Sex with the Queen

by Eleanor Herman

  With regard to Rasputin’s countless affairs, his hearty Siberian wife, at home minding the farm, said, “He can do what he likes. He has enough for all.”23

  In addition to his sexual services, Rasputin had great success healing ladies of depression, hypochondria, and migraines. Hostesses fought over him as a dinner guest; he intentionally offended the cream of St. Petersburg society, and they loved it. He jeered, cursed, and pawed the women, all the while talking of barnyard sex. His table manners were revolting; he tore food into large pieces and shoved them into his mouth with dirty hands. It was certainly much more entertaining to listen to Rasputin discussing sex as a holy sacrament than to the standard dinner conversation of war and social unrest.

  Women asked for Rasputin’s dirty linen as holy relics. “The dirtier the better. It’s got to have sweat,” they said.24 He was novel, he was amusing, and just maybe he was sent from God.

  But while Rasputin was on the rise in St. Petersburg, Russia’s fortunes were declining. In 1904 Japan declared war on Russia, but Russian armed forces did as much damage to themselves as the enemy did. Russian boats fired and sank each other by mistake. Russian minesweepers were sunk by their own mines. Trade unions struck. Hundreds of peasants protesting peacefully for better conditions were gunned down on the czar’s orders. “If such a government cannot be overthrown otherwise than by dynamite,” wrote Mark Twain, “then thank God for dynamite.”25 Fearing for their lives, the imperial family did not venture out into public.

  Two countesses, friends of the empress, knowing her interest in quacks and charlatans, brought Rasputin to the imperial palace. The empress was awestruck by the holy man. Rasputin calmed the empress’s heart palpitations and, oddly, had a healing effect on the dangerous bleeding of the czarevich. Whenever the little boy fell or knocked himself against something, internal bleeding swelled him to enormous proportions; he lay moaning in agony as palace doctors trembled for his life. But when Rasputin visited him, the pain and swelling subsided.

  One witness reported, “Coincidence might have answered if it happened, say, once or twice, but I could not even count how many times it happened!”26 Rasputin probably hypnotized the boy, calming him so he could recover naturally. But the empress declared he had miraculous powers direct from God almighty.

  Soon Rasputin convinced the empress, who convinced the czar, to appoint his friends to top positions in the church and government. But the political meddling of Rasputin, who possessed the tact of a cannonball and the diplomacy of a sledgehammer, was disastrous. Officials who protested the favorite’s influence were soon ousted and replaced by his friends.

  When it became known that the empress was meeting Rasputin at her maid’s cottage on the palace grounds, many speculated that they were having an affair. Rumors also flew that perhaps Rasputin was enjoying the favors of Alexandra’s four teenage daughters. Some people, certain he was in league with the devil, reported that the Russian flag flying over the imperial palace had been transformed into Rasputin’s underpants.

  Yet General Alexander Spiridovich, the head of the czar’s secret service who got to know Rasputin very well, said the monk behaved with “extreme decency and chastity” with the imperial family.27

  One day Rasputin’s friend Aron Simanovich cried, “It’s intolerable that rumors are spread about the grand duchesses because of you. You ought to realize that everyone pities the poor girls and that even the czarina is being drawn into the dirt.”

  “Go to hell,” Rasputin replied. “I’ve done nothing. People should realize that nobody fouls the place where he eats. I’m at the czar’s service, and I’d never dare do anything of that sort. What do you think the czar would do to me if I had?”28

  In 1912 letters written by Alexandra to Rasputin were stolen from his apartment and published in the newspapers. In a letter which could be interpreted as expressing sexual desire, Alexandra wrote, “My beloved and unforgettable teacher, redeemer and mentor, how weary I feel without you. It is only then that my soul is quiet and I relax, when you, teacher, are sitting beside me and I kiss your hands and lean my head on your blessed shoulder. Oh! How light I feel then. I wish only one and the same thing then. To fall asleep forever on your shoulder, in your arms…. Come quickly. I am waiting for you and I am tormenting myself for you. I am asking for your holy blessing and I am kissing your blessed hands. Loving you forever, M [stood for Mama].”29

  Many felt that the appearance of the white-eyed holy man marked the end of their world. The czar’s mother, who detested Alexandra, said, “My unhappy daughter-in-law does not understand that she is destroying the dynasty and herself. She truly believes in the saintliness of this rogue and we are powerless to stave off this disaster.”30 A Russian lady wrote of Rasputin’s increasing power, “It became a dusk enveloping all our world, eclipsing the sun. How could so pitiful a wretch throw so vast a shadow.”31 Alarmed by Rasputin’s closeness to the imperial family, the secret police followed him. The czar waved away their reports of drunken brawls and orgies. Lies and slander, he said. The empress sniffed, “How true it is that a prophet is always without honor in his own country.”32

  Premier Vladimir Kokovtsov tried to tell the czar that Rasputin was threatening the security of the throne as popular resentment focused on him as the cause of all public grievances. But Nicholas was contemptuous of the press and public opinion. “The public does not run the country,” he fumed. “It is run for their benefit, and I am the one who decides what is best for them.”33

  Casting his burning white eyes toward the future, Rasputin seemed to foresee World War I. He begged Nicholas not to join the war, for he could see Russia “drowned in her own blood,” and the deaths of the imperial family soon after. But in the one instance when the czar should have listened to Rasputin, he did not. As Russia lay wounded and bleeding in the First World War, revolutionary murmurs grew to a groundswell. The czar decided to fire his efficient commander in chief and lead his forces himself. The indecisive monarch, pale and trembling astride a horse, was not an inspiring sight.

  Meanwhile, Rasputin was up to his old tricks. One evening in 1915 he arrived already drunk at a Moscow nightclub. When waiters heard shrieks, breaking glass, and curses coming from the private dining room, they rushed in. A woman had refused to have sex with Rasputin, and in his frustration he had smashed the mirrors. Asked to prove he was indeed Rasputin, he unbuttoned his pants, took out his penis, and waved it in the air. Called to the scene, the police reported his behavior as “sexually psychopathic.” Although he cried repeatedly that he was protected by the czar, the police dragged him away “snarling and vowing vengeance.”34

  A group of conspirators led by a cousin of the imperial family, Prince Felix Yusupov, finally had enough. The prince used his wife, Irina, as a decoy for Rasputin, who had been panting after her. In the early hours of December 16, 1916, Rasputin went to Yusupov’s palace, expecting Irina to be available for sex.

  Rasputin was ushered into the basement, which had been fitted up as a comfortable party room with a crackling fire, a bearskin rug, and overstuffed easy chairs. He spoke jovially with the conspirators. Prince Yusupov offered Rasputin cakes poisoned with cyanide. Rasputin greedily gulped down two and washed them down with cyanide wine. According to the conspirators, after consuming enough poison to kill an elephant on the spot, Rasputin merely cleared his throat and complained of a tickling sensation. Some historians, reading details of the attempted poisoning, believe that Rasputin had steeled himself against poison by ingesting a few grains of cyanide every day, to build up resistance. Others believe the murderers exaggerated Rasputin’s demonic resistance to death to justify their foul deed.

  According to their story, Rasputin began to breathe with difficulty and complained of a burning in his stomach. Yet he was suddenly eager to take his friends to sing and dance with Gypsies. Felix Yusupov suddenly said, “You’d far better look at the crucifix and say a prayer.” Rasputin seemed to know what was going to happen; he looked almost kin
dly at the prince. Rasputin started to make the sign of the cross. When Yusupov shot him in the heart, Rasputin screamed and fell on the bearskin rug.

  He was examined and declared dead. Then the eyes opened up, “green viper eyes.” The bloody body stood up and rushed at Yusupov. “He sank his fingers into my shoulder like steel claws,” Yusupov later recalled. “His eyes were bursting from their sockets, blood oozed from his lips.” The hands reached out to strangle him, the lips crying “Felix, Felix.” Yusupov raced upstairs to the others, ashen faced, eyes bulging, followed by Rasputin who had climbed the stairs and was racing across the snowy courtyard. One witness said Rasputin was shouting, “I will tell everything to the empress.”35

  Vladimir Purishkevich took out his gun and fired, hitting Rasputin in the shoulder, and then in the head. Rasputin fell to his knees, but still he was not dead, and tried to rise again. Yusupov started beating him with a blackjack until he fell over.

  They wrapped the body in a rug or drape, threw it in a car and drove it to a bend in the river, and dropped it in. But in their haste the conspirators had forgotten to attach weights to it that they had brought along in the car. The following day workmen found bloodstains on the parapet of the bridge, a boot on the ice below, and peering into the frigid waters, they saw the corpse. The autopsy revealed water in the lungs. Rasputin had still been alive when he had plunged into the river.

  There was no trial for Rasputin’s murderers; they were not the only ones who saw their bloody deed as a patriotic act, liberating their country from the clutches of a vile lunatic. Popular opinion was decidedly in favor of the assassination. But the empress suffered a nervous collapse, sitting silently in her mauve-colored rooms, contemplating a picture of the doomed Marie Antoinette. She used opium to calm her nerves and prayed at Rasputin’s grave. “He died to save us,” she wrote, as if Rasputin had been Christ. As the country slipped into anarchy, the empress wandered about the palace looking for Rasputin’s spirit, while the czar concentrated on thrilling games of dominoes.

  The unhappy Russian people began to think that if a man as all-powerful as Rasputin could so easily be removed, so could the detested imperial family. When thousands of strikers and protesters demonstrated against the government, imperial soldiers were ordered to shoot them. But they shot their commanding officers instead and joined the mob. On March 2, 1917, Czar Nicholas II was forced to abdicate; the entire imperial family was taken prisoner.

  Within a week, Rasputin’s body, which had been lovingly buried in the imperial palace park, was dug up, doused with gasoline, and burned. The flames consumed him even as they consumed Russia, just as he had predicted. In July 1918 Nicholas, Alexandra, and their five children were murdered by revolutionary forces, as Rasputin—visionary, healer, satyr—had foreseen.

  9. DIANA, PRINCESS OF MANY LOVERS

  The chains of marriage are so heavy it takes two to carry them, and sometimes three.

  —ALEXANDRE DUMAS

  “THERE WERE THREE OF US IN THIS MARRIAGE,” INTONED Diana, Princess of Wales, sadly in her infamous television interview, pointedly referring to her husband’s mistress, Camilla Parker-Bowles, “so it was a bit crowded.”1 But the marriage was, in fact, far more crowded than Diana admitted. There were more than a dozen people in her marriage if one counted her own lovers.

  It was November 20, 1995, and the stricken Diana, melancholy eyes ringed heavily with kohl, lips tragically pale, was the first royal princess ever to admit on television that she had conducted an adulterous affair.

  Panorama interviewer Martin Bashir pressed her to discuss her relationship with army captain James Hewitt, who had detailed their steamy love affair in the book Princess in Love, in cooperation with author Anna Pasternak. “Were you unfaithful with Captain James Hewitt?” he asked. Casting her glance modestly downward, the princess murmured, “Yes, I adored him. Yes, I was in love with him.”2

  In the sixteenth century Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard had been beheaded for adultery. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Sophia Dorothea and Caroline Matilda had been locked up until their deaths. By the twentieth century execution and imprisonment were no longer accepted punishments for adulterous royal women whose battles were fought, not behind palace walls, but in the press. Diana, just like Crown Princess Louisa of Tuscany in 1902, was championed by some newspapers for her compassion and courage, and lambasted by others for her immorality and mental instability. “It’s almost as if they want to put me away,” she opined to a friend.3

  And yet it had all started out so well. Wishing to avoid the scandal of men popping up in the press with lurid tales of sex with the future queen, the royal family dismissed Charles’s beloved Camilla Shand from consideration as his bride. Casting about for a suitable candidate, they settled on Lady Diana Spencer, an attractive if slightly awkward teenager, young enough to be molded for her role as queen. An added advantage was the fact that Diana seemed intellectually limited; she had not managed to graduate from high school and kept failing her tests. This sweet befuddled girl, a virgin from a noble English family, would be in no position to make trouble for Buckingham Palace. She would do as she was told: wave, smile, and produce royal babies.

  It is ironic that if the British royal family had picked any other woman in the world as Charles’s bride, no matter what her temperament or sexual history, chances are she would not have shaken the foundations of the monarchy as Diana did. Certainly a few newspaper articles about the raucous sexual adventures of the youthful Camilla, now a discreet and supportive matron of the royal family, would not have done nearly as much damage as the virgin bride Diana.

  The Princess of Wales transformed herself from a shy pudgy teenager into a sleek, mean, and angry woman, wielding newspapers as a deadly weapon. The avenging Fury ripped moldering skeletons out of stuffy royal closets and gleefully exposed their grisly decay for all the world to see. Indeed, Queen Mother Elizabeth viewed Diana as the greatest danger to the British monarchy since the adulterous Wallis Warfield Simpson stole King Edward VIII in 1936.

  As soon as her engagement was announced, Diana, worried about her fiancé’s lackluster courtship, slipped into bulimia, binge eating to satisfy a hunger that could not be quelled with food, and then, repelled at her gorging, forcing herself to throw it all up. Bulimia, she said, “is like having a pair of arms around you, but it’s temporary. Then you’re disgusted at the bloatedness of your stomach, and then you bring it all up again.”4

  Despite her illness, Diana’s sexual needs were demanding. James Hewitt said, “She couldn’t get enough. She always wanted more.”5 Perhaps sex was something like bulimia, only having a real pair of arms around her. Of Charles she said, “Dead below the waist.”6 Given the revelations of his eternal passion for Camilla, perhaps we should say that Charles was dead below the waist for Diana. In 1992, while being videotaped by her speech instructor Peter Settelen as an exercise, Diana reported that even when they were first married, Charles only made love to her once every three weeks. Though a virgin, she realized his lack of ardor was odd. After about four years, she said on the tape, the royal sex fizzled out altogether. For his part, Charles reportedly told friends that the aroma of vomit wafting under layers of mouthwash and perfume disgusted him, rendering him unable to perform.

  Threatened by her husband’s continued friendship with his mistress and his lackluster performance in bed with his wife, Diana threw shrill temper tantrums whenever he wanted to hunt, garden, meet with friends, or attend to state duties. A single moment spent away from her seemed a painful rejection, a cruel abandonment, crystal clear proof that he didn’t love her. She broke vases, slammed doors, and called him the vilest names, and when five months pregnant, she threw herself down a flight of stairs during a fiery temper tantrum. Whatever feelings he had for his bride quickly dissipated as he ran from her furious accusations into the safe and comforting arms of Camilla.

  Diana told her voice coach that when she confronted her husband about Camilla, Charles r
eplied that he refused to be the only Prince of Wales without a mistress. Undeterred, the princess took her problem directly to the queen, who said she didn’t know what advice to give Diana, because Charles was hopeless.

  Sex between the royal couple ceased forever soon after the birth of their second child, Prince Harry, in October 1984. According to James Hewitt, Diana told him that her former bodyguard Sergeant Barry Mannakee became her lover in 1985. Married with two children, Mannakee was an unlikely lover for a princess, a bit plump, with thinning dark hair and a blue-collar background.

  The kindhearted Mannakee was deeply troubled by Diana’s bouts of sobbing depression; the affair started when he began to comfort her, putting his arms around her. Before Diana and her bodyguard attended public events, Diana often pranced around her room trying on outfits for him, waiting for his compliments. “He’d tell me I looked good. Something my husband no longer did,” Diana said.7

  Mannakee quickly began to rue his involvement with the princess. Diana demanded that he remain at her beck and call twenty-four hours a day, no matter what his obligations to his wife and children. “Once it began, [Mannakee] was very distraught about being caught up with her,” a friend of Charles said. “She was so intense, and he found it very difficult to handle.”8

  She often dismissed her servants and spent time alone with Mannakee at her apartment in Kensington Palace or went out with him for drives that lasted hours. Like so many princesses before her, Diana dreamed of fleeing her gilded cage hand in hand with her lover. “I was quite happy to give all this up,” she told Settelen on the videotape. “…Just to go off and live with him.”9

  Charles, aware of her affair, was at first relieved. Diana might find some happiness with her bodyguard, and with Camilla warming his bed at night he was in no position to cast blame. “I don’t want to spy on [Diana] or interfere with her life in any way,” he told a friend.10 Yet someone at the palace minded. Suddenly the detective was transferred far away from the princess. Diana was furious at the interference in her private life. When Mannakee died shortly after his transfer in a freak motorcycle accident, Diana was certain the palace had arranged his murder.