And the Rest Is History

by Marlene Wagman-Geller

  The couple married on January 7, 1926, in Cleveland, Ohio; because of their different religions they were wed by a justice of the peace. As the judge was in a hurry to go fishing, the newlyweds’ taxi cost only fifteen cents for waiting time.

  George wrote of their union, “I have to be honest, I was a lousy lover. But Grace married me for laughs, not for sex. Of course, she got both of them—when we had sex, she laughed.” Allen endeared herself to her in-laws by adopting his mother’s favorite phrase, used whenever her son aggravated her: “Nattie, you’re such a schmuck.”

  George’s main “schmuck” moment occurred when the couple got in an argument. Grace wanted to purchase a $750 silver table centerpiece; George didn’t want to buy one at any price. He stormed out and ended up having a one-night stand with a Las Vegas showgirl. Grace knew of his indiscretion, and George was aware that his wife had found out. Burns felt the situation more intolerable than if they had engaged in a full-blown fight. Stricken with guilt, George bought the centerpiece as well as a $10,000 diamond ring. Grace didn’t bring up the affair until seven years later when she was in the silver department at Saks with Mary Benny (Jack’s wife). She found a centerpiece she liked and said to her friend, “You know, I wish George would cheat again. I really need a new centerpiece.”

  In contrast, George’s finest moment occurred after he had been married for twenty-five years. They were in bed when Grace said that the nicest thing about him was that he had never mentioned her withered arm. His response, “Which arm is the bad one?”

  While George was known as “Nattie,” Grace too had a nickname. Once, in the middle of the night, she elbowed her sleeping spouse and asked him to make her laugh. Half asleep, he mumbled, “Googie, googie, googie.” Henceforth that was his wife’s pet name.

  The couple’s comedy success led to radio spots, and in 1940 the comedy duo’s routine revolved around Allen running for president. In one of her “campaign speeches” she joked, “I don’t know much about the Land-Lease Bill, but if we owe it we should pay it.” Another line, “Everybody knows a woman is better than a man when it comes to introducing bills into the house.” She actually drew votes in the November election.

  During George and Grace’s nineteen years in radio, they had an audience of 45 million and a salary of $9,000 a week. As always, George deflected fame from himself to his beloved: “I’m the brains and Gracie is everything else, especially to me.” In 1950, they transitioned to television where they played themselves in a CBS series; in the wrap-up to each episode, Burns would look at Allen and say, “Say good night, Gracie,” to which she would turn to the audience and simply respond, “Good night.”

  Unable to have children because of her health (she had a congenital heart condition), the Burnses adopted a daughter, Sandra Jean, and a son, Ronald John; they agreed to raise them as Catholics with the hope that when they were adults they would decide on which religion was the right one for them. With their two children, thriving career, and a stream of friends including Jack Benny and Fred Astaire visiting their home, 720 North Maple Drive was a happy place to be. George commented on his relationship, “She made me famous as the only man in America who could get a laugh by complaining, ‘My wife understands me.’” Grace was never at a loss for the wisecrack herself. She said of her spouse, “My husband will never chase another woman. He’s too fine, too decent, too old.”

  Grace suffered the first symptoms of a heart condition in the early 1950s, and eight years later, she retired. During her final performance, George said, “Say good night, Gracie,” for the last time. The event made the cover of Life magazine. George remarked of their partnership, “The audience realized I had a talent. They were right. I did have a talent—and I was married to her for thirty-eight years.” George tried to shoulder on alone, but the program folded within the year. He said, “The show had everything it needed to be successful, except Gracie.”

  After waging a battle with heart disease, Grace Allen suffered a heart attack in her home in 1964 at age sixty-nine. At the hospital the doctor asked Burns if he wanted to see Grace one last time. He replied, “Of course I did. I wanted to stand next to her onstage and hear the audience laugh. I wanted to hear that birdlike voice. I wanted her to look up at me with her trusting eyes.”

  Although they were millionaires many times over, at her death, Grace still wore the $20 wedding band that George had given her four decades earlier; like her spouse, it had been irreplaceable. George recounted of Grace’s death: “For the first time in forty years I was alone. So I did the only thing there was to do. I leaned over and I kissed her on the lips.” He said his last words to his first love: “I love you, Googie.” George was left to shoulder on—sans Grace.

  Postscript

  Gracie Allen was entombed in a mausoleum; the inscription on her crypt reads Good night, Gracie.

  In 1996, at age 100, Burns died in his Beverly Hills home of cardiac arrest. He was buried in his best dark blue suit, light blue shirt, and red tie. In his pocket were three cigars, his toupee, his watch that Grace had given him, his ring, his keys, and his wallet with ten hundred-dollar bills, a five, and three ones.

  Upon his interment with Grace, the crypt’s marker was changed to read Gracie Allen and George Burns—Together Again. Grace is buried in the chamber above his because George said he always wanted Grace to have top billing.

  18

  Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir

  1929

  The existentialist “it” couple, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, conducted their unorthodox romance against the backdrop of 1920s Parisian cafés, often with Picasso and one of his mistresses at the next table. During their tête-à-têtes the two discoursed upon events both personal and global. However, the topic upon which they most philosophized was their relationship, one of the most controversial in the history of literary lore.

  The man who was to become renowned as half of France’s greatest intellectual couple was Jean-Paul Sartre, the only child of a woman who, having lost her husband, lavished all her attention on her son. His wealthy mother was the former Anne-Marie Schweitzer, a great-niece of the famed Albert Schweitzer.

  From an early age two traits were to define the boy’s life: his genius and his appearance, which he felt was Quasimodo’s own. He was five feet two and walleyed, and he wore thick glasses. Moreover, his skin and teeth indicated an indifference to hygiene. Not surprisingly, he identified strongly with the tale of Beauty and the Beast. As soon as Jean-Paul could, he escaped his school, where he was its outcast, and headed for Paris to study at the École Normale Supérieure, while simultaneously taking classes at the Sorbonne. In France’s most eminent universities he distinguished himself as much by his brilliance as by his antics; he attended one student ball in the nude and another on the arm of a prostitute clad in a flaming-red dress.

  Jean-Paul’s destiny, Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir, was born in a Left Bank apartment in Paris to a bas bleu (bluestocking) family that had an aristocratic ancestry but very little in the way of finances. Another problem for the family was Simone’s father, George, who began sleeping with his friends’ wives and visiting brothels. His fanatically Roman Catholic wife abhorred his behavior, and violent fights ensued. From this situation Simone originated her philosophy, “Chez l’homme, l’habitude tue le desir” (“With men, habit kills desire”).

  Simone’s lack of dowry made marriage uncertain and, needing to make her own way in the world, she enrolled in the Sorbonne. It would turn out to be an adventure that would shape not just her destiny, but that of her milieu. And in it, she’d meet the man who was to become the love of her life.

  The two brilliant students heard of one another, and Sartre, in the hope of an introduction, sent Simone a drawing of Leibniz (the subject of her thesis) accompanied by an invitation to a group study session.

  The first time Simone met Jean-Paul was on June 8 in Sartre’s room at the Cité Universitaire. For the meeting, Sartre w
ore the least-soiled shirt he possessed and slippers; his room was in shambles. As soon as she started to expound on Leibniz, the group declared the topic boring and broke into a discussion on Rousseau. Nevertheless, the two had found their soul mates, which Simone was to refer to as “their twinness.” So attuned were they to one another, they took to finishing one another’s sentences. Sartre never forgot his first impression of Simone: “I think she’s beautiful. I have always found her beautiful, even though she was wearing a hideous little hat when I met her for the first time. The miracle of Simone de Beauvoir is that she has the intelligence of a man and the sensitivity of a woman. In other words, she is everything I could want.”

  Despite their existentialist studies they were not beyond nicknames: Sartre was “the Kobra” and Simone was “the Beaver” (because of its similarity to the name Beauvoir). From her journal it was apparent that the Beaver was equally smitten: “Sartre corresponded exactly to the dream-companion I had longed for since I was fifteen: he was the double in whom I found all my burning aspiration raised to the pitch of incandescence.”

  A few days after their meeting, Simone and Jean-Paul raced to their universities to discover the results of their agrégation, the fiercely competitive exam. At age twenty-one, Simone was the youngest person ever to pass in philosophy and only the ninth woman to have done so. The only one whose results surpassed her own was Sartre. This was to set a pattern; for the rest of her life de Beauvoir believed she was second only to Sartre.

  In October the inseparable couple strolled beside the pond in Paris’s Luxembourg Gardens, which were graced with the stone statues of the queens of French history. However, Sartre’s mind was not on the past, but on the future, which he wanted to spend with Simone. There, Jean-Paul, the more conventional of the two, proposed. Simone told him “not to be silly,” and reminded him that he had condemned marriage as “a despicable bourgeois institution.” Sartre, ever the thinker, came up with a “romantic” compromise. “What we have is an essential love; but it’s good if we both experience contingent affairs.” The crux of his offer was that they would both have the freedom to experience affairs with other people while remaining committed emotionally to each other. Moreover, as part of their arrangement they would conceal nothing of any liaisons from one another. His philosophical proposal had the same effect on Simone as a diamond ring has on other women. They pledged undying troth, existentialist style. The date of their agreement, October 14, 1929, became their “wedding anniversary”; the pact forever barred the door marked normal. Their legendary union made them pioneers of the sexual revolution, and although their unique pact lasted for half a century, it was to carry carnage in its wake. If the couple expected their arrangement to spare them the heartaches of a conventional marriage, they were sorely mistaken.

  After graduation, Sartre obtained a teaching position in Le Havre and de Beauvoir obtained one in Marseilles, and the two lost no time in turning their pact into reality. It was at her post that Simone began an affair with a Jewish student, Bianca Bienenfeld, who had the misfortune of escaping from anti-Semitic Poland only to find herself in a France that was soon to be occupied by the Nazis. Simone subsequently introduced Bianca to Jean-Paul, who ended up taking her to a hotel, and, after some resistance, as Bianca had never slept with a man, she succumbed to his advances. Soon after, at Simone’s prompting, they both broke up with Bianca, which, when compounded with the Nazi invasion, led to a major nervous breakdown. De Beauvoir and Sartre justified their actions as part of their ideology, which was embodied in Dostoyevsky’s quotation, “If God is dead, than everything is permitted.” Inevitably the two would always gravitate to one another, wherein they subjected their sexual escapades to a postgame analysis over drinks at a café.

  In between their numerous couplings, the couple turned their philosophies into books, which were always edited with each other’s help. De Beauvoir’s greatest work was The Second Sex. In it she argued, “On ne nait pas femme; on le deviant” (“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”). With its publication, de Beauvoir’s scandalous reputation was sealed. She was considered even more outrageous than her cross-dressing female author predecessors George Sand and Colette. The book was promptly blacklisted by the Vatican.

  However, it was in her memoirs where she truly entered the confessional of her and Sartre’s relationship, and they proved that the woman who publicly declared she was immune to jealousy actually writhed in it in private. It would have been far better for Simone’s emotional equilibrium had Sartre left much unsaid; honesty did not prove their best policy.

  Sartre’s first published book was titled Nausea. Its dedication read: To the Beaver. In 1964 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature on his book titled Words; however, he declined the award on the premise that the award was too bourgeois and would therefore compromise his intellectual integrity. His public statement on his refusal: “The writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution.”

  Together de Beauvoir and Sartre traveled the world and met the famous: Roosevelt, Khrushchev, Camus, Picasso, Castro, and Che Guevara. Despite the ever-changing carousel of partners, the couple remained committed to their pact and one another. In tribute to them, the Hotel Mistral on France’s Rue de Cels has a large plaque in front, stating that the legendary couple stayed there on several occasions during the war. Under Sartre’s name is a quotation from a letter he had written to de Beauvoir: “There is one thing that hasn’t changed and cannot change: that is that no matter what happens and what I become, I will become it with you.” De Beauvoir made a statement that is equally emotionally revealing: “Our relationship was the greatest achievement of my life.” At the end, the only thing that could sever their souls was death.

  For years Sartre had subsisted mainly on a regime of vast quantities of coffee, whiskey, cigarettes, sleeping pills, and the drug corydrane (a combination of aspirin and amphetamines), which enabled him to maintain his frenetic regime of writing, and in March 1980, when Simone went to wake up Jean-Paul, she found him gasping for breath. He was diagnosed as suffering from pulmonary edema, caused by hypertension, and was rushed to the hospital. As de Beauvoir was hovering over his bed, while his eyes were closed, Sartre took her by the wrist. He then said his last words to his first love: “I love you very much, my dear Beaver.” The twin was left alone.

  Simone crawled under the sheet to spend one final night with Jean-Paul. The epitaph she wrote for the burial plot they would one day share said, “His death separates us, my death will not unite us. This is how things are. It is enough that our lives were in harmony for so long.”

  Postscript

  After Jean-Paul passed away, the streets of Montparnasse and Saint-Germain were packed with fifty thousand people who had come to pay their last respects. De Beauvoir was chewing on Valium tablets as if they were throat lozenges.

  When the casket arrived at Montparnasse Cemetery, Simone, dressed in black trousers and a sunset-colored turban, climbed out of her car, at which the onlookers burst into applause. Because of the crush of the crowds, someone fell into the open grave. For ten minutes de Beauvoir sat beside the grave staring at the coffin, clutching a rose and weeping. When the undertakers picked up their shovels, she dropped the rose onto the coffin. On the way out she collapsed onto a tombstone.

  This was not Sartre’s final resting place; five days later he was taken to the Pere-Lachaise Cemetery to be cremated. Then his ashes were returned to the Montparnasse Cemetery. De Beauvoir was too weak to attend the cremation.

  Simone passed away on April 14, 1986, six years after Sartre, almost to the day, also from pulmonary edema. More than five thousand people followed her hearse through the streets of Montparnasse. Simone was laid to rest with Sartre. There are always fresh bouquets of flowers on their tomb.

  19

  King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson

  1930

  As with most girls raised on “Once upon a time,” Bessie Warfield dreamed of one
day marrying a handsome prince who would carry her off to the realm of happily-ever-after. In a twist on this tale, she did end up with the prince, albeit one who relinquished his kingdom for the sake of his true-life princess.

  Bessie Warfield was born in Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania, an inauspicious start for the woman who was to send shock waves of scandal throughout the British Empire. Her father died five months after his only child’s birth, and to make ends meet, her mother took in boarders and depended on the largesse of a wealthy uncle, Solomon Warfield. Despite her straitened circumstances, Bessie was spoiled by her widowed parent, and her first words were “me me,” as opposed to “mama.” From a young age she had a desire for high society and named her dolls Mrs. Astor and Mrs. Vanderbilt. Believing the name Bessie was more suitable for a cow than an aspiring socialite, she adopted her more genteel middle name, Wallis. During an argument over her coming-out party, she fought with her uncle, who not only did not throw her a reception, he cut her out of his will.

  Wallis’s first foray into wedlock was with Earl Winfield Spencer, who passed himself off as the son of wealth. After the nuptials, she discovered that Spencer’s background was a fabrication; in reality he was a U.S. navy pilot who was later stationed in the Far East. Wallis joined him there, and while visiting Peking she discovered ancient Asian sex secrets, which were later to stand her in good stead.

  Her second marriage was to the British Ernest Aldrich Simpson, a shipping executive, who left his wife for her. In England, Wallis’s youthful aspirations would soon come true beyond her wildest dreams.

  Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David, of the House of Windsor, was baptized by the Archduke of Canterbury in England. As the eldest son of King George V and the great-grandson of Queen Victoria, he was born with the bluest of blood in his veins and the silverest of spoons in his mouth. Edward became the Prince of Wales on his sixteenth birthday, and from that time he was groomed to be king of Great Britain, Ireland, and the British Dominions beyond the Seas, and Emperor of India. His impeccable pedigree, good looks, charm, wealth, and prestige made him the most photographed celebrity of his era, as well as the world’s most eligible bachelor. However, Edward’s compulsive womanizing dismayed his protocol-conscious parents, and they were soon to discover just how loose a cannon the royal heir could be.