The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People

by David Wallechinsky

  Meanwhile Maria’s seven-year-old son, Mario, was attending a boarding school near Florence. From time to time the boy was visited by a “beautiful lady.” Mario began to believe that this lady was his mother. Yet Maria did not publicly acknowledge Mario until 54 years after his birth, when her will revealed him as “il mio figlio” (“my son”). A year after Maria’s mother died, Mario, now 15, confronted Maria and said, “I know you are my mother.” When he asked to leave his boarding school to live with her, she did not object, but she insisted that he start using her surname. So Maria kept her agreement to protect her former lover and, in a way, denied his existence at the same time. Mario followed his mother into the field of preschool education and became her constant companion, even after he married and had four children of his own. For the rest of his mother’s life Mario was identified as her adopted son, nephew, or secretary.

  Maria was too brilliant and independent to be the unwitting victim of a casual affair. She championed a “new woman” who would “marry and have children out of choice, not because matrimony and maternity are imposed on her.” The moral revivals of the future, she believed, would revolve around “the struggle against the sexual sins” of a society in which women were the slaves, the men the “lords, in a barbaric sense, of sexual life.”

  In spite of her progressive beliefs, Maria Montessori was still a woman of her time. She would say, “Excuse me if I show you this,” when she used an anatomical drawing to illustrate a lecture. She could be excessively modest; for example, she insisted that her students precede her up stairways so that they wouldn’t catch a glimpse of her legs under the long skirts she always wore.

  HER ADVICE: “I wish that I could make all women fall in love with scientific reasoning. It doesn’t suffocate the voice of the heart but augments it and supports it.”

  —D.M.L.

  Lady With A Hatchet

  CARRY NATION (Nov. 25, 1846-June 9, 1911)

  HER FAME: Among the most famous of all temperance reformers, Carry Nation was a crusader whose enthusiasm in the war against vice has scarcely been rivaled anywhere. She raged against alcohol, tobacco, sex, politics, government, the Masonic Lodge, lawyers, foreign foods, and Theodore Roosevelt, to name only a few of her pet peeves. She was and is best known for her “hatchetations”—during which she destroyed bars and other dens of iniquity single-handedly with a hatchet.

  HER PERSON: Born Carry Moore in Garrard County, Ky., she had a father who was a prosperous slaveowning stock dealer and a mother who suffered from the fixed delusion that she was Queen Victoria, complete with royal carriage and scepter. There were a great number of eccentrics in Carry’s family, most notably one aunt who, at the time of the full moon, made repeated attempts to climb onto the roof and transform herself into a weather vane. Carry’s odd relatives and her own early religious visions probably served to influence her development toward fanaticism.

  Although erratically educated, Carry was certified to be a teacher. She became interested in temperance in 1890. At that time she was a resident of Kansas, which was a dry state. When a new U.S. Supreme Court ruling permitted wet states to export liquor in “original packages” to dry states, Carry felt that the law of Kansas was being undermined and she began her crusade. With a handful of female followers she marched on saloons. While her followers sang hymns outside, Carry stormed into the saloons and wielded her hatchet. She was in and out of jails more than 30 times, paying her fines by lecturing and selling souvenir hatchets. In her heyday she was a forbidding figure; nearly 6 ft. tall and weighing 176 lb., she wore stark black-and-white clothing, with a hatchet brooch pinned to her expansive bosom. She died at age 64 in Leavenworth, Kans. Her legacy was the 1919 Prohibition Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

  LOVE LIFE: Carry’s mother and numerous aunts trained her to look upon every man as a potential seducer. Therefore, when she received gentlemen callers, there was no hand holding or hay riding. Instead, they discussed literature or the Bible. She said of herself: “Oh, I was a great lover,” and in her autobiography she wrote: “There are pages in my life that have had much to do with bringing me in sympathy with the fallen tempted natures. These I cannot write, but let no erring, sinful man or woman think that Carry Nation would not understand, for Carry Nation is a sinner saved by grace.” However, her concept of sin was so exaggerated that she was probably referring to her fantasies.

  In 1865 Charles Gloyd, a handsome young doctor from Ohio, became a boarder at the Moore household. Although Mrs. Moore forbade the two young people to be alone in the same room together, Gloyd managed to woo Carry nonetheless. One day he caught her in his arms and kissed her on the mouth. She covered her face with her hands and cried, “I’m ruined! I’m ruined!” Their courtship lasted two years. Things took a turn for the worse on their wedding day, when Gloyd showed up drunk for the ceremony. Carry wrote of the days that followed: “I did not find Dr. Gloyd the lover I expected. He was kind but he seemed to want to be away from me; used to sit and read, when I was hungry for his caresses and love.” After a few months she left him, at her parents’ urging, when she was pregnant and on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Six months later Gloyd died as a result of his heavy drinking.

  Several years later, living with her daughter and mother-in-law, Carry was in financial difficulty. She turned to the Lord, saying, “Lord, you see the situation. I cannot take care of Mother and Charlien. I want you to help me. If it is best for me to marry, I will do so. I have no one picked out, but I want you to select the one you think best.” Within six months she was married to David Nation, an extremely ugly widower 19 years her senior, who was a minister and a lawyer. Their marriage was rocky, and Carry was bitter that she had not found true love. Her new husband resented her overzealous Christianity and religious visions, and although she wept at his lack of affection, she found sex repugnant.

  After 24 miserable years together, Nation divorced Carry on grounds of desertion. In her final analysis, men were “nicotine-soaked, beer-besmeared, whiskey-greased, red-eyed devils” and “two-legged animated whiskey flasks.” In addition to fighting her war on fermented grains, Carry was something of a feminist; she preached against corsets and advocated a matriarchal society.

  QUIRKS: The product of a deeply repressed sexuality, Carry’s hatred of all things sexual and her battle tactics in fighting them became increasingly warped. She began her career of interference by attacking necking couples and lecturing them on the evils of buggy riding and “spooning,” all the while brandishing a ferocious-looking umbrella with a sharpened tip. (She had not yet picked up the hatchet.) She also stopped women on the street to alert them against seduction, describing it in graphic anatomical detail. She established a “Home for the Wives of Drunkards” and started a newspaper called The Hatchet. In it she ran a column entitled “Private Talks to Boys and Girls.” Its main theme was the evils of self-abuse, and its language was so explicit that one reader called it “a blueprint for masturbation.”

  Claiming that God had told her to use a hatchet, she began to wreak real havoc. To protect themselves, bar owners went so far as to hire bodyguards, equip their bars with trapdoors, or keep cages of rats to let loose on unwelcome visitors. One saloon keeper even designed a portable bar with the strength of a tank, which he planned to take on tour through the dry states in open defiance of Carry and her hatcheteers. One of her most celebrated smashings occurred in Wichita, Kans., at the beautifully ornate bar of the Hotel Carey. Famed for its lovely interior decoration, the bar proudly sported a life-size painting of a nude Cleopatra bathing, along with scantily clothed attendants. When Carry saw it, she hit the ceiling. The place deserved “hatchetation.” She proceeded to completely destroy the bar single-handedly, throwing rocks and axing away wildly. She caused thousands of dollars’ worth of damage. She told the bartender, “It’s disgraceful! You’re insulting your mother by having her form stripped naked and hung up in a place where it is not decent for a woman to be when she has her clothes on!” No
t wishing to risk similar treatment, a hotel owner in New York City abjectly draped with cheesecloth the naked statue of Diana decorating his lobby. Mrs. Nation had told him, “Look here, my man, you cover up that nasty thing or there’ll be a little hatchetation around here!”

  —A. W.

  The Rites Of Spring

  WASLAW NIJINSKY (Mar. 12, 1890-Apr. 8, 1950)

  HIS FAME: During his brief but glorious career as the premier danseur of the Imperial Russian Ballet at St. Petersburg’s Maryinsky Theater and of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Nijinsky performed the leading male roles in such works as Le Spectre de la Rose (“The Specter of the Rose”), Petrouchka, and his masterpiece, Le Sacre du Printemps (“The Rite of Spring”). Rejecting the conventional forms of classical ballet, he perfected leaps in which he appeared to hang in midair. His daringly original choreography and dramatic acting spurred the art of ballet to great heights and earned him a reputation as a genius.

  HIS PERSON: The son of two professional dancers, Nijinsky was born in Kiev in the Ukraine. “A delicate child, awkward, temperamentally backward and slow-thinking,” he began dancing early, and by the age of three was touring with his parents’ troupe. As a student he demonstrated unparalleled ability and once performed 10 entrechats—crossing and uncrossing the legs—in a single jump.

  When Nijinsky was nine, his father deserted the family in favor of a pregnant mistress. His mother urged him all the harder to excel in dance, since a ballet career would insure money and prestige. He graduated from St. Petersburg’s Imperial School of Ballet in the spring of 1907 and joined the Imperial Russian Ballet as a soloist.

  In 1909 he met dance impresario Sergei Diaghilev and began collaborating with him as a dancer and later as a choreographer. When he danced in Paris with the Ballets Russes, he created a sensation. In 1911 Nijinsky was dismissed from the Imperial Ballet for appearing onstage without his full costume. He was promptly offered a place in the Ballets Russes. There he choreographed and danced his most legendary roles. L’Après-midi d’un Faune (“The Afternoon of a Faun”) created a minor scandal in 1912; in the final scene Nijinsky simulated masturbation. The police warned him to rewrite the scene or risk having the show closed. He refused to change the passage, but no performances were actually raided.

  In 1913 Nijinsky married Countess Romola de Pulszky. The marriage offended Diaghilev so much that he dismissed his star performer. Nijinsky then formed his own dance troupe, which toured for about a year, appearing in London and in the U.S. But his talents did not extend to running the business aspects of a dance company, and it failed.

  During WWI Nijinsky was imprisoned in Austria-Hungary on charges of spying for Russia. He was not permitted to perform, and not until he was freed in 1916 was he able to return to his career. He again toured, but in 1919, at 29, he suffered a nervous breakdown. He stopped dancing, was plagued by insomnia, headaches, persecution mania, schizophrenia, and depression. Until his death from kidney disease in 1950, he lived most of his last 30 years in a Swiss insane asylum.

  LOVE LIFE: Nijinsky’s tumultuous love life contributed significantly to his insanity. He had a passive nature in love, perhaps because he reserved his full vitality for performing on stage. A naive and beautiful young man, Nijinsky began an intimate relationship with 30-year-old Prince Pavel Dmitrievich Lvov in 1908. Tall, blue-eyed, and handsome, Lvov was instantly attracted to the muscular Nijinsky. The prince initiated his friend into the intoxicating delights of nightclub life and provided him with his first homosexual experience. However, Lvov was disappointed with the dancer’s small penis; as one biographer described him, “Nijinsky was small in a part where size is usually admired.” The prince was not possessive; he even arranged Nijinsky’s first sexual experience with a woman—a prostitute. Nijinsky was frightened and repelled by the encounter.

  Lvov, who was generous with gifts, won the heart of his lover. But after a few months the prince withdrew, having grown bored with the dancer he considered just “another of his toys.” Before they parted, however, Lvov introduced Nijinsky to Sergei Diaghilev, the cultivated ballet producer who had founded the Ballets Russes. Twenty years older than Nijinsky, Diaghilev was an unabashed homosexual. His first—and last—experience with a woman (his 18-year-old cousin) had been marred by a subsequent venereal infection. The two men became lovers. Nijinsky had grown accustomed to being passed around, but his initial lovemaking with Diaghilev disturbed him. “I trembled like a leaf,” wrote Nijinsky. “I hated him, but pretended.”

  “Chinchilla,” as Diaghilev was called because of the white streak in his dyed black hair, stripped his lover of independence. He scrutinized Nijinsky’s personal and professional life and warned him against ever sleeping with women, telling him such acts would impair his dancing. So persuasive and insistent was Diaghilev that Nijinsky once turned down a sexual offer from Isadora Duncan, whom the two men met in Venice in 1909. She had suggested to Nijinsky that he father her next baby, but he refused.

  Diaghilev repeatedly encouraged his lover to consent to a ménage à trois with a young boy, but Nijinsky was already finding the act of love extremely difficult with just one person. By 23 he felt he was growing too old to be Diaghilev’s “boy.” In September of 1913, while the entire Ballets Russes was en route to South America aboard the S.S. Avon, Nijinsky became engaged to coquettish Romola de Pulszky. She was 23 and the daughter of Hungarian actress Emilia Markus. Romola had been pursuing Nijinsky for months, had even taken up ballet in order to be near him. According to Hungarian tradition, the exchange of engagement rings authorized freedom to indulge in premarital intercourse. But whether it was Nijinsky’s shyness, the couple’s language barrier, or his emphatic desire for a proper Catholic wedding, they did not consummate their romance until after their wedding on Sept. 10, 1913.

  Diaghilev was surprised and insulted by this wedding and retaliated by firing Nijinsky. He refused to answer his former lover’s letters. Soon after the marriage, Nijinsky gained another ardent admirer. The Duchess of Durcal, a beautiful redhead, fell so desperately in love with him that she offered herself as his mistress. Romola had no objections, and Nijinsky had sex with the duchess at least once. He regretted it later, saying, “I am sorry for what I did. It was unfair to her, as I am not in love.”

  As Nijinsky’s mental health began to deteriorate, he and Romola took separate bedrooms. Sometimes he would slip out at night and walk the streets, searching for prostitutes—just to talk. He would return home, sexually aroused by these women, and masturbate in his bedroom “in order to protect myself from catching a venereal disease.”

  Romola gave birth to the first of their two daughters in 1914—the second was born in 1920—and a few years later Diaghilev reentered Nijinsky’s life. Romola objected to Diaghilev’s peacemaking attempts and even brought a 500,000-franc lawsuit against him, as compensation for her husband’s past performances in the Ballets Russes. She won the suit, but Diaghilev never paid. Instead he made an overt move to win back Romola’s husband. She pulled one way, Diaghilev pulled the other way, and Nijinsky, no longer dancing and with no outlet for his frustrations, lapsed into a catatonic world.

  —A.K. and K.P.

  The First Free-Lover

  JOHN HUMPHREY NOYES (Sept. 3, 1811-Apr. 13, 1886)

  HIS FAME: John Humphrey Noyes, social visionary and originator of the term “free love,” gained notoriety in the mid-19th century for preaching a form of promiscuity and birth control to his followers, who were called Perfectionists. He argued that since the Second Coming had already occurred (in 70 A.D.) a sinless existence—perfection—was possible on earth by simply accepting Christ into one’s soul. These beliefs found expression in his creation of the most successful of American utopias, the Oneida Community in New York State, which thrived for over a quarter of a century and at its peak had 300 members.

  HIS PERSON: Noyes was raised by a strong and devout mother, who prayed that her firstborn son would become a minister. Business deals and a polit
ical career often kept his father away from their home in Brattleboro, Vt. When Noyes was 20, he experienced a religious awakening. According to one of his biographers, “light gleamed upon his soul,” and by nightfall he had decided to devote himself to God. Another turning point in his life occurred three years later when he was a student at Yale Theological Seminary in New Haven. In a revelation that shocked the ecclesiastical world, Noyes made his “confession of salvation from sin.” Expelled from school and stripped of his preacher’s license, Noyes vowed to continue spreading his Perfectionist beliefs. This he did, eventually establishing the first of the self-sufficient communities of love among the saved in Putney, Vt. The unorthodox sex practices of these communities were probably influenced by still another event in his life. When he was 23 and a virgin, he experienced a traumatic rejection from his first love and first convert to the new religion. Thirty-one-year-old Abigail Merwin, his pretty “angel,” was very attracted to the fiery prophet, but she married a schoolteacher after her family persuaded her that Noyes was crazy. For several years Noyes pursued her, going so far as to follow her to her new home in Ithaca, N.Y., in the belief that they were joined in “immortal marriage” and before long she would realize her mistake. When that didn’t happen, he rejected conventional marriage. “When the will of God is done on earth there will be no marriage,” he wrote in a letter to a close friend. As God’s representative, he resolved to create the perfect society, where “marriage” is “free to every guest” but devoid of all “exclusiveness, jealousy, and quarreling.” That vision of a social arrangement which would protect him from emotional involvement and rejection was realized in the Oneida Community.