they ever be less. Today [1927], I have no time to punctuate my life with other than work, but in the past, now the long-ago past, when I was free to pick and choose my style of writing, I often found the parenthesis a pleasant way to punctuate.”

  —M.J.T.

  Evita

  EVA PERÓN (May 7, 1919-July 26, 1952)

  HER FAME: A legendary Argentinean political figure, Eva Perón, popularly called “Evita” (“Little Eva”), was the wife of dictator Juan Perón. She wielded unprecedented power for a woman in her country, acting as de facto minister of health and labor from 1946 to 1952.

  HER PERSON: María Eva Duarte was born in Los Toldos, a poverty-stricken village on the pampas, about 150 mi. from Buenos Aires. Eva was the fourth child born to Juana Ibarguren as the result of her unmarried liaison with Juan Duarte, a married minor landowner.

  Faced with a bleak future, Eva left for Buenos Aires at age 14 hoping for a theatrical career. At first her regional accent and undisciplined manner worked against her, but eventually she became one of the leading actresses on the radio. She was tall for an Argentine woman—5 ft. 5 in.—with dyed honey-blond hair, large dark-brown eyes, an attractive face, and a tendency toward plumpness, which she determinedly controlled. She was barely literate.

  Her ambitions led her to cultivate the company of Juan Perón, a widower and a colonel, whom she met in 1943. She moved in with him and two years later married him on Oct. 21, 1945. With Eva at his side, Juan Perón became president-dictator of Argentina. Not content to be a conventional first lady, Evita unleashed her venom on the
rich and her personal enemies alike, but she won the hearts of the poor of Argentina, whom she called los descamisados (“the shirtless ones”). They revered this peasant who stood before them in regal attire, and backed her as she promoted women’s suffrage, organized workers, and under the guise of the María Eva Duarte de Perón Welfare Foundation pumped millions of dollars of government money into welfare programs (and her Swiss bank accounts). When she died of cancer of the uterus at age 33, Evita was mourned as a saint.

  Juan and Eva Perón in 1945

  SEX LIFE: Eva Perón had a very complex personality, being as vindictive as she was charismatic, and she used sex as a means to obtain wealth and power, which were no doubt her true loves. With little chance of advancement from the lower classes a woman in Argentinean society had only one tool—sex—and Eva knew how to use it. When she married Juan Perón, she sought to conceal all evidence of her past, and what remains is often mere rumor and gossip.