At 44 Rubirosa reappraised his life and his financial position and declared, “Never again will I marry for money.” He took his last bride, 19-year-old French starlet Odile Rodin, in 1957. The pair were still happily wed when Rubirosa, exhilarated by a spectacular win on the polo field, dropped Odile at their apartment and alone continued off into the night to celebrate. After a few drinks at a nightclub near the Champs Élysées, he climbed back into his Ferrari and started home through the Bois de Boulogne. In an accident eerily similar to the one which five years earlier had claimed the life of his good friend Prince Aly Khan, Rubi crashed into a tree. He died en route to the hospital. At least 250 celebrated friends attended his funeral.
—S.W.
I’m a Sad Clown
ANNA NICOLE SMITH (Nov. 28, 1967-Feb. 8, 2007)
HER FAME: Anna Nicole Smith made her fame as the 1993 Playboy Playmate of the Year, then went on to become something of a one-woman carnival sideshow for the next decade and a half, a luminary of the golden age of public confessional and reality television. Her highly publicized marriage to dying octogenarian billionaire J. Howard Marshall and the subsequent U.S. Supreme Court battle over his money, as well as her fluctuating weight, was public fodder, and led to her appear in her own reality show.
HER PERSON: Born Vickie Lynn Hogan in Houston, Texas, Anna Nicole’s father abandoned the family shortly after her birth. She was raised by various family members, and after failing ninth grade, she dropped out of school. She was soon working as a waitress at Jim’s Krispy Fried Chicken in Texas. At seventeen she married the sixteen-year-old cook, Billy Wayne Smith. Her son Daniel Wayne Smith was born the next year; the couple was separated shortly after. To support herself and Daniel, Anna Nicole worked at Wal-Mart, Red Lobster, and as an exotic dancer. It was while dancing at a strip club that she met oil billionaire J. Howard Marshall, 63 years her senior. After auditioning for Playboy, she was chosen by Hugh Hefner to appear on the cover of the March 1992 issue, under the name Vickie Smith. Many, including Anna Nicole, attributed her immediate popularity to her resemblance to Marilyn Monroe. Anna Nicole was one of many women who reinforced the trend for massive surgical breast enhancement. Anna Nicole finally settled on the name Anna Nicole Smith by the time of her election as the 1993 Playmate of the Year. She then married Marshall, who died 13 months later, initiating a bitter legal battle between Anna Nicole and Marshall’s disowned son James Howard Marshall III (technically Smith’s stepson) for the oil magnate’s $1.6 billion estate. She returned to widespread fame as the public face of the TrimSpa diet method (before going on a diet, the grossly overweight Smith had been asked by Conan O’Brien what her “playmate diet” was, to which she immediately replied “fried chicken”), as well as with her own reality TV show, The Anna Nicole Smith Show, which largely put her and her close relations on display like prescription-drugged zoo animals.
It was announced on June 1, 2006 that she was pregnant again and the apparent father was her lawyer Howard K. Stern. Her daughter Dannielynn Hope Marshall Stern was born in September 2006. Her first child, 20-year-old Daniel Smith, died shortly after the new birth, while visiting his mother and Dannielynn in the hospital; an autopsy showed that he had died of a lethal combination of Zoloft, Lexapro and methadone, likely obtained from his mother. Smith herself was found comatose a few short months later in a Hollywood, Florida hotel room and pronounced DOA at the emergency room of an apparently lethal combination of sleeping pills and large numbers of other prescription drugs in her system, many of them prescribed to Howard K. Stern.
LOVE AND SEX LIFE: Anna Nicole’s life is significant not for the sexual debauch but for the depths of misery and isolation she felt about her behavior. A bizarre psychosexual symbol, Smith was paid lucratively to be the object of 13-year-olds’ masturbatory fantasies, and paid even more to be the kept woman of an ancient billionaire—the phrase “gold-digger” was frequently volleyed in the media. Despite Anna Nicole’s profuse claims of love, the couple never lived together. During and after her second pregnancy, a string of men came forward claiming paternity after affairs with Smith, including Zsa Zsa Gabor’s husband Frédéric Prinz von Anhalt, former bodyguard Alexander Denk, and ex-boyfriend Mark “Hollywood” Hatten. It was also rumored that she had used Marshall’s frozen sperm to conceive the child. DNA tests after Smith’s death confirmed that another ex-boyfriend, entertainment photojournalist Larry Birkhead, was the actual father.
In the year before her death, Anna Nicole told Entertainment Tonight that she had been physically and sexually abused as a child, and raped by multiple male family members, which her mother—who also beat her until she left home—knew about but did nothing to stop. Much of her adult behavior is textbook for survivors of sexual abuse. Diaries from the early nineties released after Smith’s death—and subsequently sold on eBay for over $500,000 to a German businessman—opened an insightful window into her private life: she wrote often of her great love for Marshall as well as her disdain for sex—“I hate for men to want sex all the time… I hate sex.”
In her controversial exploitative book Blonde Ambition, television host Rita Cosby suggests that Anna Nicole most enjoyed lesbian liaisons and obsessively watched a videotape of attorney Howard K. Stern having oral sex with Larry Birkhead. In turn, Stern filed a $60 million lawsuit against Cosby and her book’s claims.
HER THOUGHTS: In a video released after her death, Howard K. Stern follows a drugged and pregnant Anna Nicole—who is inexplicably wearing full clown make-up around the house—goading her with the camera, until, cornered, she wails “Iiii’m a saaad cloooown.”
—J.L.
The Italian Sheik
RUDOLPH VALENTINO (May 6, 1895-Aug. 23, 1926)
HIS FAME: Valentino made the woman in the silent-picture audience fantasize that he would take her in his arms, force his lips on hers, and tempt her beyond her power to resist. He was the embodiment of love in its most primal form in such films as The Sheik (1921), Blood and Sand (1922), and The Son of the Sheik (1926).
HIS PERSON: Rodolfo Guglielmi di Valentina D’Antonguolla, from the small town of Castellaneta, Italy, was a wayward boy and a daydreamer. He applied himself just long enough to get through an agricultural school, after which he took a holiday in France and squandered his family’s hard-earned money in night spots and restaurants. He had to borrow funds to get home. His mother was horrified by the change in him; he now associated with show girls and “loose” women. Rather than run the risk of disgrace, his parents shipped him off to the U.S. He arrived in New York City as Rodolfo Guglielmi, age 18, friendless and unable to speak the language.
Rodolfo first sought work as a gardener and was employed on a millionaire’s estate until he wrecked his boss’ motorcycle. He went hungry for a time and was locked out of his hotel room for nonpayment of rent. But he learned English quickly and, with his suave European charms, he procured jobs as a dancing partner for unescorted ladies at cabarets and hotels. Women clamored to dance with the flirtatious young man, and soon he was offered professional dance spots. He tangoed with headliner Joan Sawyer until he appeared as a witness against her in a divorce trial in which Joan was named as a corespondent. After that, he once again had difficulty finding work. In September, 1916, he was arrested, along with a Mrs. Georgia Thym, in a vice and white slavery investigation. “Many persons of means, principally ‘social climbers,”’ said The New York Times, “had been blackmailed after discreet visits to [Mrs. Thym’s] house.” Why Rodolfo was there was never clarified, but he was jailed for a few days as a “material witness.” The charges against him were apparently dropped, but rather than face the possibility of deportation he left New York.
After joining a musical comedy show that folded in Utah, he made his way to San Francisco, where he sold bonds for a while. When that business went under, he took a job as a dancer with an Al Jolson troupe that was moving to Los Angeles. There he tried desperately to break into films. From 1917 to 1921 he played bit parts as a “foreign type
” or a “villain” until scriptwriter June Mathis spotted him and helped him land the role of Julio in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Between 1921 and his death from peritonitis at age 31, the man known as Rudolph Valentino acted in 14 completed films. He was perhaps best loved for his role in The Sheik, in which he portrayed passion personified.
LOVE LIFE: Valentino had a sexual-fantasy film image which no mortal could sustain in real life. But women found the tall, lean young man always polite and impeccably, though sometimes gaudily, dressed. When he arrived in Hollywood, Valentino fell prey to the charms of Jean Acker, an aspiring young actress. They were kindred spirits, both looking for that big break. Their marriage in 1919 was spur-of-the-moment, and as soon as the ceremony was over, Jean knew she had made a “big mistake.” Before Valentino could scoop up his bride for the traditional ride across the threshold, she dashed inside ahead of him and bolted the door. Valentino spent his wedding night alone, and the marriage was never consummated. Friends suspected that Jean had been in love with someone else, and she admitted that she had married the struggling actor out of pity. Rather than set up house with her husband, she moved in with her intimate friend Grace Darmond. (Just prior to Jean’s marriage, the two women had had an argument that split up their friendship; afterward Grace protected Jean from Valentino’s attempts to see his wife.) Ironically, Jean sued Valentino for divorce on grounds of desertion. The actor counter-sued, and after admitting in court that he and his wife had never had sex, he won an interlocutory decree of divorce which became final at the end of a year, in March, 1923.
But late in 1920, while at work on Uncharted Seas, Valentino met Natacha Rambova (her real name was Winifred Shaughnessy), stepdaughter of cosmetics tycoon Richard Hudnut, the woman who became the moving force in his life. As a strong-willed, ambitious teenager, she had run away from home to join Kosloff ’s Russian ballet company. When Valentino met her, she was working on another set with Russian actress—and purported lesbian—Alla Nazimova as a costume and set designer. In Natacha, Rudy found his greatest love; she made him “touch ecstasy,” he once said. They were married before his divorce became final. The groom was promptly arrested on charges of bigamy and jailed for several hours until bond could be posted. Valentino was once again forced to admit in court that his marriage hadn’t been consummated, and the charges were dropped. Though he and Natacha lived apart until they could legally remarry, she became a part of his life and his career. He trusted her judgment and bowed to her decisions. Especially after his great success in The Sheik, she envisioned him as another Douglas Fairbanks, appearing in epic films rather than in the “small, trifling, cheap, commercial pictures” Paramount gave him. For almost two years—late 1922 to early 1924—he made no movies because of contract disputes in which he protested, at her instigation, the parts he was getting and the studio’s treatment of Natacha.
Rudy and Natacha legalized their union in March, 1923, and the newlyweds earned a living by dancing for the Mineralava Company, promoting beauty clay. To further supplement their income, the Valentinos wrote a book of poetry called Day Dreams. The contract problems ended when an independent filmmaker agreed to shoot Valentino’s films and let Natacha act as consultant. She became involved in every facet of his pictures, provoking the press to say that she wore the pants in the Valentino family. They snickered at the platinum slave bracelet she gave him. Her mistake, she said later, was to go overboard in incorporating “beauty” into his films. It was beauty that hurt his career; in the films in which Natacha “meddled,” Valentino seemed effeminate. In Monsieur Beaucaire he wore powdered wigs and a heart-shaped beauty spot on his face. The publicity became vicious: Photoplay ran an article stating that “All men hate Valentino,” and the Chicago Tribune ran an editorial called “Pink Powder Puffs,” which blamed Valentino for the fact that a powder-vending machine had been installed in the men’s room of a Chicago ballroom. Finally, the independent filmmaker refused to work with the Valentinos and scrapped a film they had already begun. United Artists approached Valentino with a lucrative contract, but the company banned Natacha from its sets. Valentino tried to assuage her feelings by backing her in her own endeavor, a movie called What Price Beauty? It failed miserably, and critics thought they detected lesbian-fantasy scenes in it. Once she no longer shared his career, Natacha wanted no part of Rudy’s bed. Valentino insisted that what he really wanted was a homemaker, not a business partner. He told the press, “Mrs. Valentino cannot have a career and be my wife at the same time.” They were divorced in 1925.
The “Great Lover” was a bachelor again. Detectives herded him home if he got too friendly with strange women, because the studio didn’t want more bad publicity if Valentino should turn in a less-than-successful amorous performance. But no one could keep him away from Pola Negri. He met the actress through Marion Davies, the mistress of publisher William Randolph Hearst. As Pola wrote in her autobiography, “Valentino’s true sexuality reached out and captured me.” She was fascinated, she said, by “the way in which he used his body,” and he took her in “a perfect act of love.” Valentino preferred sex first and intimate conversation afterward. She found him a very accomplished lover, able to size up a woman and judge exactly the right approach which would maneuver her into bed. One time he decided that strewing rose petals on Pola’s bed would do the trick, and it did. Pola hoped to marry him, though as a form of New Year’s resolution in 1926 he bet that he would still be a bachelor by 1930. No one knows whether he would have won. After a brief illness, he died in 1926. Thousands of men and women crushed each other to view the body; some women who never knew him committed suicide, and for years a “Lady in Black” visited his grave on the anniversary of his death.
HIS THOUGHTS: “To generalize on women is dangerous. To specialize on them is infinitely worse.”
—W.A.D. and V.S.
II
Acting It Up
MOVIES
The Great Profile
JOHN BARRYMORE (Feb. 15, 1882-May 29, 1942)
HIS FAME: The son of Maurice Barrymore and the brother of Ethel and Lionel Barrymore, Jack was a member of the most distinguished family of actors to appear on the American stage. Although he conquered the legitimate theater with his good looks, he in turn was conquered by a riotous life of dissipation in Hollywood. His career was a duel between his awesome talents and his inexorable drive toward self-destruction.
HIS PERSON: Inherently lazy and an alcoholic from the age of 14, Jack chose the stage as the easiest way of making a living. He had been fired from a job as a caricaturist on a New York newspaper because of his heavy drinking, so he joined an acting troupe on its way to Australia. Before departing, he managed to sleep through the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Soldiers pressed him into clearing rubble, causing his uncle to remark, “It took a calamity of nature to get him out of bed and the U.S. Army to make him go to work.”
He returned to America a polished light comedian and shortly was the toast of Broadway. The young matinee idol was kept busy trying to support his profligate lifestyle, and even though he despised the repetition involved in stage acting, his characterizations of Richard III and Hamlet are still regarded as classics. He made 15 films before following his drinking buddies Ben Hecht, Gene Fowler, and W. C. Fields from New York to Hollywood. At his peak in pictures, he was earning a minimum of $76,250 per film and was nationally acclaimed as “the Great Lover.” However, he hated his pretty-boy image and never missed an opportunity to act in grotesque makeup, relishing roles like Svengali, Mr. Hyde, and Captain Ahab.
Barrymore was a notoriously cruel wit. At the funeral of a friend, he was about to depart with the other mourners when he saw a doddering old man lingering behind, staring down into the grave. Barrymore sidled up to the old fellow, leaned over, and whispered, “I guess it hardly pays to go home.” When he met columnist Louella Parsons at a social function, he commented in a voice loud enough to be heard by the entire roomful of people: “She’s a quaint old udder
, isn’t she?” He described another woman as looking “exactly like a dental filling.”
Barrymore was equally well known for his nearly superhuman drinking, which aged him rapidly. In 1935, in an attempt to dry out, he took his daughter Diana on a cruise on his yacht. All liquor was removed from the boat before it sailed. Yet Barrymore was drunk during the entire voyage, for he found a means of siphoning off alcohol from the yacht’s engine-cooling system.
By the end of his life the once great actor was reduced to a pitiful series of self-mocking roles that reflected his tarnished reputation—that of a lecherous old drunkard. A friend summed up Barrymore’s life by observing, “Nobody can run downhill as fast as a Thoroughbred.” He lived voraciously up to the moment of his death from extreme old age at 60.
SEX LIFE: At age 15, Jack lost his virginity to his stepmother, who seduced him. After that he was to make love to countless women, but he could never really trust any of them. His first romantic scandal solidified this feeling. He had been sleeping with 16-year-old show girl Evelyn Nesbit, the girl friend of society architect Stanford White. Evelyn’s parents discovered the affair and hastily married her off to Harry K. Thaw, a psychotic millionaire. Thaw publicly murdered White out of jealousy, and Barrymore was forced to hide out for months until the case blew over.
The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People Page 6