The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People

by David Wallechinsky

  Thanks to Mom, he did not always have to go out. On several occasions, sexual opportunity knocked on his dressing-room door when his mother brought girls from the audience backstage to meet her talented son. Mom would introduce them and then discreetly slip out of the room, leaving the two young people to the mercy of their hormones. Not a panderer, but a pragmatist, Berle’s mother explained to him, “Who can say what can go wrong if the body doesn’t get what it wants?”

  When Berle went hunting on his own, his taste in women proved to be eclectic. He had a brief affair with Louise Cook, a black belly dancer, and several clandestine encounters with Aimee Semple McPherson, the famous evangelist. He cut a wide swath through show-biz womanhood, dallying with Betty Hutton, Dorothy Kilgallen, Wendy Barrie, and Marilyn Monroe, whom he took to trendy Hollywood hot spots because “it was like taking a hungry kid into a bakery.” Serious romance eluded him until he met an actress he calls “Linda Smith.” To be sure, Berle and Linda had their differences. He was a lifelong teetotaler; she drank heavily (“When I think about Linda today, I see her as a woman with one hand with fingers on it and the other arm ending in a wrist attached to a highball glass.”) Despite their star-crossed relationship, Linda became pregnant with Berle’s baby and he asked her to marry him. She refused, choosing to wed an older man, a producer who could help advance her career. Although the producer was impotent most of the time, Linda successfully convinced him that the baby was indeed his. A boy was born and grew up never knowing that Milton Berle was his real father.

  When Berle finally did marry a show girl named Joyce Matthews in 1941, the solid, happy relationship he had longed for still eluded him. His work dominated their life together, and their marriage was further strained by their fruitless efforts to have a child. They finally adopted a baby girl, Victoria, but their spell of happiness was brief, and they were divorced in 1947. Joyce subsequently attempted to commit suicide with an overdose of sleeping pills. In 1949 they decided to give their union a second chance and renewed their marriage vows. However, it was an ill-fated reconciliation; once again Joyce attempted suicide, and once again they were divorced. Later Joyce was twice wed to showman Billy Rose.

  In 1951 Berle met Ruth Cosgrove, who worked in Sam Goldwyn’s publicity department. Ruth was “a cute brunette with short curly hair and a good figure,” who impressed Berle with her unabashed criticism of his work. They were married in December, 1953. Eight years later they adopted a son, Billy. After years of one-night stands, unrequited loves, and tragic entanglements, Berle had found in Ruth “love to last a lifetime.”

  MEDICAL REPORT: According to Hollywood legend, Milton Berle is the John Dillinger of show business. He tells of an incident that occurred in the Luxor Baths in New York, when a stranger said to him, “Hey, Berle, I hear you got a big one,” and offered to bet $100 that his own organ was larger than the comedian’s. Berle refused the bet, but was goaded by a friend to “just take out enough to win.”

  —M.J.T.

  The Dancing Revolutionary

  ISADORA DUNCAN (May 27, 1878-Sept. 14, 1927)

  HER FAME: Rejecting the rigid disciplines of ballet and other formal dance techniques, Isadora Duncan created her own stage routines. Her graceful, free-flowing movements and imaginative pantomimes, performed to great classical music, helped modern dance gain formal recognition as a new creative art.

  HER PERSON: Isadora’s unique style was inspired by Greek and Italian art and based loosely upon the calisthenics system of François Delsarte, which advocated coordination of voice with body gestures. In April, 1898, after her entire wardrobe was lost in New York City’s disastrous Hotel Windsor fire, Isadora introduced an innovative twist at her next appearance—an improvised costume that left little to the imagination. One newspaper critic described it sarcastically as “a species of surgical bandage of gauze and satin.”

  Undaunted, Isadora sailed for Europe where—in a see-through diaphanous tunic of Liberty silk, adorned with colorful streamers of varying lengths—she became the barefoot dancing darling of the continent. Touring first with the Loie Fuller troupe, she was soon taken on by impresario Alexander Gross and booked for solo appearances in Budapest, Berlin, Vienna, and other major capitals. A shocked but titillated audience arrived en masse to see the nearly nude nymph glide, pose, and leap about the carpeted stage, accompanied by such well-known compositions as Strauss’ “Blue Danube” and Chopin’s “Funeral March.”

  A firm believer in free love, Isadora subsequently jolted her U.S. fans by touring while obviously pregnant with her second child, although she had not bothered to marry the child’s father. She remained the “Pet of Society” for over two decades; however, her personal life dissolved in tragedy in 1913. In a freak accident, her car—momentarily driverless—rolled backward down a slope, drowning her two children and their nurse in the muddy Seine. Professionally, as well as emotionally, Isadora never fully recovered.

  In 1922 her outspoken views on atheism and the Bolshevik Revolution brought further woes. Coming to the U.S. from Moscow with her Russian husband, she infuriated Boston theatergoers by waving a red scarf at them from the stage. In Chicago the tour earned the animosity of evangelist Billy Sunday. Playing upon the “Red Menace” theme, he labeled her “that Bolshevik hussy who doesn’t wear enough clothes to pad a crutch.” In Indianapolis, Ind., the mayor bluntly called Isadora a nude dancer whose appearance might well earn her a trip to jail by paddy wagon.

  Broke and disillusioned, Isadora returned to Europe. She eked out a twilight existence, shuttling between Paris and the Riviera, until a second freak automobile accident occurred in 1927. Getting into a Bugatti, she tossed her trademark scarf about her throat, cheerily calling out, “Farewell, my friends, I am going to glory!” The dangling scarf caught in the spokes of a rear wheel as the car started up, and her neck was instantly snapped.

  SEX LIFE: Isadora kept her virginity until age 25, but quickly made up for lost time. Her favors were dispensed initially to Oscar Beregi, a handsome Hungarian actor then appearing on the Budapest stage as Shakespeare’s Romeo. Mutually smitten at first sight, they galloped off to the downy privacy of a peasant four-poster bed in the Danube countryside. The dark-eyed Magyar’s offstage, all-day marathon left the dancer so exhausted that she admittedly limped around during her Urania Theater recital that night. But the delighted Isadora rapidly booked Beregi again, especially after he promised that she “finally would know what heaven was on earth.”

  In December, 1904, Isadora began a torrid liaison with theatrical designer Gordon Craig, the son of English actress Ellen Terry. For two wild weeks the lovers copulated repeatedly on some old blankets spread over artificial rose petals strewn on the black, waxed floor of Craig’s high-rise studio in Berlin. The nonstop orgy paused only for an occasional meal, ordered “on credit” and delivered while “Topsy”—Craig’s pet name for Isadora—shivered outside on the narrow balcony. Her frantic manager had to cancel her shows while he searched police-station blotters, fearing abduction or worse. Eventually he gave up and published a discreet newspaper notice that “Fräulein Duncan has regrettably been taken seriously ill with tonsillitis.” Nine months later, the “tonsillitis” was named Deirdre, Isadora’s own contribution to the brood of six such free-love productions sired by Craig in his lifetime.

  In 1906 Isadora became the mistress of Paris Singer, one of the 23 children of sewing-machine magnate Isaac Singer. The playboy millionaire gave her seven years of lavish living, along with the chromosomes for her second love child, Patrick. The idyllic affair ended in 1913, when both children died tragically and Isadora fled, first to Italy, then France, where a willing sculptor fathered a third baby. The boy lived only an hour. At the close of WWI, Isadora took on a new lover, pianist-composer Walter Rummel, her “archangel.” He showed great talent, but an aging and jealous Isadora called it quits in Greece when she suspected that his “shining wings” were also being folded about a young dryad in her dance troupe.

  In 1922,
when she was 44, Isadora set aside her aversion to marriage long enough to become the wife of the Russian Revolution’s poet laureate, Sergei Esenin, 17 years her junior. The brief marriage was a disaster. Esenin, half-mad and alcoholic, left a trail of broken liquor bottles and furniture on both sides of the Atlantic. His inebriated scampering in the nude down hotel corridors and distribution of her money and clothes to friends and relatives proved too much for even the liberated Isadora to handle. She coaxed him back to Moscow the next year and quietly went her own way.

  BAREFOOT QUOTATIONS: “Any intelligent woman who reads the marriage contract, and then goes into it, deserves all the consequences.”

  “Toe walking deforms the feet; corsets deform the body; and nothing is left to be deformed but the brain and there is not much of this in the women who dance modern dances.”

  “Vot Bog! ” Translation: “This is God!” (Isadora’s reply in Russian, as she pointed to a nearby bed, when Esenin joked about her personal beliefs on religion.)

  —W.K.

  The Most Dangerous Woman In The World

  EMMA GOLDMAN (June 27, 1869-May 14, 1940)

  HER FAME: Emma Goldman was an American anarchist agitator, editor, and lecturer who devoted her life to the support of social and political causes. She spoke out in favor of feminism, birth control, freedom of speech, workers’ rights, and free love, and against war, conscription, economic exploitation, and government in general. Although few of her views are considered unusual today, in her time she was beaten, jailed, deported from the U.S., and dubbed “the most dangerous woman in the world.”

  HER PERSON: Born to struggling Jewish parents in Kovno, Lithuania, Emma developed an early rebellious nature in response to the authoritarianism of her father and her teachers. When her father, Abraham, tried to marry her off at the age of 15, Emma pleaded with him to let her continue her studies instead. He threw one of her books into the fire and told her, “Girls do not have to learn much! All a Jewish daughter needs to know is how to prepare gefilte fish, cut noodles fine, and give the man plenty of children.” The following year Emma convinced her father to allow her to go to America with her older half sister, Helena. But he only consented after Emma, who had been forced to quit school and go to work in a corset factory, made a serious threat to jump into the Neva River.

  Helena and Emma joined their sister, Lena, in Rochester, N.Y. Expecting to find the U.S. a land of freedom and equality, Emma was disappointed by the horrible living and working conditions that were the lot of her fellow Jewish immigrants. While working in sweatshops, she began to attend German Socialist meetings and soon she was reading about anarchism, the theory which advocates abolishing government and replacing it with voluntary cooperatives and federations.

  In 1889 Emma moved to New York City in order to join the anarchist movement. With the encouragement of the fiery editor and agitator Johann Most, she became an effective orator. In 1893 she was jailed for nine months on a charge of inciting to riot after she told a New York crowd of unemployed workers to steal bread if they had no money to buy it.

  Continuing her speeches in America and Europe, Emma also studied nursing and midwifery, which provided her with an occupation and exposed her to the desperate needs of the impoverished women who pleaded with her for abortions and an end to childbearing. She also learned about modern European theater, and her lectures on the subject played a major part in introducing Americans to the work of Ibsen, Shaw, and Strindberg. In 1906 she founded Mother Earth, an anarchist journal which she edited until its suppression in 1917.

  In 1916 Emma spent 15 days in jail in New York City after giving a public speech in favor of birth control. When WWI began, Emma and her lover and lifelong friend, Alexander Berkman, opposed American involvement and organized an anticonscription campaign. Arrested for conspiracy to obstruct the operation of the selective service law, they were sentenced to two years in prison. When Goldman completed her sentence, she was stripped of her U.S. citizenship and she and Berkman and 247 other “subversives” were put on a boat to Russia. Arriving in January of 1920, Emma and Berkman quickly found themselves at odds with the new Bolshevik government. When Lenin started rounding up anarchists, Goldman and Berkman fled the country. In 1923 Emma published My Disillusionment with Russia, a libertarian criticism of the Communist regime. In 1931, with Berkman’s help, she finished her two-volume autobiography, Living My Life. While working in Toronto on behalf of the Spanish anarchists then fighting Franco, Emma suffered a paralytic stroke and died in 1940 at the age of 70.

  SEX PARTNERS: When Emma was 15, a 20-year-old hotel clerk in St. Petersburg attempted to force himself on her sexually, but Emma saved herself by screaming. In February, 1887, feeling lonely and depressed in Rochester, Emma consented to marry Jacob Kershner, who worked beside her in a sweatshop. Unfortunately, Kershner was impotent, and within a year she demanded a divorce. After working at a corset factory in New Haven, Conn., she returned to Rochester and agreed to remarry Kershner after he threatened to commit suicide. But his impotence continued and they grew apart intellectually as well. At 20 Emma left her husband and moved to New York City.

  There she met Alexander Berkman, a stern Jewish anarchist from Russia. Called Sasha, he was extremely concerned with revolutionary ethics. His friend Fedya was an artist who, although an anarchist, was more committed to beauty than to politics. When Fedya bought bouquets of flowers for Emma, Sasha ranted that it was a waste of money which would be better spent on the Cause. Emma felt love for both of them, but especially Sasha, with whom she lost her virginity. She called him “my boy” although he was only one and a half years younger than she. Emma lived together with Sasha, Fedya, and another woman, but she also spent time with the infamous Johann Most. Most was the model for the mad-bomber anarchist stereotype. Poor medical treatment resulting from a jaw infection had left him disfigured and ugly. He saw Emma as a protégée, and she saw him as an idol. “I yielded to Most’s trembling embrace,” she wrote of the night before her first speaking tour, “his kisses covering my mouth as of one famished with thirst. I let him drink.”

  During this period Emma learned that she had an inverted womb and would have to undergo an operation if she ever wanted to bear children. She refused the operation, vowing to find an outlet for her mother need “in the love of all children.”

  In May of 1892 news came that striking workers of the Homestead, Pa., mills of the Carnegie Steel Company had been shot and killed by Pinkerton thugs hired by company chairman Henry Clay Frick. Sasha was so outraged that he decided to assassinate Frick. However, he didn’t own a gun and didn’t have enough money to buy one. Emma, ever resourceful, decided to raise the money by selling her body. On a Saturday evening she paraded up and down 14th Street in an attempt to attract customers, but hurried away nervously whenever one approached. Finally, a tall, well-dressed 61-year-old man picked her up and went with her to a saloon. Recognizing her amateur status, he told her: “You haven’t got it, that’s all there is to it.” He gave her a $10 bill and said, “Take this and go home.” Astounded, she accepted the money and sent it to Sasha, who was waiting in Pittsburgh. Alexander Berkman did shoot Frick on July 23, 1892. He stabbed him, too, but he failed to kill him. Frick, although badly injured, was back to work in a week. Berkman was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

  When Johann Most wrote an article critical of Berkman’s act, Emma was furious at his betrayal of her Sasha. Most had gone to jail in England for advocating tyrannicide, and he constantly spoke out in favor of acts of violence, yet he had no praise for the attack on Frick. Goldman attended Most’s next lecture and sat in the front row. As Most prepared to begin his speech, Emma rose up and demanded that he defend his statements against Alexander Berkman. Most mumbled that she was a “hysterical woman” but said nothing more. Pulling a horsewhip out of her cloak, Goldman flailed Most across the face and neck, broke the whip over her knee, and threw the pieces at him. An enraged crowd surrounded her, but she was rescued by Fedya and other fr
iends.

  In December of 1892 Emma met tall, blond 40-year-old Edward Brady, who had just arrived in America after spending 10 years in an Austrian prison for publishing anarchist literature. With Brady she experienced her first orgasm. “In the arms of Ed I learned for the first time the meaning of the great life-giving force. I understood its full beauty, and I eagerly drank its intoxicating joy and bliss. It was an ecstatic song, profoundly soothing by its music and perfume. My little flat … became a temple of love.”

  Emma and Ed began living together, but he became jealous of the time she devoted to her lectures, meetings, and political activities. To please Brady, she turned down speaking engagements and spent more time at home. But Emma was bending herself unnaturally. Finally, after an argument in which Ed criticized the books she read, Emma gave him a tongue-lashing. “Under the pretext of a great love,” she cried, “you have done your utmost to chain me to you, to rob me of all that is more precious to me than life. You are not content with binding my body, you want also to bind my spirit! First the movement and my friends—now it’s the books I love…. You are not going to clip my wings, you shan’t stop my flight. I’ll free myself even if it means tearing you out of my heart!” Her “ecstatic song” had become “a cracked bell.” Reconciliations followed, but after Ed faked a suicide attempt “just to scare you a little and cure your mania for meetings,” Emma left him for good, seven years after they first met.