The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People

by David Wallechinsky

  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