The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People

by David Wallechinsky

  As a rule, Ninon retained a “favorite” for a few months at the most. The Marquis de Villarceaux was an exception; she lived at his country estate for three years and once spent eight days in bed with him, allegedly to speed his recovery from a long illness. After she had broken off the affair, she recommended Villarceaux to a friend, Madame Scarron (later Madame de Maintenon, wife and mistress to Louis XIV), who was greatly in need of sexual fulfillment. The woman’s marriage to writer Paul Scarron, another friend of Ninon’s, was clouded by her overpowering inhibitions and her husband’s progressive paralysis. Ninon came to the woman’s rescue with the right man at the right time. It was not the first time she had set up a female friend with an ex-lover. She routinely advised Madame de la Suze on the sexual expertise of various men, and Ninon’s evaluations were always highly accurate.

  Two men who ranked low on Ninon’s list of competent lovers were soldiers, the Comte de Navailles and the Duc d’Enghien. Navailles fell asleep while she was preparing for bed, so she donned his uniform and crawled under the covers with him. Navailles awakened with a start, and what followed is not known. What is certain, however, is the fact that Ninon never again took a blond man as a lover. Enghien managed to stay awake, but in spite of his reputation as a formidable warrior, he failed her on the bedroom battlefield. Afterwards, she quoted to him a classical maxim: “A hairy man is either passionate or strong.” Then she added, “You must be very strong.”

  The Comte de Sévigné likewise rated poorly in Ninon’s estimation. She deliberately seduced him in order to aggravate his lover, an actress of whom Ninon was jealous. But the attraction was purely political, for she found the count to be “a man impossible to define … a soul of boiled beef, a body of damp paper, with a heart like a pumpkin fricasseed in snow.” Her victory won, she quickly dumped him.

  A persistent but probably apocryphal story has it that a tragic incident occurred to Ninon when she was in her 60s, after she had retired from the courtesan life. She still received a few young men, the sons of close friends, and educated them in gentlemanly virtues. One of them, the son of Monsieur de Gersay, fell in love with Ninon. She had the best of reasons for discouraging his attentions; he was in fact her son. The boy was unaware of his true parentage, because Ninon had insisted that De Gersay keep it a secret. She tried to thwart the young man’s attentions by pleading advanced age. She called his passion for her “ridiculous” and sent him away. But she soon called him back, having decided to reveal the true nature of their relationship. Before she could speak, though, he began again to profess his love. Ninon angrily protested, “This dreadful love cannot go on. Do you realize who you are and who I am?” She then told him. Taken aback, he repeated the word mother, went out into Ninon’s garden, and fell on his sword, killing himself.

  —M.J.T.

  “The Beautiful Little Thing”

  VIRGINIA OLDOINI, COUNTESS DI CASTIGLIONE (Mar. 22, 1837-Nov. 28, 1899)

  HER FAME: Regarded in the courts of Turin and Paris, and in London society, as the most beautiful woman of her time, the countess was a secret agent in France representing those who fought for the unification of Italy.

  HER PERSON: Born in Florence, Italy, “Nicchia” Oldoini was the product of a noble but disinterested father and an ailing mother. She was raised amid wealth and luxury in a Florentine palace by her grandfather, a renowned jurist and scholar named Lamporecchi. As Nicchia matured, it became evident to all eyes that she had the looks of a goddess. At 18 she was chosen by her cousin, Premier Camillo Benso di Cavour, and King Victor Emmanuel II, of Sardinia, to represent their cause in France. Their cause was to bring together the small states of Italy into one nation. But they could not do it alone. Austria controlled northern Italy. King Victor Emmanuel II and Cavour needed the help of France. And to obtain this help they sent the Countess di Castiglione to seduce Napoleon III, the emperor of France.

  The countess fulfilled her mission. Her dazzling beauty made her the sensation of Paris. She was partially responsible for encouraging Napoleon’s army to go to war against the Austrians in Italy. By 1861, with the help of Giuseppe Garibaldi, Italy was one nation and Victor Emmanuel II was its king.

  SEX LIFE: The young Countess di Castiglione was clever and witty, but basically she was cold, arrogant, egocentric, selfish, and spoiled. Despite her endless sexual activity, she did not enjoy sex as a carnal delight. She enjoyed sex as a means of humbling men, using them.

  Few men could resist her breathtaking beauty. She had rich brown hair, slanted blue eyes, parted lips (“like an opening crimson flower”), a dimpled chin, a perfect body (“faultless in its symmetry”). Attending balls at the Empress Eugénie’s prim crinoline court and elsewhere, the countess used her state of undress as a lure. At a ball given by the Count Walewski, France’s new foreign minister, Nicchia entered attired as the Queen of Hearts, a strip of gauze across her breasts with two hearts sewed on to hide her nipples, and a transparent skirt with a heart sewn on to cover her vaginal mound. But her pubic hair could clearly be seen, provoking Empress Eugénie to remark acidly, “Countess, your heart seems a little low.”

  SEX PARTNERS: Nicchia got off to a fast start when she was 16. Her first lover was an Italian naval officer, Marquis Ambrogio Doria. Shortly after, she took his brothers, Andrea and Marcello, to bed. About this time she started a diary, with her sexual activities kept carefully in code: “B—a kiss; BX—beyond a kiss; F—everything!” Her family was worried about F and decided to get her married. Just then an eligible young nobleman, searching for a bride and advised to have a look at Nicchia, showed up. He was Conte Francesco Verasis di Castiglione, an aide to King Victor Emmanuel II. Her family forced her to marry the count in January, 1854. She found him to be a weakling, and told everyone, “I am married to an imbecile.” She slept with him until they had a child, a son named George, and then she refused to share his bed again. Bored, she frittered away the count’s fortune; in fact, she put him 2 million francs in debt. By now, Premier Cavour had discovered that his cousin, the new countess, could be most useful if she were put to seducing Napoleon III. He outlined his scheme to King Victor Emmanuel II. The king had to be convinced of Nicchia’s wonders firsthand. He tried her out in bed and pronounced her satisfactory. Leaving behind her bankrupt husband and infant child, the countess was off to Paris in November, 1855. (She did not see her husband again until 12 years later, when she returned to Italy for the wedding of the king’s son. At the wedding her husband, riding his horse alongside the bridal coach, tumbled off his mount and was crushed to death by the wheels of the carriage.)

  Upon her first arrival in Paris, the countess was 18 years old. Invited to a fancy-dress ball at the Tuileries, she made a memorable entrance. Attired in a low-cut tight gown, she was the center of all attention. The guards, ushers, and servants all fell back to make way for her. Some male guests clambered atop tables for a sight of her. Johann Strauss, conducting a waltz, stopped the music. Emperor Napoleon III, deep in conversation with the British ambassador, abruptly excused himself and asked her for the next dance.

  After that, Louis Napoleon began to woo the countess. He presented her with a house in the Rue de la Pompe. He gave her a 100,000-franc emerald and a 442,000-franc pearl necklace. He visited her house almost nightly. The countess was flirtatious but played hard to get. After months of wooing, Louis Napoleon invited her to Compiègne, his château outside Paris. During a theatrical presentation, one evening, she excused herself to the emperor and empress, pleading a headache. Shortly after, the solicitous emperor visited her room and found her in bed wearing her most fashionable gray batiste and lace nightgown. He undressed and slipped into bed with her. Not long before, the emperor had complained to his physician that sexual intercourse no longer “contributed to his sound sleep.” But that night he slept soundly.

  They made love regularly for over a year. She became known as “the woman with the cunt of imperial gold.” In court circles it was generally believed that she had presented Loui
s Napoleon with a son, who grew up to be the well-known Paris dentist Dr. Hugenschmidt. Gradually, as the affair progressed, the emperor’s ardor cooled. He told one friend, “She talks about herself too much. She has bandied about our relationship. She allows herself to be seen in bed by all and sundry wearing monogrammed underwear that I had sent her.” One night in 1859, an Italian tried to assassinate Louis Napoleon in her bedroom. A bodyguard saved the emperor. Days later, the Countess di Castiglione was deported from France.

  Back in Italy, the countess wrote King Victor Emmanuel II, “If you want me, call me.” The king replied, “I want you.” He set her up as his mistress in the Pitti Palace in Florence and gave her a pension of 12,000 francs a year. After two years, and the intercession of French friends, Louis Napoleon allowed her to return to Paris. While no longer his official mistress, she became what he called one of his “little diversions.” This was not enough for her. She began to entertain many men in her bed. The only qualifications required: a noble birth or wealth. She slept with the French foreign minister, Prince Henri de la Tour d’Auvergne, for four years. But other lovers overlapped. A senior member of the richest family in the world, 70-year-old Baron James de Rothschild, fell in love with her. A lady friend advised her, “Try to keep alive the passion of the old baron, maybe you will profit richly by it. Make available ‘the beautiful little thing.”’ The countess finally had sex with the old baron, and then also made herself available to his three sons. Her most incredible coupling was with the eccentric British millionaire, the fourth Marquis of Hertford. He wrote her: “Give me one night of love, without excluding any erotic refinements, in exchange for a million francs.” The price for a single night of her favors amused the countess. She accepted. She did not know that Hertford was a stallion. Once in her bed, he made love to her nonstop the entire night. After he left, she was a wreck, unable to leave her bed for three days.

  In a letter, Nicchia’s husband had once warned her, “The day will come when your fatal beauty will have disappeared and the flatterers will be rarer.” The countess dreaded that day. At the age of 40 she took a ground-floor apartment in the Place Vendôme, shuttered the windows, covered all mirrors. She admitted no friends, no relatives, dabbled in spiritualism, and taught her pet dogs, Kasino and Sandouga, to waltz. She never went out in daylight, took her dogs walking only at night. She sat alone in her unkempt dark rooms with her memories, deluding herself into believing she was ill and impoverished. She was neither. One night she was discovered dead of cerebral apoplexy, with rats gnawing at her body. At her instructions, she was buried wearing the gray batiste and lace nightgown she had worn at Compiègne the night she gave herself to the emperor, with her two pet dogs stuffed and placed at her feet in the coffin.

  —I.W.

  Royal Favorite

  LA BELLE OTERO (Nov. 4, 1868-Apr. 10, 1965)

  HER FAME: Often called the last of the great courtesans, La Belle Otero (or Caroline Otero) was the professional name of Augustina Otero Iglesias, from Valga, a hamlet in Galician Spain. Officially she was a dancer, singer, and actress in the world’s music halls, but in reality she was mistress to some of the most famous men in the world. During her lifetime she made and lost approximately $25 million.

  HER PERSON: The illiterate daughter of the town prostitute, Otero grew up in poverty without a father. At the age of 11 she was brutally raped by the village shoe-maker, who had become excited by watching her dance. The rape left her with a broken pelvis, permanently unable to bear children. She departed Valga the next year and wandered to Barcelona, realizing, like so many young girls before her, that prostitution was the only way to survive.

  When she was 14, she met a Catalan named Paco Colli, who had been a dancer all his life. He taught Otero the ways of the stage—dancing, singing, acting—and performed as her pimp, since she had to continue sleeping with men in order to support Paco and herself. Paco also took her to the French Riviera, where in 1889 he decided to marry her. She declined his proposal and instead became a music hall star and courtesan until she retired more than 25 years later.

  During her heyday Otero was as famous as any star Hollywood would later produce. Of her American debut on Oct. 1, 1890, the New York Tribune headline declared: OTERO CONQUERS NEW YORK. A reviewer for The New York Times marveled, “She appears to dance all over. Every muscle, from her dainty toes to the crown of her head, is brought into play, and the consequent contortions are wonderful and, at times, startling.” Acton Davies, writing for the New York Sun, dissented, saying, “We have seen Otero sing, we have heard her dance.”

  She was a compulsive gambler and occasionally mixed business with pleasure. An employee at the casino in Monte Carlo maintained that Otero, running low on funds, went to bed at a nearby hotel with 11 men in a 24-hour period. He added that she never spent more than a half hour away from the gaming tables during this marathon. In her lifetime, she lost an estimated $20 million at the casino. Asked what she would have done with that money if she hadn’t been a gambler, Otero replied, “I might have endowed a university for prostitutes. Think of the variety of courses we could have offered.”

  SEX LIFE: People said that she was a nymphomaniac, or that she sought to punish men in retaliation for her childhood rape. In any case, Otero was a strikingly beautiful woman, around 5 ft. 10 in. tall, with measurements of 38- 21-36. Her face was symmetrically oval, her hair black and silky, her teeth pearly white. Her friend, French writer Colette, said that Otero’s breasts “were of curious shape, reminding one of elongated lemons, firm and upturned at the tips.” An anonymous source added that Otero’s breasts “preceded her by a quarter of an hour.” The touch of foul language in her speech titillated her patrons, and she believed in always making a man feel like a king in the bedroom, whether he was royalty or not. During her prime, Otero charged $10,000, or the equivalent in jewelry, for a night of her services.

  SEX PARTNERS: According to Otero’s autobiography, on Nov. 4, 1898, a group of men with whom Otero had been having profitable affairs for several years gathered to give her a birthday party. The guest list was impressive, including King Leopold II of Belgium, Prince Nicholas I of Montenegro, Prince Albert of Monaco, the Grand Duke Nicholas of Russia, and Albert, Prince of Wales, who would become King Edward VII of the United Kingdom.

  Otero made love with Baron Lepic in a hot-air balloon floating 200 ft. over the Aube River near Provins, France. On June 15, 1902, the New York World reported that “the gondola remained high above the earth for more than an hour.” Sixty years later, Otero purred, “It was an experience every woman should enjoy.”

  Otero did not limit herself to royalty. William K. Vanderbilt, of the famous (and rich) American family, offered Otero a yacht and showered her with $250,000 worth of jewels, including a pearl necklace Napoleon III had given the Empress Eugénie.

  Her five-year affair with the Muzaffar-ed-Din, shah of Persia, netted Otero a stream of jewels. “He was a dirty, smelly old man, and very strange in his desires,” she recalled. “He visited me every afternoon at two o’clock and left at five. Ten minutes later one of his servants would be at the door to hand my maid a gold, inlaid cassette, lined with velvet. It contained a single jewel but a very magnificent stone—diamond, ruby, pearl, jade, or emerald, some worth as much as 25,000 francs. I would remove the jewel and return the box.”

  For her part, Otero later wrote that she did not always enjoy sex with her men, but she was unfailingly hospitable. In the 1890s, Prince Albert of Monaco earned low marks because he had trouble getting an erection. After a night of conversation, he finally did, and Otero exaggerated the truth to tell him he was “formidable”—whereupon he “strutted around the room.” The grateful Albert set her up in a choice apartment and gave her more than $300,000 worth of gems. “He was not a very virile man and I don’t think he got his money’s worth,” Otero concluded. “But as long as he didn’t care, neither did I, and he seemed to enjoy taking me where we could be seen together publicly.”

&nb
sp; In 1894 Prince Nicholas of Montenegro (who would become his country’s first and last king) moved into the apartment Albert had given Otero. The tall, slender prince was in his early 50s, and their relationship lasted for several years. After presenting Otero with “a simply gorgeous diamond bracelet and at least five … beautiful watches,” he persuaded her to visit his palace in 1897. Otero later complained, “I saw practically nothing the whole trip … all the prince wanted to do was to make love to me so I obliged.”

  Sixty-year-old King Leopold II of Belgium “was not very generous at the start but I taught him how to give. He was an apt student.” They met in 1894 and were part-time lovers for three or four years. Leopold, said Otero, “gave me my own small villa by the sea” at Ostend, in west Flanders, then an exclusive summer resort.

  One of the richest men in the world, Nicholas II, czar of Russia, had a bad complexion and rarely bathed. “He really stank,” said Otero, and was still shaken from an assassination attempt that had occurred six years earlier. “There were always a half-dozen huge, black-bearded armed guards at our bedroom door, some more at every window, and if there was a rear exit, he’d have half a regiment posted there. It almost felt like I was undressing in an army barracks or a bullfighting arena. If I happened to move a chair suddenly or drop a perfume bottle, Nick would jump out of bed screaming with fright.” But Otero “grew quite fond of him” even though “he had the strangest views about sex.”