As the oldest child, Josephine was sent out to do domestic work for white families. She never forgot the cruelties that were inflicted on her, but she also remembered the kindness of one family, the Masons, who took her to the theater for the first time and encouraged her to build her own makeshift theater in their basement. When Josephine confided to Mrs. Mason that Mr. Mason had come into her room at night and stood beside her bed breathing heavily, she was sent back to her family.
While job hunting, 13-year-old Baker walked into the Booker T. Washington Theater and applied for work. That evening she left St. Louis employed as singer Bessie Smith’s maid. On Bessie Smith’s advice, Baker became a chorine at New York’s Cotton Club.
In 1925 Baker went to Paris as part of La Revue Nègre. Asked to dance at the prestigious Folies Bergère, Baker prepared for opening night by holding bowls of cracked ice against her bosom to make her breasts firm and pointed. In her initial appearance onstage, she impressed the audience with her satin-like hair and her costume, which consisted of a belt of bananas and nothing else. Her wildly darting image was reflected a thousand times as she danced before a background of mirrors. Improvising, Baker sang and closed her act by leaping into a banana tree, spreading its leaves, crossing her eyes, and waving to the audience, which was applauding thunderously. To the French, this was the epitome of “le jazz hot.” Overnight, Josephine Baker became a sensation and the reigning queen of the Folies.
With the advent of WWII, Baker became a member of the French Resistance, delivering to the Allies the original copy of an Italian-German codebook. Baker’s marriage to a Jewish businessman, Jean Leon, brought her to the attention of the Gestapo. They decided to liquidate her. According to the plan, Hermann Göring invited her to dinner. Her fish course contained cyanide. Forewarned, Baker excused herself from the table as soon as the fish was served, saying she had to go to the powder room. There she intended to drop herself down the laundry chute into the arms of Resistance members below. Before she could leave the table, however, Göring—gun in hand—ordered her to eat the fish. She ate it, complained of dizziness, stumbled to the powder room, and lowered herself into the laundry chute. Resistance members broke her fall and rushed her to an underground clinic, where her stomach was quickly pumped. After lingering between life and death for a month, she slowly recovered. Word was put out that she had died in Morocco. The poisoning episode caused her to lose all her hair (she wore wigs from then on). Her courage won her the Croix de Guerre, the Rosette of the Resistance, and the Legion of Honor. In the decades following the war, Baker returned to the stage. Also, to prove universal brotherhood was possible, she adopted 11 children of different races and religions from places as diverse as Korea, Algeria, and Israel.
SEX LIFE: Baker’s serious affairs began when she moved to Paris at the age of 19. She fell in love with a fair-haired, handsome Frenchman named Marcel, who set her up in a luxurious apartment on the Champs Élysées which she called her “marble palace.” Marcel appeared every evening and brought live gifts with him—white mice, a parrot, a miniature monkey. At last Baker asked him when they would be married. He said marriage was impossible because she was black and a public dancer. The next day she walked out on her palace and her menagerie.
Baker’s first distinguished admirer was a Moroccan she called “the Sheik of Araby.” He sent her a tame panther wearing a diamond necklace, and took both Baker and the panther to dinner. However, she decided that having sex with him was impossible. He was short and chubby, and she was tall. “The problem,” she said, “was that when I was young I used to like to do it standing up, and if I had ever done it with him, he would have been jabbing me in the knees.”
In 1929 Crown Prince Adolf (future King Gustavus VI) of Sweden, entranced by Baker, visited her dressing room and invited her to his country. Although Baker knew the prince was married, she sent him a one-word telegram later that night: “When?” The following morning she had his reply: “Tonight.” That evening Baker boarded the prince’s private railroad car with its gold interior and Aubusson carpets. In her sleeping quarters was a swan-shaped bed covered with satin sheets to highlight the shapely contours of her dusky body. After she had settled into bed, the Prince arrived. When she complained of being cold, he warmed her heart by fastening a three-strand diamond bracelet on her arm. While grateful, she told him that her other arm was still cold. He roared with laughter and gave her another bracelet. Undressing, he pulled down the sheets and joined her, kissing her softly. They maneuvered their bodies together and allowed the undulating movements of the railroad car to set the tempo of their lovemaking. “He was a real fox,” Baker said afterward. “He was my cream and I was his coffee, and when you poured us together, it was something!”
They spent a warm winter month together in his isolated summer palace, making love when indoors and playing like children in the snow outdoors. The last night of their idyll he draped a floor-length sable coat around her, took her in his arms, and they danced a silent waltz. They never met again.
At a cabaret, Josephine Baker was introduced to Count “Pepito” Abatino, an Italian administrator. They danced a tango, which led to a night of lovemaking. Before long Abatino had become her lover and manager. They never married, but Baker always presented him as her husband. He was a jealous lover as well as a tough manager, sometimes locking her in her room to force her to work on dance routines. The affair lasted 10 years and ended in New York when Baker decided she wanted to be free of his domination.
On Nov. 30, 1937, Baker married French industrialist Jean Leon. He wanted children and a home in the country. Together they leased Les Milandes, a château that became her dream house. When Baker became pregnant but miscarried, she lost not only the baby but Leon as well. The judge who dissolved their marriage in 1939 said, “They were two strangers who never really met.”
It was five years before Baker fell in love again. In 1933 she had met Jo0 Bouillon, a French orchestra leader, when he came backstage at the Folies to ask her for an autographed picture. They met again in October of 1944 when she asked Bouillon to donate his services to the cause of Free France. They began seeing each other. On June 3, 1947, they were married. During their marriage Baker purchased the château she had once leased, Les Milandes, and had it renovated into a resort. She incurred huge debts, placing tremendous pressure on the relationship with her husband. Her marriage to Bouillon lasted 13 years.
In her last years Josephine Baker gave more and more time to her adopted children and to her growing struggle against racism, especially in the U.S., where many of her bookings had been canceled. Ironically, it was following a triumphant tour of the U.S. that Baker died of a heart attack in Paris at the age of 68.
—F.C.
The Girl Who Had It
CLARA BOW (Aug. 6, 1905-Sept. 27, 1965)
HER FAME: As F. Scott Fitzgerald embodied the Roaring Twenties in literature, she embodied it on film, having 48 films to her credit by the age of 25. In 1927 she was receiving 40,000 fan letters a week.
HER PERSON: Clara’s was the classic Hollywood story—up from obscurity at age 19 to become the reigning sex goddess of her time, collecting the obligatory emotional scars all along the way. Father Robert was often either unemployed or footloose; Mother Sarah was bitter. She’d stick Clara in the closet of their Brooklyn tenement while she turned tricks for food and rent money. Once, when she learned that Clara and her father were submitting a picture of Clara for a magazine beauty contest, she crept into Clara’s bedroom with a knife, vowing that her daughter wouldn’t live to be one of those whores who primps before cameras for the pleasure of men. Luckily Clara escaped into the bathroom that night, with her life and her career. She won the contest and an initial stab at Hollywood, which eventually led to her signing with Paramount.
She became one of the studio’s biggest stars, earning $7,500 a week. And thanks to the insomnia which resulted from her mother’s late-night threat on her life, she was able to live in a manner that embell
ished her on-screen image. She’d speed up and down Sunset Boulevard in an open convertible accompanied by a couple of chows who matched her hennaed hair. She’d run up fabulous gambling tabs in Las Vegas. And she was perfectly scandalous in her personal affairs. In 1931 those affairs brought her down when she sued Daisy DeVoe, her private secretary, for embezzling $16,000 from her. During the trial, the judge would not permit Daisy to discuss Clara Bow’s sexual escapades, so Daisy sold her exposé to Bernarr Macfadden’s New York Evening Graphic (incidentally, the authors of this book scoured the U.S. for a copy of the exposé issue, but no copy was available anywhere). Daisy was found guilty and sent to jail for a year. Word got out about Clara’s private life and damaged her career.
SEX LIFE: In her heyday Clara reputedly made love to Gilbert Roland, Victor Fleming, Gary Cooper, John Gilbert, Eddie Cantor, Bela Lugosi, and the entire University of Southern California football team.
She met Roland, Paramount’s Latin lover, during their filming of The Plastic Age. He was the first man she ever cared about, she said, but it wasn’t enough for the temperamental Roland, who went into fits of jealousy at Clara’s continued interest in other men. When he proposed marriage as a remedy for his insecurity, she dismissed the proposal, saying that no man would ever own her.
Thus she set the pattern for most of her relationships with men. She’d love them, but never enough to satisfy their egos. Director Victor Fleming was 20 years older than Clara and had vast prior experience with women, but neither fact helped him cope with her, especially when he learned that after they’d finish having sex together, she’d climb into her roadster and head off for a session with another, usually younger man.
Most notable amongst those younger men was Gary Cooper, who had a bit part in It and was dubbed the “It” boy for his involvement with Clara, the quintessential “It” girl. In later years Coop tried to dismiss his relationship with Clara as just so much publicity, but Clara told delicious stories of his bathing her and her dogs in the morning and making love to her all night.
There was the “Thundering Herd,” the University of Southern California’s football team, which Clara entertained on a regular basis at her Beverly Hills home. Those with a vested interest in the Trojan sports program have always maintained that the post-game get-togethers at Clara’s place were nothing more than good, clean fun, but neighbors and “friends” told tales of nude football games on the front lawn and all-night orgies. The legend grew that Clara introduced the team concept to lovemaking by taking on more than a single player at a time. Whatever the truth to the stories, a sign was eventually posted in the Trojan locker room making Clara Bow off limits.
Clara took a brief fancy to East Coast football in the person of Robert Savage, a millionaire’s son who played for Yale. Unlike most of Clara’s other lovers, who merely went off and brooded when they found out that they weren’t number one in her program and number one in her heart, Savage tried to kill himself by slashing his wrists and letting the blood flow onto an autographed picture of Clara. Clara exclaimed, “Jesus Christ, he’s got to be kidding. Men don’t slash their wrists, they use a gun!”
Harry Richman, top-salaried Broadway singing star in the 1930s, did not become a Hollywood immortal like some of Clara’s other lovers, although he tried to do so by flaunting their relationship. He boasted that she was the only woman who could ever keep up with him sexually. She gave him a $2,000 ring. He gave her a child (which she had aborted), put detectives on her tail when he was out of town, and even followed her himself to see where she went after their nights together. Needless to say, they did not live happily ever after.
She might have achieved that blissful state with William Earl Pearson, a Texas doctor who performed an emergency appendectomy on her during the filming of Dangerous Curves. She loved him enough to try monogamy for a while (gifting him with a $4,000 watch), but when he returned to his wife in Texas, Clara was left with nothing but an alienation-of-affections suit that had been filed against her, which was settled out of court.
There had been actors, ballplayers, stunt men, airmen, and guys off the street, but finally there was Rex Bell, a cowboy actor and staunch Republican who twice became lieutenant governor of Nevada during the 1950s. Clara married Bell in 1931 and he saw her through the Daisy DeVoe trial, a failed comeback in the early 1930s, and a series of emotional breakdowns. Because of her unstable emotional condition, she lived apart from Bell and their two sons, seeking help in various sanitariums. In 1961, the 59-year-old Bell died of a heart attack. Clara succumbed four years later while watching television with a nurse-companion in her Los Angeles home.
HER WORDS: “Most men want me on their terms. The trouble with men is that they all want to make you over into something else. It burns me up. Especially since it’s me as I am that they fall for. The more I see of men, the more I like dogs.”
—D.R.
Clubfooted Libertine
LORD BYRON (Jan. 22, 1788-Apr. 19, 1824)
HIS FAME: Considered one of the great 19th-century poets, George Gordon, Lord Byron, was the incarnate symbol of romanticism. In his works he created the “Byronic hero,” a mysterious and lonely young man defiantly hiding some unspeakable sin committed in his past. Byron’s autobiographical masterpiece, Don Juan—left unfinished upon the poet’s death—won universal acclaim for its combination of lyrical storytelling and satirical realism.
Byron at age 26
HIS PERSON: A British lord by age 10, young Byron was influenced adversely by an unstable mother and a foot so crippled that he once begged a doctor to amputate it. Nevertheless, he became an excellent distance swimmer, easily lasting for 5 mi. or more. This exercise did not end his constant battle against obesity, and at 17 he entered Cambridge University carrying 212 lb. although he was only 5 ft. 8 in. tall. To maintain his weight at a reasonable level in adult life, Byron fasted frequently while taking drugs to reduce, and kept to a fairly steady diet of hard biscuits plus a little rice, washed down by soda water or diluted wine. An occasional gorging on meat and potatoes when he could no longer resist the temptation triggered an immediate digestive upset and added rolls of fat about his middle. Byron hoped that his lifelong Spartan regimen would also “cool his passions,” but it didn’t. In 1809 he sailed with John Cam Hobhouse for a two-year “grand tour” of Europe. Upon his return, Byron published Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, a fictionalized narrative of the trip done in Spenserian stanzas, and the poem brought instant fame. He followed the success quickly with a series of Greco-Turkish tales (The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair, The Siege of Corinth, and others) that enhanced his reputation further. Driven from England by public reaction to his sex life, Byron made his way to Italy. He continued to write brilliantly, producing Manfred (1817) and Beppo (1818) along with Don Juan (1819-1824). Intrigued by Balkan politics, Byron slipped into Greece to fight against its Turkish masters but perished from malaria at Missolonghi before achieving battlefield honors. His death fulfilled a fortune-teller’s prophecy, made to his mother in 1801, that he would die in his 37th year.
SEX LIFE: Byron was sexually initiated at age nine by the family nurse, May Gray. The devout, Bible-quoting Scottish girl seized every chance for three years to creep into the child’s bed and “play tricks with his person.” Arousing the boy physically by every variation she could think of, May also allowed him to watch while she made love with her uninhibited lovers. Thus primed, Byron—eager for continued stimulation—moved with ease into sexual activities during four years at Harrow, one of England’s prestigious boarding schools. There he preferred the company of young boys: the Earl of Clare, the Duke of Dorset, among many others. Although he may have been bisexual, the thought of having sex with adult males repelled him. One such proposition from 23-year-old Lord Grey de Ruthyn, tendered while Byron was visiting on holiday from Harrow, sent the future poet fleeing in terror. In 1805, entering Trinity College (Cambridge), Byron fell in love with choirboy John Edleston, who gave him a heart-shaped carnelian to seal t
heir friendship. Byron combined three years of intermittent studies with an orgiastic existence in London, staging bacchanalian revelries that nearly killed him. Living on laudanum (a tincture of opium), he cavorted nightly with prostitutes while maintaining at least two mistresses, one of whom he dressed in boy’s clothing and passed off as a cousin. The deception ended when “the young gentleman miscarried in a certain family hotel in Bond Street, to the indescribable horror of the chambermaids.”
Leaving England for the Continental tour in 1809, Byron spent almost two years traveling through Greece, Albania, and Asia Minor. In Turkey he was fascinated that the major physical difference seemed to be “that we have foreskins and they none,” and that “in England the vices in fashion are whoring and drinking, in Turkey, sodomy and smoking. We prefer a girl and a bottle, they a pipe and pathic.”
The publication of Childe Harold in March, 1812, brought Byron into contact with Lady Caroline Lamb, the uninhibited 27-year-old wife of William Lamb, who later became Lord Melbourne, prime minister of England. Meeting Byron, she confided in her journal that he was “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” Her slender, boyish figure met Byron’s standards and they were soon lovers. A notorious exhibitionist and outspoken eccentric, “Caro”—as Byron fondly called her—proved a unique sex partner. In August, a startled Byron opened an envelope to find a thatch of Caro’s curly black pubic hair and a long note. “I cut the hair too close,” she wrote, “and it bled. Do you not the same.” She asked for a like gift, admonishing him to be careful when handling the scissors. Amused, Byron complied but soon tired of her constant presence and erratic behavior. With the help of his good friend Lady Melbourne (who was also Caro’s mother-in-law) he broke off the affair in December. Caro burned Byron in effigy, vowed revenge, and bided her time. Fleeing from Caro’s fury, he moved in with Jane Elizabeth Scott, the 40-year-old wife of Edward Harley, the Earl of Oxford. Happily making love to Lady Jane until the following June, Byron was the latest in a series of lovers she had enjoyed during her marriage. (The Oxford children were known as the “Harleian Miscellany” because of their uncertain paternity.)
The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People Page 2