The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People

by David Wallechinsky

  Rasputin with devoted followers

  SEX LIFE: Rasputin was undoubtedly one of the most profligate sexual adventurers in history. He seems to have been born with an overabundance of natural lust, a lust which, according to his daughter Maria, seemed to “radiate” from his 13-in. penis. Even as a young boy his magnificent phallus was the delight of all the village girls, who observed him swimming in the nude—as they were—in a local pond. But his real initiation into the world of sex came at the hands of Irina Danilova Kubasova, the young and beautiful wife of a Russian general. She enlisted the help of six of her maids in a mass seduction of the 16-year-old Rasputin. With suggestive moves, Irina lured him into a bedroom. When he stripped and followed her to the bed, the maids suddenly leaped out of hiding, dousing him with cold water and grabbing his penis. Following this episode, he sported with prostitutes in his native village, even after his marriage to Praskovia Feodorovna. A sexual frolic with three Siberian peasant girls whom he chanced on while swimming in a lake led Rasputin to a religious revelation of sorts, and he soon joined the Khlisti, who not only allowed but actively encouraged the indulgence of the flesh. Thus converted, Rasputin embarked on a journey through Russia, during which he gathered women “about him through the magnetism of his animal attraction,” celebrating his peculiar rites. These included enormous bacchanalian orgies, complete with partner-swapping “in any convenient place, the woods, a barn, or the cottage of one of his converts.” His doctrine of redemption through sexual release allowed a multitude of guilt-ridden women to enjoy themselves sexually for the first time, despite the grubby, slovenly appearance of the “holy satyr.” As biographer Robert Massie noted, “making love to the unwashed peasant with his dirty beard and filthy hands was a new and thrilling sensation.” Even the sophisticated women of St. Petersburg fell under Rasputin’s sexy sway. He set up shop in an apartment, and the ladies gathered about his dining room table to wait for an invitation to his bedroom, which he called the “holy of holies.” So fashionable did his attentions become that the husbands of his conquests sometimes bragged to one another that their wives had “belonged” to the incredible Rasputin; one of his steady customers, an opera singer, often telephoned her mentor for no other reason than to sing him his favorite songs. Typically, he could be found in his dining room, surrounded by lovely “disciples,” sometimes sitting with one of them on his lap, stroking her hair and whispering softly of the “mysterious resurrection.” He would begin to sing, and eventually the ladies would join in. Soon the singing would erupt into wild dancing, which itself often led to passionate swoonings and trips to the “holy of holies.” At one of his sessions in St. Petersburg, Rasputin abruptly launched into a graphic description of the sex life of horses. He then roughly seized one of his distinguished guests and said, “Come, my lovely mare.”

  Even Rasputin’s death had sexual overtones. Described by biographer Patte Barham, in collaboration with Rasputin’s daughter Maria, the mystic’s murder was plotted by men jealous of his power. His assassins invited him to a midnight repast and fed him poisoned cakes and wine. One of the murderers, Felix Yussupov, was a prince, reputedly with homosexual tendencies, who had been rebuffed several times for his advances to the mystic. When Rasputin grew dazed from the poison, Yussupov sexually used him and then shot him four times. Rasputin fell, still alive, and another attacker pulled out a knife and “castrated Grigori Rasputin, flinging the severed penis across the room.” A servant recovered the penis and turned it over to a maid, who, at last account, was living in Paris in 1968. Inside a polished wooden box she preserved the organ which looked “like a blackened, overripe banana, about a foot long.”

  SEX PARTNERS: Rasputin’s willing sex partners—often anonymous—constituted a large tribe. He had probably been enjoying himself with the village girls long before Irina Danilova came on the scene. Dunia Bekyeshova, who at 14 was one of the girls who helped Irina seduce Rasputin, later became a servant of the priest’s family and his lifelong mistress. Another of the many conquests noted by Rasputin’s daughter was Olga Vladimirovna Lokhtina, the wife of a minor nobleman. The list goes on and on, including actresses, military wives, and—when no one else was available to quell his mighty lust—chambermaids and prostitutes. But the most famous of Rasputin’s ladies—the czarina herself—was probably never a conquest, despite her flowery letters to the priest in which she vowed to “kiss your hands and lean my head on your blessed shoulder.” Certainly the most patient of all his women was his wife, Praskovia, who suffered his lifelong infidelities without complaint, shrugging them off by saying tolerantly: “He has enough for all.”

  HIS THOUGHTS: “So long as you bear sin secretly and within you, and fearfully cover it up with fasting, prayer, and eternal discussion of the Scriptures, so long will you remain hypocrites and good-for-nothings.”

  —W.L.

  The Passionate Philosopher

  PAUL TILLICH (Aug. 20, 1886-Oct. 22, 1965)

  HIS FAME: An eminent 20th-century Protestant theologian and existential philosopher, Paul Tillich was a central figure in the intellectual life of Europe and America. The Courage to Be (1952) and Dynamics of Faith (1957) remain his most widely read works.

  HIS PERSON: Tillich’s involvement with Protestantism began in the rustic town of Bad Schönfliess, Germany, where his father was a Lutheran minister. As a chaplain and gravedigger during WWI and a socialist professor during the Marxist revolution which followed, Tillich never lost his faith in man’s “religious center.” Out of those shattering times emerged his fundamental “Protestant principle,” the idea that freedom and faith will resolve the conflict between personal needs and universal realities.

  Tillich at age 33

  After the war, a love triangle involving his first wife, Margarethe Wever, and his best friend, Carl Richard Wegener, led to a divorce. In 1921 Tillich fell in love with Hannah Werner, an art teacher whom he met at a masked ball Ten years younger than he and unconventional in outlook, Hannah was engaged to Albert Gottschow, also an art teacher. She fell in love with Tillich but married Albert anyway, because she considered him such an affectionate lover. Hannah continued to see Tillich. When she became pregnant by Albert, she decided sex was not enough; she would leave him for someone who could inspire her intellectually. She became Tillich’s wife in 1924.

  During the next eight years Tillich, happily but turbulently married, dedicated himself to professorships at important German universities, and to lecturing and publishing over 100 articles. Outspokenly critical of Hitler’s rise to power, Tillich was dismissed from the University of Frankfurt and exiled by the Nazi government in 1933—a deportation he considered an honor. In the same year, Tillich and his wife immigrated to New York City, where Reinhold Niebuhr had secured him a post at Union Theological Seminary.

  Besides holding subsequent teaching positions at the University of Chicago and at Harvard, he published many popular and influential books. In 1940 he and Hannah became American citizens. The third volume of his magnum opus, Systematic Theology, was published in 1963, bringing him recognition as a world-renowned philosopher. A paradoxical and complex man, Tillich was not ultimately freed by his faith or his tragic burden of guilt. He died in Chicago of a heart attack at the age of 79.

  SEX LIFE: While a seminary student in Germany, Tillich had a priggish attitude toward sex. His group of friends took a vow of chastity, which Tillich, an ordained minister, kept with difficulty until his marriage at 28. His first wife hurt him by scoffing at his belief in monogamy and his wish to be faithful to her. This led to her affair with Wegener and the divorce. His wife’s desertion inspired him to plunge into a bohemian life in Berlin, seemingly bent on making up for lost time. He too began to consider monogamy unrealistic and unnatural. In his second marriage, he insisted on the freedom to be open to all experience. Possessive, jealous, and spiteful, Hannah begrudgingly accepted her husband’s need for other women but sought equality in her own series of extramarital affairs.

  Hannah
was the great love of Tillich’s life; he needed her for stability and order. But he could not live without his passionate relationships with other women, believing that his work would suffer without the excitement and stimulation of new sexual encounters. Tillich had a genius for friendships with women and a healthy appetite for play. He cast an erotic spell. Hannah liked to say she had turned him into a “boy Eros.” Wherever he lectured in Germany and the U.S., women swarmed around him. Some wrote him poetry, many became his lovers. Tillich also enjoyed good pornography, which he felt venerated the female body and the phallus. Both lusty and reverent in regard to lovemaking, with women he was able to achieve a spiritual transformation, a union with the divine. “Women are closer to God,” he once said.

  In the 1920s, Tillich’s “erotic solution” became a moral imperative. Having already experienced one tragic love triangle, he was determined to avoid jealousy and guilt in his second marriage. He accepted Hannah’s lovers and expected her to extend him the same courtesy. Since her schoolgirl days, Hannah had formed erotic alliances with men and women alike. She was introduced to lesbian love at 15 by a young woman named Annie, who was so seductive that for years afterward Hannah sought the charms of women. Once Tillich took a lesbian friend of Hannah’s to bed while Hannah tried to enjoy her lover Heinrich in the next room. The situation was painful for Hannah, however, and she brought it to a halt. On another occasion, Tillich necked with a woman in full view of his wife. As he grew older he became more reliant on Hannah, until their interdependence finally superseded every conflict and bound them closely together.

  Self-doubt and inner conflict persisted, however, until Tillich’s dying day. Once he admitted to a friend that he was a great sinner. When asked why, he said, “Because I love women, drinking, and dancing.” To all who knew him, Paul Tillich remained paradoxically Christian and pagan.

  QUIRKS: Tillich was aroused by women’s feet. He himself traced this fetish to one of his most erotic childhood memories: the sight of a friend of his mother’s walking barefoot on the beach. Hannah wrote of a walk she once took with her future husband in the woods: “When I took off my shoes, Paulus became ecstatic about my feet. In later years I often said that if I hadn’t walked barefoot with him that day, we would never have married.”

  —A.S.M.

  The Polygamous Preacher

  BRIGHAM YOUNG (June 1, 1801-Aug. 29, 1877)

  HIS FAME: Quickly taking command as the second president of the Mormon Church upon the death of Joseph Smith, Young held the post for 33 years. He was instrumental in leading the church to Utah, where it established enduring roots, and in making polygamy an official Mormon doctrine.

  HIS PERSON: Born into a puritan New England household, Young spent an impoverished childhood, which instilled in him a respect for physical labor—he prided himself on his skills as a carpenter and painter—and an austere morality, which his father reinforced with whip-pings whenever the motherless boy (Abigail Young had died when Brigham was 14) broke even minor rules. A self-taught reader (by age 16 he had attended school only 11 days), Young discovered the Book of Mormon in 1830 and soon embraced the religion founded by Joseph Smith. He was baptized in 1832, and, once commissioned to preach, he zealously fulfilled his missionary assignments as he rapidly climbed in the church’s hierarchy.

  Young with Margaret Pierce, wife # 17

  When anti-Mormon feelings culminated in the 1844 murder of Smith in an Illinois jail, Young succeeded him as president, a position he held until his own death from natural causes. His authority soon pervaded all aspects of life in the flourishing Mormon communities and industries he helped found in the Utah desert to which he and his followers had fled. A strict disciplinarian, Young unsparingly wielded his powers; dissidents often found themselves dispatched on far-flung “missions” to convert the unfaithful. Only once was his will widely ignored, when Mormon women were as one in opposing his proposal that they dress in a “Deseret costume” of his own design (an ungainly ensemble that united an 8-in.-high hat, a baggy calf-length skirt over trousers, and an antelope-skin jacket). But that was one of the rare times women—or indeed, any Mormons—disobeyed the “Lion of the Lord.”

  SEX LIFE: Much of the Mormon Church’s troubles in Illinois and points east stemmed from polygamy, a principle Joseph Smith claimed was “revealed” to him as a divine truth. Young insisted that, upon learning “plural” marriages were necessary for salvation, “it was the first time in my life that I had desired the grave … knowing the toil and labor that my body would have to undergo.” Nonetheless, it was Young himself who in 1852 officially incorporated polygamy into the church’s canon—a move that led some members to resign, since the Book of Mormon itself forbids plural marriages. And it was also Young who most fervently practiced what he preached. No Mormon had more wives than Young, a man who wed so frequently that a precise accounting does not exist. Conservative counts give him 19 wives, possibly 27. The Mormon Genealogical Society credits him with 53 wives. Others peg the total at 70 or higher. No matter the precise count, Young indisputably and enthusiastically fulfilled his “duty” to marry often.

  Nor had Young waited until 1852 to begin. His first wife, whom he married when he was 23, died soon after the pair joined the church. Two years later, in 1834, Young wed again, and then waited only until 1842 to take his initial “plural” wife. By the time he issued his official blessing of polygamy in 1852, Young had wed at least 22 times. Many of the older women were not his mates; he merely wanted to give them his name and financial support.

  Was polygamy simply a tool to satisfy male lust? This was what one of Young’s daughters-in-law suggested when she said, “If Salt Lake City were roofed over, it would be the biggest whorehouse in the world.” But lust had nothing to do with it in Young’s eyes. “There are probably few men in the world who care about the private society of women less than I do.” Polygamy, he proclaimed, was a divinely sanctioned way to enhance the church’s population and to eliminate prostitution, spinsterhood, and adultery. But when a pretty girl caught Brigham Young’s eye, he was quick to invoke his orthodoxy. “You must be my wife,” he told one. “You cannot be saved by anyone else…. If you refuse, you will be destroyed, both body and soul.” Few women resisted the potent advances of the barrel-chested (44 in. around), 5-ft. 10-in., blue-eyed, robust Young. Only one, the beautiful actress Julia Dean Hayne, whom he unembarrassedly pursued, is known to have successfully spurned him. But, even with Hayne, Young had the last word. After the death of this woman, in whose honor he had named an ornate sleigh, he had a “proxy” marriage performed so that they could be together eternally in heaven. But Young also had no aversion to fleeting temporal weddings; while staying with the Sioux in 1847, for instance, he happily accepted the company of two young squaws, who, at least for the length of his encampment, were married to him.

  His other marriages proved more lasting. One home held most of Brigham Young’s wives. This was the Lion House (named after the reclining stone lion set over the entrance), located in a central block of Salt Lake City. No more than 12 of Young’s wives ever slept in the Lion House at the same time. A New England-style structure, it was connected by a corridor to the adjacent Colonial abode known as Bee Hive House. However, most of Young’s wives had their own private, monogamous-type residences scattered throughout the city.

  The Lion House was the heart of Brigham Young’s harem. The second floor was sectioned into a central parlor for prayers and entertainment and a series of bedroom suites for wives with children. The third floor contained 20 smaller bedrooms for the childless wives and older children. When Young decided upon a bed partner for the night, he made a chalk mark on the selected wife’s door. He fortified himself for each amorous visit by eating large numbers of eggs, which he believed enhanced virility. Later, he would quietly go down the row of doors, find the one with the chalk mark, and slip inside. Upon completing his husbandly duties, Young invariably returned to his own bedroom for a solitary night’s sleep.
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br />   His virility was never in doubt. He fathered 56 children. He had his first child, a daughter, when he was 24, and his last, also a daughter, when he was 69. In a single month of his 62nd year, three of his wives gave birth to children. He had long sexual relationships with a number of his wives. Lucy Decker, the third wife, had her first child by Brigham in 1845 and her seventh by him 15 years later. Clara Decker, the sixth wife, had her first child by him in 1849 and her fifth child by him 12 years later. Emily Dow Patridge, the eighth wife, had her first child by him in 1845 and her seventh child by him 17 years later. Lucy Bigelow, the 22nd wife, had her first child by him in 1852 and her third child by him 11 years later.

  SEX PARTNERS: “I love my wives … but to make a queen of one and peasants of the rest I have no such disposition,” Young claimed. But many of his wives (along with other Mormon women) “whined” about his lack of attention, and Young responded by offering to divorce any of them that so wished. None did at that time. Certainly, however, Young had his favorites, and for nearly two decades Emmeline Free was his chief lover. They wed when she was 19 (and he 44), and over the years Emmeline bore him 10 children. She was, the other wives whispered, awarded the best quarters—a room that featured a private stairway Young could secretly use for his frequent visits.