Within the week, Pepys had tracked down Deborah Willet, kissed her, and given her fatherly advice. But Elizabeth found out immediately and demanded that Pepys write a letter to Deborah in which he called her a “whore” and said he hated her. This he did, but only after Will Hewer, Pepys’ lifelong friend, agreed to deliver the letter and, with a wink, assured him that Deborah would never see the offensive portions.
Eventually life calmed down for Samuel and Elizabeth. However, on Apr. 9, 1669, Pepys was back with Mrs. Martin, doing what he would, and also with her sister, who was now Mrs. Powell. On Apr. 15 he even met with Deborah in an alehouse and kissed her and touched her breasts. Six weeks later, the threat of losing his eyesight forced Pepys to give up his diary. On Nov. 10 Elizabeth, after suffering a high fever, died at the age of 29. Shortly after his wife’s death Pepys became passionately close to a witty young lady named Mary Skinner. Twenty years later she moved in with him, without scandal, and she nursed and consoled him in his old age. Not surprisingly, Pepys never remarried, preferring, no doubt, to do what he would for the rest of his life.
HIS THOUGHTS: Dec. 25, 1665: “To church in the morning, and there saw a wedding … and the young people so merry one with another, and strange to see what delight we married people have to see these poor fools decoyed into our position, every man and woman gazing and smiling at them.”
—D.W.
The Celebrity Collector
ALMA MAHLER WERFEL (1879-Dec. 11, 1964)
HER FAME: A classical composer who received scant recognition, Alma Mahler Werfel gained prominence through her association with famous men. Described by her admirers as the “most beautiful femme fatale of turn-of-the-century Vienna,” Alma was married in succession to the composer Gustav Mahler, the noted architect Walter Gropius, and the Austrian writer Franz Werfel. A complete list of her lovers would read like a history of the intelligentsia of eastern Europe.
HER PERSON: “What I really loved in a man was his achievement,” Alma Werfel wrote in her autobiography, And the Bridge Is Love. “The greater the achievement, the more I must love him.” Alma lived up to her words, with the help of some of the greatest musicians, painters, and writers of her day.
Born in Vienna to the landscape painter Emil J. Schindler, Alma had wit and intelligence honed by the scores of intellectuals and artists who flocked to her family’s home. She received a formal education in music and composition from many of Vienna’s finest musicians and composers. When she became a teenager and blossomed into a classical beauty with high cheekbones, sensual eyes, and a full figure, her teachers avidly courted her. At 17 she was aggressively pursued by 37-year-old artist Gustav Klimt. But Alma held her admirers at bay because she “believed in a virginal purity in need of preservation.” She changed her mind at the age of 21 and began chasing after men of artistic achievement, involving herself in three marriages and innumerable affairs. Initially attracted to brilliant father figures, she married Gustav Mahler when he was 41 and she was 23. Later she reversed roles and married the poet and novelist Franz Werfel, who was 12 years her junior.
SEX LIFE: A “small, repugnant, chinless, toothless, and unwashed gnome” was Alma’s description of her teacher, Alexander von Zemlinsky. The Viennese musician and composer attracted her anyway. “I long so madly for his embraces. I shall never be able to forget how his touch stirred me to the depths of my soul … such a feeling of ecstasy filled my being…. I want to kneel down in front of him and kiss his open thighs—kiss everything, everything! Amen!”
During her affair with Zemlinsky, Alma met Gustav Mahler at a party. He was a handsome but austere man, prone to attacks of nervous tension. His fame as a composer was based on his romantic symphonies, particularly the Eighth Symphony, known as the Symphony of a Thousand. Alma was in awe of Mahler’s musical genius but had doubts about accepting his marriage proposal. “Do I really love him?” she wrote in her diary. “I’ve no idea…. So many things about him annoy me: his smell—the way he sings—something in the way he speaks!” She finally agreed to marry him because “I am filled to the brim with my mission of smoothing the path of this genius.”
Mahler confessed to Alma that he was a virgin, and said he was worried about his ability to consummate their marriage. She agreed to participate in a premarital rehearsal. After engaging in several sessions of lovemaking, she wrote, “Joy, beyond all joy,” in her diary, and soon she was suffering the “dreadful torment” of pregnancy. But on their wedding night a few months later, Mahler was impotent. When this problem continued, a frustrated Alma suggested that he consult their friend Sigmund Freud. The great analyst recommended that Mahler, who adored his mother, call his wife by his mother’s name, Marie. This seemed to work, and the couple had another child together, a daughter who became a sculptress.
However, their marriage still wasn’t satisfactory to Alma. Mahler had insisted that she give up her musical career when they married, saying, “You … have only one profession from now on: to make me happy!” She hated being a traditional wife and mother. “I often feel as though my wings had been clipped. Gustav, why did you tie me to yourself—me, a soaring, glittering bird—when you’d be so much better off with a gray, lumbering one?”
During their marriage Alma flirted with Mahler’s rival, composer Hans Pfitzner. “I do not fight the sensuous excitement caused by his touch,” she confessed, “an excitement I have not felt for so long.”
After Mahler’s death in 1911, Alma was courted by her late husband’s physician, Dr. Joseph Fraenkel. In turning down Fraenkel’s marriage proposal, she wrote: “My watchword is: Amo—ergo sum [I love, therefore I am!]. Yours: Cogito—ergo sum [I think, therefore I am!]”.
Next, Alma became involved with Austrian painter and playwright Oskar Kokoschka, whom she described as a “handsome figure but disturbingly coarse.” Beginning his career as a portrait painter, Kokoschka became famous for the daring use of color and form in his landscapes. When he asked to paint Alma’s portrait, she wrote in her diary, “We hardly spoke—and yet he seemed unable to draw. We got up. Suddenly, tempestuously, he swept me into his arms. To me it was a strange, almost shocking kind of embrace.” She enjoyed that embrace for three years, which she called “one fierce battle of love. Never before had I tasted so much tension, so much hell, so much paradise.” Kokoschka wanted to marry her, but when she had an abortion in 1913, it spelled the end of their affair.
In 1915 Alma married the renowned architect Walter Gropius, whose advances she had spurned when married to Mahler. Their marriage lasted four years and produced one child. While wed to Gropius, Alma became enchanted with the poetry of Franz Werfel, whose first prose piece, Not the Murderer (1920), marked the beginning of the expressionist movement in German literature. A stocky man with burning eyes and elegant features, Werfel achieved his greatest popularity as a result of his book The Song of Bernadette, which was later made into a highly successful film. In 1917 Alma and Werfel began an affair. “It was inevitable … that our lips would find each other…. I am out of my mind. And so is Werfel,” Alma wrote. The poet agreed. “We made love,” he said of their first sexual encounter. “I did not spare her. At dawn I went back to my room…. There is something suicidal in her climactic surrender.” Alma became pregnant with Werfel’s child while still married to Gropius. The child, a boy, was born in 1918 and died less than a year later. After the birth of Alma’s son, Gropius agreed to a divorce. Alma moved in with Werfel, and they were eventually married in 1929, when she was 50 years old. She remained passionate throughout their 16-year marriage.
An admirer, the German dramatist Gerhart Hauptmann, once said to Alma, “In another life, we two must be lovers. I make my reservation now.” His wife overheard this request and quickly replied, “I’m sure Alma will be booked up for there, too.”
—R.S.F.
Designing Lover
FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT (June 8, 1867-Apr. 9, 1959)
HIS FAME: Regarded as the greatest American architect of the 20th cent
ury, his creative, trend-setting designs for nearly 800 buildings earned him a reputation as one of the giants of modern architecture. Among his most famous projects are the Edgar J. Kaufmann house, known as “Falling Water,” near Pittsburgh, Pa.; the administration buildings of the Johnson Wax Company in Racine, Wis.; and the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, which was opened in 1959, following Wright’s death.
HIS PERSON: Wright was the product of a broken home. His minister father, William C. Wright, divorced his wife, Anna, because she refused him “intercourse as between husband and wife.” The elder Wright moved out of their Madison, Wis., home in 1885, and Frank, who continued to live with or near his mother until she died in 1923, never again saw his father.
Wright, 28, took this photo himself.
Trained as an engineer, Wright worked for six years in the architectural firm of Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler before establishing his own office in Chicago in 1893. By the turn of the century the 33-year-old, predominantly self-taught designer had a lucrative business and was known for his revolutionary “prairie school” of architecture—a style widely recognized for its radical approach to building modern homes.
But despite his architectural achievements, Wright’s love life was marred by a series of scandalous romances.
LOVE LIFE: Guided by conflicting sexual morals, Wright fluctuated between puritanism and liberalism. He denounced marriage, claiming no person should “own” another, and scorned fatherhood, saying the idea of having a child deeply disturbed him. However, he married three times, fathered seven children, and engaged in a number of adulterous affairs. These he justified by proclaiming that it was more honorable to live openly with a mistress than to carry on secret affairs.
He considered himself a lady-killer in his later years, but when at 21 he married 18-year-old Catherine Tobin, he was a beginner in the art of lovemaking. A handsome man with auburn hair, his classic features couldn’t mask his shyness; the very sight of a young girl could make him run like “a scared young stag, scampering back into his woods.”
In his autobiography Wright wrote that his and Catherine’s marriage on a rainy day in June resembled a funeral more than a wedding. As the years passed, Catherine’s affection for him turned to “an almost bitter love.” She shouldered the burdens of raising their six children with little help from him, and turned her head when he began seeing other women.
Many of his female clients were infatuated with him, but it was Mamah Borthwick Cheney—wife of one of his friends—who stole his heart. Impulsively, in September, 1909, he eloped to Europe with Mrs. Cheney, who was known in social circles as a capricious, temperamental lady. Although Catherine refused to give him a divorce, the lovers returned to the U.S. in 1910. Wright designed a home called Taliesin in Spring Green, Wis., in which he and Mamah lived. On Aug. 4, 1914, their romance ended tragically when an insane servant set fire to the house and then chopped Cheney, her two children, and four neighbors to death with an ax as they tried to escape the inferno.
On the verge of a nervous breakdown, Wright rebuilt Taliesin as a memorial to Mamah. In 1915 he installed another mistress, Miriam Noel, an unstable sculptor who had fallen in love with his picture. He was finally able to secure a divorce from Catherine in November, 1922, 13 years after their initial separation. One year later Miriam, distinguished-looking with her reddish-brown hair and monocle, married Wright. But Wright often felt lonely despite Miriam’s companionship, and instead of strengthening their “luckless love affair,” their marriage destroyed it. Growing increasingly neurotic and unbalanced, Miriam left him in April, 1924, five months after they were wed.
The 57-year-old architect almost immediately became involved with the beautiful 26-year-old Olga Milanoff Hinzenberg. The press called her “the Montenegrin dancer,” thus giving rise to rumors that she was an immoral, flighty chorus girl. Jealous of Wright’s newfound love, Miriam harassed him with an outpouring of legal actions and appalling statements aimed at aborting his affair with Olga (known as Olgivanna). At one point Miriam even tried to move back into Taliesin by force. Wright’s loyal employees were able to rebuff her, but she did succeed in forcing Olgivanna into temporary hiding.
Nevertheless, divorcée Olgivanna solidly occupied Wright’s heart and home, and they both ignored the fact that he was legally married to another. By the end of 1925 she had given birth to Wright’s daughter, whom they named Iovanna. Wright finally secured a divorce, and he and Olgivanna exchanged wedding vows in August, 1928. During the last 30 years of his life they remained devoted to each other, and after his death Olgivanna took over as director of Taliesin West, Wright’s school for apprentice architects.
—A.K.
Sexual Characteristics
HANGING ON: LATE VIRGINITY LOSERS
Catherine II
Isadora Duncan
Havelock Ellis
Johann Wolfgang
von Goethe
Victor Hugo
D. H. Lawrence
Bertrand Russell
Marie Stopes
Mao Tse-tung
Mark Twain
H. G. Wells
Mary Wollstonecraft
Virginia Woolf
EARLY TO BED: PRECOCIOUS SEX AND LOSS OF VIRGINITY
Pope Alexander VI
Gabriele D’Annunzio
Josephine Baker
Natalie Barney
John Barrymore
Lord Byron
Cleopatra
Kurt Cobain
Mahatma Gandhi
Jean Harlow
Jimi Hendrix
Ninon de Lenclos
Louis XIV
Amedeo Modigliani
Marilyn Monroe
Aristotle Onassis
La Belle Otero
Cora Pearl
Eva Perón
Édith Piaf
Rainer Maria Rilke
Jean Jacques Rousseau
Thomas Wolfe
MEN WHO ENJOYED GIRLS 16 YEARS OR YOUNGER
John Barrymore
Lewis Carroll (platonic)
Casanova
Charlie Chaplin
Kurt Cobain
Errol Flynn
Paul Gauguin
Johann Wolfgang
von Goethe
Howard Hughes
Samuel Pepys
Elvis Presley
Marquis de Sade
Mark Twain (platonic)
OUTSIZE ORGANS
Milton Berle
Wilt Chamberlain
Charlie Chaplin
Charles I
Gary Cooper
Jimi Hendrix
Guy de Maupassant
Aristotle Onassis
Grigori Rasputin
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
MINUTE MEMBERS
Napoleon Bonaparte
Frédéric Chopin
Edward VIII
Farouk I
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Ernest Hemingway
Waslaw Nijinsky
Rainer Maria Rilke
WEIRD QUIRKS AND FETISHES
Natalie Barney (men’s
clothes)
James Boswell
(arborophilia)
Carlos Castaneda (said that
sperm was poisonous)
Colette (men’s clothes)
Aleister Crowley (hunch-
backs, dwarves)
Havelock Ellis
(urination voyeur)
Clark Gable (cleanliness)
Mahatma Gandhi
(sleeping naked)
André Gide (deformity
fetish)
Jean Harlow (dyed pubic
hair)
Adolf Hitler (coprophilia)
Howard Hughes
(cleanliness,
body hair)
Victor Hugo (feet)
Michael Hutchence (auto-
erotic asphyxiation)
James Joyce (graphomania,
underwear)
Martin Luthe
r
(coprophilia)
Yukio Mishima (white
gloves, armpit hair,
sweat)
Marilyn Monroe
(dyed pubic hair)
Adelina Patti
(liked a midget)
Jean Jacques Rousseau
(exhibitionist,
inanimate objects)
Algernon Swinburne
(babies, corporal
punishment)
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
(unexpected erogenous
zones)
TROILISM AND MÉNAGES À TROIS
Honoré de Balzac
Natalie Barney
Casanova
Aleister Crowley
Paul Gauguin
George Gershwin
Jack Johnson
Janis Joplin
John F. Kennedy
Guy de Maupassant
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Elvis Presley
Grigori Rasputin
Jean Jacques Rousseau
Bertrand Russell
Marquis de Sade
Mary Wollstonecraft
Brigham Young
BIGAMISTS, POLYGAMISTS
Honoré de Balzac
The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People Page 73
