The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People

by David Wallechinsky

  In 1843 she married George Washington Glover, a hearty building contractor, and they moved to Wilmington, N.C. There, after less than a year of marriage, Glover died of yellow fever, and Mary, pregnant, was forced to move back to her father’s home in New Hampshire. In 1844 she gave birth to a son, George Washington Glover II. Mary did not take well to motherhood, and at the age of 6 George was sent off to Minnesota to live with foster parents. Mary did not see him again for 23 years. (Her father said: “Mary acts like an old ewe that won’t own its lamb.”) In Bow, Mary became a chronic invalid, having to be rocked to sleep in her father’s arms. Her sister Abigail had a huge cradle constructed for her, and neighborhood boys often earned extra money by rocking Mary to sleep.

  In 1862, still suffering from extreme hysteria, Mary visited Phineas P. Quimby, a famous Maine faith healer, and was at least temporarily cured. She was much taken with Quimby’s methods and studied with him for a time. In 1866 she fell on an icy sidewalk and was once again incapacitated. This time, however, she was able to “cure” herself by reading the Bible. Her recovery eventually led to the development of her Christian Science Church. In 1875 she published Science and Health, and through the strength of her personality as much as the merits of her book, she managed to gain adherents throughout New England. By the time of her death at 89, she’d earned more than $400,000 in book royalties and left behind a flourishing church.

  Asa Gilbert Eddy become Mary’s third husband

  SEX LIFE: Her first love came when she was 15. Andrew Gault, her neighborhood swain, was 21. Though Mary went so far as to write him a love poem, the only one she ever wrote, Andrew married someone else. Her marriage to George Washington Glover having ended tragically, she went into a mental and physical tailspin.

  Nine years later she married Dr. Daniel Patterson, an itinerant dentist who had a reputation as a philanderer. He was off on trips much of the time, and Mary spent most of their married life as an invalid. During the Civil War Dr. Patterson joined the Union Army, was captured by the Confederates, and passed most of the war in prison. Shortly after returning to his wife, Patterson left home for good in 1866, and Mary, now deeply involved in her mental healing, took on several protégés, including young Richard Kennedy, with whom she set up a profitable “healing” business. She also took on the writing of her book, Science and Health, and finished the first draft in 1870. In 1873 she finally divorced Patterson on grounds of desertion, though she later insisted that it was because of adultery. Patterson sent Mary an allowance of $200 a year. In 1896 he died in a Maine poorhouse.

  In 1877 Mary was wedded to Asa Gilbert Eddy, a sewing-machine salesman who became the first person to announce publicly that he was a Christian Scientist. On their marriage certificate, the 56-year-old Mrs. Eddy gave her age as 40. The presence of a new husband seemed to aggravate Mary’s various illnesses. More and more often she found Eddy irritating. Said biographer Dakin: “He was constant in his efforts to please her and to anticipate her whims; but she showed an increasing annoyance at his slowness, his round awkwardness, and his rather rustic manners and appearance.” She did not have to put up with him too long. In 1882 Eddy died of organic heart disease.

  But Mary had become used to having a man nearby, and the same year as Eddy’s death a young machinist named Calvin Frye entered her life. He served as her steward, secretary, bookkeeper, and footman until her death. In 1888 she met Dr. Ebenezer Johnson Foster, a homeopathic physician, and adopted him as her son. In Mary’s later years, all the men close to her seemed to have one thing in common: They were inferior to her and she could easily manipulate them. When she couldn’t, she got rid of them by accusing them of being “mesmerists.”

  QUIRKS: She believed fervently in something she called “malicious animal magnetism” (M.A.M.), which she thought her enemies were using to destroy her. (When her last husband, Asa Gilbert Eddy, died, she insisted that the cause was arsenic poisoning at the hands of the “mesmerists,” by the use of M.A.M.) In order to protect herself, she created a select bodyguard of “watchers” to ward off these attacks of mental mesmerism. As Mrs. Eddy’s stature in the community grew, she found it necessary to institute numerous lawsuits (all of which were thrown out of court) against her enemies and their use of M.A.M. In fact, one of the reasons she took on Calvin Frye was his supposed efficacy as an “antimesmerist.”

  Eventually Mrs. Eddy began to think herself infallible and became extremely autocratic in her rule. She preferred that her followers call her “Mother,” and she wrote memos about controlling the weather through mental processes. Continuing to suffer from bouts of hysteria, she took morphine to ease her physical pain. She advised complete celibacy as the only true spiritual state.

  HER THOUGHTS: About marriage she said, “it is often convenient, sometimes pleasant, and occasionally a love affair. Marriage is susceptible of many definitions. It sometimes presents the most wretched condition of human existence.” Her last written words were “God is my life.”

  —C.H.S.

  Tempted By The Devil

  MARTIN LUTHER (Nov. 10, 1483-Feb. 18, 1546)

  HIS FAME: A strong-willed monk, Luther challenged the Roman Catholic Church and inaugurated the 16th-century Protestant Reformation. Following his excommunication, Luther startled theologians by marrying a nun and dedicating his life to the establishment of a religious movement that took a more personal approach to presenting the gospel. Lutheran churches still flourish, using as their foundation the precepts the founder originally laid down in the 100 volumes he wrote.

  HIS PERSON: Dominated by autocratic parents, Luther was often beaten by his father, a copper miner. As a result Luther suffered through a sickly and sad childhood. While growing up, he joined his impoverished family members as they slept together naked—thus providing the impressionable youngster an opportunity to witness sexual acts.

  Although he found school boring, Luther readily submitted to his father’s suggestion that he enter law school. However, he quickly abandoned his legal education and entered an Augustinian monastery. Ordained in 1507, his order sent him to the University of Wittenberg, where, in 1512, he received the degree of Doctor of Theology.

  Luther gradually developed hostilities toward the Church. On Oct. 31, 1517, he posted on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg his scandalous 95 Theses. In the theses, Luther denounced the church practice of selling indulgences. (An indulgence was sold to a sinner by the Church to lessen the punishment for a sin.)

  Labeled a “drunken German” by Pope Leo X, Luther appeared before an ecclesiastical court and shocked the assembled clergymen by accusing the pope of being “no better than any other stinking sinner.” Luther was excommunicated and faced probable execution, but he escaped and was harbored by German knights who supported his cause. He resurfaced as a folk hero a year later and became the acknowledged leader of the Reformation.

  Throughout his life Luther suffered from indigestion, constipation, kidney stones, and hemorrhoids, but his painful ailments didn’t slow his crusade to reform the Catholic Church. He was supported by a vociferous following, and his profound religious impact was still evident even after his death.

  SEX LIFE: As spiritual head of a new church that celebrated but two sacraments—baptism and communion—Luther advocated the elimination of clerical celibacy. He believed sex was not sinful, and insisted intercourse was as necessary as eating and drinking.

  Luther supported wedlock for the clergy, and he practiced what he preached. Shortly after severing ties with the Catholic Church, he established an underground railroad to help nuns escape their cloisters. One of them, Katharina von Bora, became his wife after another of the other nuns he had aided rejected his offer of marriage. Luther married the reddish-haired runaway nun to spite the pope, to avenge his hatred for the devil, and to please his father, who was concerned that the family name would die out. The excommunicated monk insisted nothing could cure his lust, not even marriage. Luther learned to live with this lust, and apparent
ly he was never unfaithful to Katharina. Reflecting on his marriage, he once said: “Man has strange thoughts the first year of marriage. When sitting at the table he thinks, ‘Before I was alone; now there are two.’ Or in bed, when he wakes up, he sees a pair of pigtails lying beside him which he hadn’t seen there before.”

  Prior to marrying Katharina, Luther spoke openly of his “temptations of the flesh” and said that he and many of his fellow monks at the Augustinian monastery in Erfurt, Germany, had experienced “nocturnal pollutions.” Luther frequently waited more than a year to change his bed sheets, permitting them to become saturated with the foul smell of sweat, and after his marriage he often touched “specified parts” of his wife’s body while being tempted by the devil. The devil lost his greatest battles “right in bed, next to Katie.”

  Throughout his life Luther staged a haunting personal battle with Satan, who manifested himself in a variety of disguises. Luther was known to cry out to the devil, “I have shit in the pants, and you can hang them around your neck and wipe your mouth with it,” and he boasted he could drive away the evil spirit “with a single fart.” He had an intimate relationship with his bowel movements and regularly wrote home giving a box score of his defecations.

  Although he believed women were emotionally weaker than men, and craved sex more intensely then their male counterparts, Luther confessed in a 1519 sermon that his own sexual desires were overpowering. He considered sex a natural function ordained by God and therefore supported the idea that an impotent man should supply a sexual partner for his wife.

  Luther and his wife had six children of their own and raised 11 orphans as well. Their marriage lasted 21 years, from 1525 until Luther died of a stroke in 1546. Despite his religious radicalism, Luther wasn’t ready for a domestic reformation. He believed the man was to rule his wife, and she was to give him not only love but also honor and obedience. In Luther’s eyes women were meant to stay at home. “The way they were created indicates this, for they have broad hips and a wide fundament to sit upon.” He preferred bigamy to divorce and thought that if a married man needed another female companion to satisfy his sexual needs, he should feel free to take a second woman as a mistress. History does not record Katharina’s position on this patriarchal philosophy, but she may have deferred to it to preserve domestic harmony.

  —A.K.

  The Lord’s Ringmaster

  AIMEE SEMPLE McPHERSON (Oct. 9, 1890-Sept. 27, 1944)

  HER FAME: As founder of the International Church of the Four-Square Gospel, “Sister” Aimee was the spiritual leader of thousands and one of the foremost big-money evangelists of the early 20th century.

  HER PERSON: Aimee Elizabeth Kennedy spent her childhood near the rural hamlet of Ingersoll in Ontario, Canada, in an atmosphere of religious fervor. Her father was a Methodist farmer, her mother a Salvation Army zealot who consecrated Aimee’s life to the Lord’s service a few weeks after she was born. As a teenager, Aimee shocked her pious parents with her desire to become an actress. She eventually managed to satisfy all concerned by combining religion and show business in a successful, money-making formula that is still widely emulated.

  Aimee first hit the revival circuit with a fiery Pentecostal preacher named Robert Semple, whom she married at age 17. Semple died of typhoid fever in Hong Kong, where the young couple had gone to set up a mission. The 19-year-old widow returned home with her infant daughter, Roberta, and shortly thereafter married Harold McPherson, a grocery clerk. After the birth of a son, Rolf, Aimee coaxed her reluctant husband into accompanying her and the children on the hallelujah trail. But McPherson quickly became disgusted with life under Aimee’s revival tent and ordered his wife to settle down. In response, she cut loose from him and continued her wanderings. He divorced her in 1921 for desertion.

  In 1918 Aimee set up her headquarters in Los Angeles, then as now a hotbed of religious cults, She began to receive invaluable newspaper publicity for her faith-healing services and quickly accumulated a large following. An attractive, dynamic woman, she was widely criticized for her Paris gowns, makeup, and tinted blond hair. Her massive concrete church, called the Angelus Temple, was famous for its theatrical religious spectacles. On one occasion Sister Aimee donned a policeman’s uniform and rode a motorcycle down the center aisle to introduce a sermon on the consequences of breaking God’s law.

  During the 1930s her Four-Square Church was the center of a series of internecine intrigues and lawsuits. In a celebrated fight with her mother, Aimee broke the old woman’s nose. After a third unhappy marriage, Aimee began to shy away from publicity. Her death from an overdose of barbiturates in an Oakland, Calif., hotel room was ruled an accident.

  SEX LIFE: Aimee used to declare that her ideal man would be 6 ft. tall, have wavy hair, and play the trombone. In fact, her men adhered to no such specifications. Kenneth Ormiston, a radio engineer for her church station, was tall and slender, but he had a receding hairline and bat ears. If he played the trombone, he kept it to himself. Ormiston was already married. In addition, he was an agnostic who refused to treat Sister Aimee with the respect she was accustomed to receiving, and this she found attractive.

  On May 18, 1926, the superstar evangelist was reported missing while swimming in the ocean off Venice, Calif. For days her followers searched for her body, and two of the faithful died during the search. Five weeks later Aimee turned up in Agua Prieta, a town near the Mexico-Arizona border, and she spun a fantastic tale of having been kidnapped and held captive in Mexico. Her clean clothes and fresh appearance gave little credence to her story, and a county grand jury decided to investigate. It was revealed that during the time Aimee claimed she was held by hoodlums in a shack in the Sonora Desert, she was actually enjoying an idyllic month with Ormiston in a rented cottage in Carmel, Calif. Aimee was forced to sever her relationship with Ormiston to preserve her career.

  By her own admission, she was often lonely, and the tenets of her church forbade a divorced person to remarry while an ex-spouse was still living. Nevertheless, Aimee eloped in 1931 with 30-year-old David Hutton, Jr., a 250-lb. baritone. They met when he sang the role of Pharaoh in one of Aimee’s biblical stage productions. The couple had been married for just two days when Hutton was named as defendant in a $200,000 breach-of-promise suit, initiated by a woman who worked in a massage parlor. The plaintiff was awarded damages of $5,000, and when Aimee heard the news she pitched forward in a faint, fracturing her skull. After her recovery, she left on a European tour without Hutton. He divorced her during her absence, and for a time eked out a living as a nightclub singer billed as “Aimee’s man.”

  She indulged herself in discreet affairs in a special, out-of-the-way apartment in Los Angeles. One of these was with a Hearst reporter she had hired to ghost-write her autobiography. Another was with a rising young comic named Milton Berle. He remembers her as a worldly and passionate woman who charmed him into her apartment and made love with him in front of a homemade altar—candles, crucifix, Calvary scene, and all.

  In 1936 the Los Angeles Times reported that unknown persons were demanding money to refrain from releasing nude photographs of the evangelist, but the pictures never surfaced. Still, she was often a target for innuendo and obscene phone calls. Like it or not, Aimee had become a sex symbol, “the evangelist with pulchritude,” as one reporter called her.

  HER THOUGHTS: “I have never yielded one inch to a man … I have beaten the men at their own game. Who ever heard of a woman preacher, and a successful one at that?”

  —M.J.T.

  The Lustful Monk

  GRIGORI RASPUTIN (1871?-Dec. 30, 1916)

  HIS FAME: Born a rustic Siberian peasant, Rasputin had a combination of charisma, keen opportunism, and sexual prowess that helped him rise from the status of an unwashed back-country healer and mystic to a position of power and influence with the ruling families of prerevolutionary Russia.

  HIS PERSON: Rasputin was born in the village of Pokrovskoye, the third and last child of Efim Ak
ovlevich Rasputin, a farmer, and Anna Egorovna, who may have been a Mongol from Tobolsk. As a young man, Grigori gave every appearance of growing up to be a peasant farmer, with a farmer’s appetite for work, hard drinking, and loose women. At 20 he married a local girl, Praskovia Feodorovna Dubrovina, and fathered four children, three of whom lived to adulthood. Around 1900 he had joined a heretical religious sect known as the Khlisti. These flagellants believed that man must sin first in order to be redeemed later, so they practiced an incredible variety of bizarre sexual customs and rites. Pushed out of his native village for these practices, Rasputin wandered through rural Russia, performing cures and initiating hordes of women into the rituals of the flagellants. By 1905 he had settled in the capital, St. Petersburg, where tales of his “miraculous” healing powers brought about an audience with Czar Nicholas and Czarina Alexandra. The imperial couple had a son, Alexis, who was a hemophiliac, and Rasputin’s apparently genuine ability to ease the boy’s suffering won him immense favor, especially with Alexandra. Rasputin used the czarina’s protection to build his own influence, and at the same time scandalized St. Petersburg with his wild sexual antics. In 1916 a conspiracy of conservative noblemen assassinated him. After drinking poisoned wine, and being shot and beaten, Rasputin was tied up and thrown into the icy Neva River, where he finally died from drowning.