The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People

by David Wallechinsky

  But Emmeline’s reign ended soon after 1860 with Young’s first sight of Amelia Folsom, a 22-year-old who stubbornly resisted his advances and announced her love for another man. However, that rival stepped aside when threatened with a lengthy church mission, and Amelia surrendered to Brigham’s wishes. But not fully. Unlike Emmeline, Amelia relished her role as Young’s favorite. When he gave her a sewing machine, she pushed it down the stairs; it was the wrong brand, she huffed. Young bought her the right brand. When he lectured her on her sins, she scoffed, and on one occasion punctuated his sermon by pouring a pitcher of milk and an urn of hot tea on his lap. Never one to tolerate disobedience from anyone, Young nonetheless suffered it from Amelia until his death.

  Troublesome as Amelia proved, it was Ann Eliza (wife number 27 by some counts; 51 by others) who proved the most rebellious. This wife, too, rejected the aging Young’s advances. “I wouldn’t have him if he asked me a thousand times—hateful old thing,” she told friends. But she underestimated Young’s determination; in 1869, a year after the courtship commenced, the 24-year-old bowed to family pressure and married him. But Young got more than he bargained for. Ann Eliza complained about his inattention; castigated him for his frugality (despite his riches, Young doled out slender provisions to his wives); and, in 1873, listing neglect and cruelty among the causes, she escaped Salt Lake City and filed for divorce. Young found himself forced to contest her claim strenuously, for only a year earlier federal charges of polygamy had been dropped because of a technicality. By conceding that Ann Eliza could sue for a divorce, Young would be admitting that he was a polygamist, and the federal government, he was sure, again would pounce on him. After years of bitter legal wrangling, Young won his case. He told the court that he was legally married to Mary Ann Angell (his second wife and his senior living spouse) and that he could not, therefore, have legally married Ann Eliza. But, in splitting this legal hair, Young had in effect repudiated his cherished doctrine of polygamy—a practice that soon after his death was to be formally abandoned by the Mormon Church.

  HIS THOUGHTS: “Some want to marry a woman because she has got property; some want a rich wife; but I never saw the day I would not rather have a poor woman. I never saw the day that I wanted to be henpecked to death, for I should have been if I had married a rich wife.”

  “Make haste and get married. Let me see no boys above 16 and girls above 14 unmarried.”

  —R.M.

  XV

  Heads You Win

  PSYCHOLOGISTS

  The Impotent Educator

  HAVELOCK ELLIS (Feb. 2, 1859-July 8, 1939)

  HIS FAME: Called “the Darwin of sex,” Havelock Ellis was principally known as a sex educator and the author of a seven-volume work issued between 1897 and 1928 entitled Studies in the Psychology of Sex.

  HIS PERSON: The son of a sea captain and a doting mother, Ellis was born in Croydon, Surrey, England. He attended private schools in London. At 16, suffering poor health, he was sent to Australia on his father’s ship. There he worked as a teacher—part of the time in remote areas—for four years, too shy to be effective. Returning to London, he entered St. Thomas’ Hospital at 22 to take up medicine. After graduation, he practiced briefly in the London slums. Because he loved books, he gave up medicine for literary pursuits.

  At 30 he published his first book, The New Spirit. Shortly after, Ellis became interested in sex, then a forbidden subject. Through interviews and research reading, he gathered material on human sexuality and wrote about it. The first volume of his Studies in the Psychology of Sex series was entitled Sexual Inversion and dealt with homosexuality. The book was banned in England for “obscene libel.” Nevertheless, Ellis continued to pour out books about various aspects of human sexuality. Although widely known, he lived close to poverty most of his life. He was 64 when he had his first commercial success with The Dance of Life, an immediate hit in the U.S.

  During his lifetime, Ellis defended the rights of women and homosexuals, and pioneered open discussions on sex. He gave free advice on sex to anyone who wanted it, and he could not understand why Sigmund Freud charged patients for the same help. Ellis was a sweet and humane man, part scientist, part mystic. Birth-control crusader Margaret Sanger found him a “tall angel,” blue-eyed, handsome, with his trademark flowing white beard. He died in Washbrook, Suffolk, of a throat ailment at the age of 80.

  SEX LIFE: Not until he was 25 did Havelock Ellis have any sexual experience with a woman. It came about by accident. He had read a novel, The Story of an African Farm by Ralph Iron, and wrote a fan letter to the author. The author proved to be an attractive, lusty woman named Olive Schreiner, a 29-year-old feminist and well-known novelist. They corresponded and then they met. Olive, who wanted to be dominated, expected a strong man and found in Ellis an awkward and withdrawn intellectual. They became friends, and he gave her his daily journal to read. Going through it, she realized that he was totally inexperienced in sex. Olive, who’d had several affairs with men, decided she could rectify that and eventually marry Ellis. She lured him to the Derbyshire countryside for a weekend. During their first walk together, she put her hand on his crotch to feel his penis. Determined to consummate their love, she lay nude with him on a sofa. He caressed her and kissed her vagina. He could not get an erection and finally suffered premature ejaculation. Time and again they tried, with the same result. “She possessed a powerfully and physically passionate temperament,” Ellis admitted, and he could not match her sex drive. They settled for a close and enduring friendship. She was ever uninhibited with him. Once, in Paris together, observing some bronze vessels in the Louvre, Olive spoke seriously of the handicaps women suffered. “A woman,” she said, “is a ship with two holes in her bottom.” Eventually Olive returned to South Africa, married a farmer-politician, and endured a less than successful marriage.

  Havelock Ellis was 31 when he became involved in his greatest love affair. Edith Lees, a 28-year-old former social worker, was curly-haired, pretty, under 5 ft. tall, and outspoken. Edith was drawn to Ellis upon reading his first book. He in turn liked her brightness and intelligence. When she proposed marriage, he worried about his privacy and his low financial state. Edith promised him privacy and agreed to share all their expenses. (She was running a girls’ school at the time.) They went out for a wedding ring, and she paid for half of it. The marriage took place in December, 1891.

  Edith did not know Ellis was impotent. On their honeymoon in Paris she found out. He did not even attempt to have intercourse with her. While she had told Ellis she’d had affairs with several men, she had not told him she liked women more. Edith mourned the baby she could never have with Ellis and settled for his fondling her in bed, still thinking him “beautiful” and her spiritual lover. She agreed to a marriage of companionship, but not for long. Three months after their wedding, she informed him that she was having a torrid affair with a woman named Claire. Unhappy but tolerant, Ellis interviewed Edith on lesbianism for a book he was writing on homosexuality. After breaking with Claire, Edith had another affair with a fragile painter named Lily. When Lily died, Edith turned her attentions back to her husband.

  Their 25-year marriage was a stormy one. It turned out that Edith was a manic-depressive. When manic, she fixed up and rented cottages, gave lectures as Mrs. Havelock Ellis (her favorite lecture was on Oscar Wilde), wrote books and plays, and founded a film company. When depressed, she sat at her female lovers’ graves, had several nervous breakdowns, and three times tried to commit suicide. When she resumed her lesbian affairs, Ellis continued to love her and resumed his own sexless affairs. He outraged his wife when he fell in love with the 24-year-old daughter of a chemist friend, a woman he referred to as Amy (her real name was Mneme Smith) and continued to be close to until she married another man. He was 57 when he met and became enchanted by Margaret Sanger. This intimate relationship brought Edith back from a lecture tour in the U.S. and gave her one more nervous breakdown. Ellis was constantly attentive to Edith. Her
doctor told him she was on the verge of insanity. In September of 1916 she died in a diabetic coma.

  Shortly afterward, a charming young Frenchwoman, Françoise Cyon, entered Ellis’ life. Françoise wanted to collect her fee for having translated one of Edith’s books into French. Drawn to Ellis’ kind understanding, she returned to him for marital advice. She’d had a child by an earlier lover, and a second son by her husband, Serge Cyon, an insensitive Russian journalist whom she had recently left. During her treatment by Ellis, Françoise fell in love with him. On April 3, 1918, she wrote him, “I am going to write a very difficult letter. Yet it must be written if I want to find peace of mind. The truth is, Havelock Ellis, that I love you.” He tried to warn Françoise of his impotency. He wrote her that he had many dear women friends. “But there is not one to whom I am a real lover…. I feel sure that I am good for you, I am sure that you suit me. But as a lover or husband you would find me very disappointing.” Puzzled, she replied, “I will have nothing but what you offer; it is the very flower of love.”

  On going to bed with him, she learned his problem but was undeterred. They masturbated each other. She lavished love on him unconditionally, treating him as a virile male, a potentially good lover. And miracle of miracles, he responded. Aged 60, he had his first erection with a woman, and then another and another, and found himself enjoying sexual intercourse at last. Their relationship was idyllic, marred by only one bad incident. Ellis had asked her to be friendly with one of his admirers, an urbane minor novelist and advocate of free love named Hugh de Selincourt. While Ellis was out of town, Françoise allowed De Selincourt to seduce her. He was a mighty lover. He hated to wear a contraceptive device and had trained himself to copulate at great length, bringing his women to orgasm without ejaculating himself. Françoise lost herself in pleasure. Then Ellis learned about the affair and was wounded, feeling she had found a younger and better lover. Françoise tried to gloss over the physical aspect of her affair. Ellis answered, “Do you imagine that coitus is unimportant? Olive said to me once that when a man puts his penis into a woman’s vagina it is as if (assuming of course that she responds) he put his finger into her brain, stirred it round and round. Her whole nature is affected.” Françoise pleaded with Ellis, writing him, “You have been the beloved, the lover, the friend most divine. You are still this, will always be.” She gave up De Selincourt and returned to Ellis. She worked as a teacher and at first lived separately with her sons. She wanted to move in with Ellis, but he could not support her. Then, from America, Margaret Sanger offered her a salary as Ellis’ secretary. Françoise, at last able to pay her share of their expenses, joined him for what was left of his life. They had 22 warm years together. Françoise, keeper of the flame, died in 1974.

  QUIRKS: Ellis asked many of his new women friends for photographs of themselves in the nude.

  At the age of 12, while accompanying his mother to the London Zoological Gardens, Ellis saw her pause and urinate on an isolated gravel path. Hearing of this, his favorite sister told him, “She was flirting with you.” Decades later, after lying down fully clothed to pet with Françoise the first time, he followed her into the bathroom to watch her urinate. He enjoyed having Françoise urinate when they went walking in the rain. She termed his interest in urolagnia a “harmless anomaly.”

  —I.W.

  It’s All In Your Head

  SIGMUND FREUD (May 6, 1856-Sept. 23, 1939)

  HIS FAME: The father of psychoanalysis, Freud established new directions for understanding and treating mental illness. His theories concerning the development of personality and the sexual origins of neuroses have been absorbed into our everyday speech in such terms as “Oedipus complex,” “libido,” “repression,” “penis envy,” and “death wish.”

  HIS PERSON: Sigmund Freud was his mother’s firstborn and her favorite of eight children; his father, however, had two sons by a previous marriage. Always an excellent student, Freud attended the University of Vienna. It took him eight years to graduate since he could not settle on one course of scientific study. Ambitious as well as intellectually curious, Freud finally chose medicine because, as a Jew in Vienna, his opportunities in his first career choice—politics—were limited. He was not religious, but he retained strong ties to his heritage and was a lifelong B’nai B’rith member.

  Freud and Martha Bernays in 1885

  His research into the nervous system led to the study of related diseases and their possible cures. He experimented with hypnosis, became enthusiastic about cocaine as a therapeutic substance, and in 1886 established a private practice specializing in nervous disorders. That same year he married Martha Bernays. He was 30.

  In the late 1890s Freud suffered a serious psychoneurosis, precipitated by the agonizing death of his father and his own fading interest in sex after the birth of his last child. In the process of analyzing his disturbing dreams at the time, he began making use of the “talking cure”—psychoanalysis—which had been developed by his teacher and friend Josef Breuer. For the next 40 years Freud lived a life of domestic stability and formidable achievement, gathering around him a circle of disciples, notably Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, Sándor Ferenczi, Helene Deutsch, and Ernest Jones.

  When the Nazis came to power in 1933, they burned Freud’s works as “Jewish pornography,” but not until 1938 did he escape to London. Princess Marie Bonaparte of Greece, a friend and former patient, paid £20,000 ransom to the Third Reich for his safe passage. Freud spent his last year in London, deteriorating from cancer of the jaw and palate, and died there in 1939.

  SEX LIFE: Freud made a career of sifting through the sexual secrets of others, yet he took pains to conceal his own private life. He destroyed many letters; some that survived are in the Library of Congress, unavailable to scholars until the year 2000.

  At 16 his first love, Gisela Flüss, rejected him; he responded by getting a crush on her mother. Until he was 26 he showed no renewed interest in women. In 1882 Freud met Martha Bernays, a slim, pretty 21-year-old girl from a traditional Jewish family. They became engaged and remained so for four years, exchanging hundreds of letters and seldom meeting, although he was a resident at a nearby hospital. Freud was a passionate and jealous suitor in his correspondence. In 1884 he wrote, “Woe to you, my princess, when I come. I will kiss you quite red and feed you till you are plump. And if you are forward you shall see who is the stronger, a gentle little girl who doesn’t eat enough or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body.”

  They finally had enough money to marry in 1886, and eventually settled into the Vienna apartment they would occupy until 1938. Within nine years Martha had six children. In 1895 her sister Minna Bernays came to live with them. Evidently Freud was faithful, but he became a distant husband. He was devoted to his work, and Martha was absorbed by domestic duties deemed proper to a wife and mother. She arranged the entire household for her husband’s convenience, keeping children and servants out of his way, tending to his meals and wardrobe, even putting the toothpaste on his toothbrush. Looking back, Freud admitted that Martha never seemed at ease around him.

  During Freud’s self-analysis he developed dramatic emotional ties to Dr. Wilhelm Fliess, a Berlin ear, nose, and throat specialist. There was a strong attraction between the two men; they wrote constantly and met occasionally for “congresses,” as they termed their out-of-town rendezvous. Freud wrote, “I am looking forward to our congress as to a slaking of hunger and thirst … I live gloomily … until you come and then I pour out all my grumbles to you, kindle my flickering light at your steady flame and feel well again.” Fliess was receptive and caring. He tried to persuade his friend to give up smoking 20 cigars a day. (Freud never analyzed his habit, although he had observed that smoking, drugs, and gambling were substitutes for the “primal addiction”—masturbation.) At one of their congresses Freud fainted, and later remarked about the incident, “There is some piece of unruly homosexual feeling at the root of the matter.” The friendship ended in 1903, largely owing
to Freud’s complicated reaction to Fliess’ theory of a universal bisexual impulse. At first Freud rejected the idea, then claimed it as his own, and planned to write a major book on it, giving Fliess only nominal credit. Freud came to believe in a strong bisexual aspect to every personality and said, “Every sexual act is one between four individuals.”

  It has been speculated that Freud and his sister-in-law Minna were lovers. Indeed, for 42 years Minna’s bedroom was accessible only through that of Sigmund and Martha. Larger and heavier than her sister, Minna was, according to one neighbor, also prettier than Martha. Of the two she was considerably more intellectual, and Freud found her a good conversationalist and a sympathetic ear for his thoughts on psychoanalysis. Minna was known for her pungent wit and strict discipline with the children. Freud once described Minna as being like himself; they were both “wild, passionate people, not so good,” whereas Martha was “completely good.” Freud loved to travel, and when he took his extended summer vacations, Minna often accompanied him. Martha stayed home.

  The main source for the story that Freud actually had a love affair with Minna was Freud’s disciple Carl Jung. Reportedly, Jung said that Minna and Martha had separately approached him about the problem of Freud’s passion for Minna. Jung told an American professor that on one occasion in 1907, when Jung had been Freud’s houseguest in Vienna, Minna came to him and poured out her secret. Said Jung, “From her I learned that Freud was in love with her and that their relationship was indeed very intimate.” Upset, Jung confronted Freud about the matter and suggested that he be analyzed by an outside therapist. Jung offered himself as the analyst. Freud coldly rejected the suggestion.