In 1910 Jack married a debutante named Katherine Harris. Blond, shapely, cultured, and intelligent, Katherine married the actor against her parents’ wishes, yet she was the envy of her peers. However, Jack’s accelerating career, coupled with his impromptu drinking binges, brought their marriage to an end in 1917. On the rebound, he met and married Blanche Thomas, who led suffragette marches and wrote poetry under the pen name Michael Strange. The couple startled New Yorkers of the day with their unisex attire—matching outfits of black velvet. His time with Michael Strange was marked with slugfests and sonnets and the birth of a daughter, Diana. When he divorced the poet in 1928, he renounced all rights to their infant daughter and headed west.
In Hollywood his lust seemed insatiable. Although most starlets succumbed to his charm, he struck out with a young Southern actress named Tallulah Bankhead. One afternoon he invited her to his backstage dressing room and, as Tallulah recalled, started making “little animal noises” as he led her to his casting couch. She refused to have sex with him and escaped intact. He was far more successful with 17-year-old Mary Astor, who would appear in his suite on Sundays, accompanied by her mother. After sending the mother outside onto the veranda to enjoy the sun, he would take Mary into his bedroom.
Soon the golden-haired bit player Dolores Costello caught his eye, and he chose her as his leading lady in The Sea Beast. When Michael Strange saw the love scenes in the film, she said bitterly, “That’s not acting. He’s in love with the girl.” She was right. Barrymore dropped Michael flat for Dolores and conceded, “I’m just a son of a bitch.” He made Dolores his protégée and married her, but he was insecure in the relationship. In a rage of jealousy, he snatched her away from a party when he saw her dancing with David O. Selznick, took her home, and lectured her until daybreak. He accused her of plotting an affair with Selznick and insisted that all married women were constantly unfaithful. On another occasion he physically ejected her obstetrician from the house, claiming she was infatuated with the man. Maybe she was; after divorcing Jack, she married the doctor.
In later years Barrymore was drawn to exotic prostitutes. When he took a trip to India in search of a guru, he wound up in a Calcutta whorehouse, which he described as a “pelvic palace.” He was delighted by the “gentle music that went directly to the scrotum and cuddled there,” and he stayed on for a month. “And so I never met my saint,” he explained. “I met only dancing girls and singing girls, all of them devout students of the Kamasutra, which teaches that there are 39 different postures for the worship of Dingledangle—the god of love.” His sojourn in Calcutta was followed by a visit to a brothel in Madras, where he enjoyed himself so much that he rented the establishment exclusively for himself for an entire week.
His last wife, Elaine Barrie, married the wreckage of the once great actor in 1936. She met him when she was a sophomore at Hunter College and spent the next year chasing him across the country. The day before their wedding he told his cronies, “Gentlemen, you are talking to a man who is about to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel.” On their wedding night he was insanely jealous because she was such a good lover. He demanded to know exactly how, when, and where she had learned her skills. Later he said of Elaine: “That little filly made a racehorse out of me again.” Elaine made a banned film called How to Undress in Front of Your Husband, starring “Mrs. John Barrymore.” Then, aware that he was nearly washed up in films, Elaine took her husband on the road in a play called Dear Children. People flocked to see the great Barrymore, a sick old man, humiliate himself. He vomited onstage and often relieved his bladder in public—once in a hotel lobby sandbox and another time in a socialite’s private elevator.
Aware that he was dying, he faced the end with his own brand of gallantry. When a priest entered his hospital room with an extremely ugly nurse and asked, “Anything to confess, my son?” Barrymore replied, “Yes, father. I confess having carnal thoughts.” Astonished, the priest asked, “About whom?” Barrymore pointed at the ugly nurse. “About her,” he said.
The night Barrymore died, his longtime friend Gene Fowler and his son Will held vigil by his body at Pierce’s Funeral Home. The only person who came to pay him homage was an old prostitute, who knelt in silent prayer and then disappeared into the dark.
John Barrymore had earned over $3 million in his day. When his estate was auctioned off after he died, he was still $75,000 in debt.
HIS THOUGHTS: “It’s a slander to say my troubles come from chasing women. They begin when I catch them.”
—M.S. and the Eds.
The Tramp
CHARLIE CHAPLIN (Apr. 16, 1889-Dec. 25, 1977)
HIS FAME: The king of silent screen comedies, Charles Spencer Chaplin made 80 films and gained international fame with his portrayal of a pathetic yet humorous little tramp in such cinema classics as The Kid (1920), The Gold Rush (1925), City Lights (1931), and Modern Times (1936). He was knighted in 1975 for his achievements.
HIS PERSON: Chaplin learned to sing and dance at an early age by watching his mother, Hannah, perform in the music halls of his native London. His alcoholic father, Charles, left the family shortly after Charlie’s birth, and because Hannah was often confined to mental institutions, Chaplin spent his childhood—when not on the street—in a series of orphanages and workhouses. As an adolescent, he earned a living by working as a lather boy in a barbershop, as a janitor in music halls, and as a bit-part vaudeville performer.
Chaplin cavorting during his later years in Switzerland
Chaplin’s film career began in December, 1913, after he had come to the U.S. on tour with the Fred Karno Company, a British vaudeville troupe. He was spotted on stage by producer Mack Sennett, who signed him to Keystone Films to appear in one-reelers for $150 a week.
The funny man’s salary increased with his popularity; in one year he earned $1 million for eight films. He had made 69 films by the end of 1920, but his output million as he began to control the screenwriting, directing, and producing of his pictures. A moody perfectionist, he often shot as much as 50 times the amount of footage necessary. The Great Dictator, released during WWII, caused some politicians and journalists to believe that Chaplin was a leftist, because in it he made an impassioned plea for the launching of a second front in Europe in order to aid the Russians. His Monsieur Verdoux (1947), which was vehemently attacked by censors and conservatives for its view of contemporary society, was picketed, banned in Memphis, and withdrawn from many theaters. Chaplin left the U.S. in 1952, purportedly to take an extended vacation, but apparently aware that his reentry would be challenged. It was, and he gave up his reentry visa and took up residence in Switzerland, declaring himself a “citizen of the world.” He returned to the U.S. (a country he always professed to love) only once, in 1972, to receive an honorary Academy Award. He won another Oscar in 1973 for his 1952 score of Limelight.
SEX LIFE: Though a “workaholic,” Chaplin made time for sex “between pictures” or, as he crudely put it, in “that hour when [I am] bored.” When he did make the time, his preference was for young girls; the result was four marriages (three to women 18 years of age or younger), 11 children, and a long list of mistresses.
Calling himself the “Eighth Wonder of the World” and proud of his Hollywood reputation for having an oversized appendage, Chaplin relished nothing more than the prospect of deflowering a budding virgin. “The most beautiful form of human life,” he once averred, “is the very young girl just starting to bloom.” His first pubescent protégée was 14-year-old Mildred Harris, whom Chaplin took under his wing in 1916. He promised her a career in pictures, but Mildred was soon pregnant with Chaplin’s child. Although he believed marriage would interfere with his work, there was no escaping the pressure of Mildred’s furious mother, and the two were wed on Oct. 23, 1918. Mildred’s pregnancy turned out to be a false alarm. Although he grew fond of her, Chaplin said Mildred’s mind was “cluttered with pink-ribboned foolishness.” About a year after their marriage, she gave birth to a severely
deformed son, who lived only three days. When the child died, so did the marriage. They were divorced in 1920.
Chaplin loved hiring star-struck starlets to double as his leading ladies both on the screen and in his bed. Such was the case with Lita Grey, who first grabbed Chaplin’s attention in 1914 when she was only six years old. By the time she turned 12, Lita was prancing around Chaplin’s studio under the lovelorn, watchful eye of her domineering director. For the next three years he groomed her for her first romantic fling, and finally, in 1923, during the filming of The Gold Rush, he attempted to molest her in his hotel room. “He kissed my mouth and neck and his fingers darted over my alarmed body,” Lita wrote in her autobiography. “His body writhed furiously against mine, and suddenly some of my fright gave way to revulsion.” But over the next few months he coddled her and charmed her. They were often seen together in the company of Thelma Morgan Converse (later known as Lady Furness), whom Chaplin used as a “chaperone” so that he could date Lita without arousing the suspicions of her mother. Eventually, on the tile floor of his steam bath, he took Lita’s virginity.
Chaplin was well aware of his sex appeal. Once when Lita remarked that he could probably have any one of a hundred girls in two minutes, Chaplin quickly corrected her. “A hundred,” he said. “No, a thousand. But I want to be naughty with you, not with them:” Despite a steady diet of sex, months passed before Lita experienced her first orgasm. Her constant pleas with Charlie to use contraceptives went unheeded; he felt rubbers were “aesthetically hideous.” It was no surprise, then, when Lita became pregnant in 1924. She was 16 years old, he was 35.
Chaplin shuddered when he heard the news, and suggested she have an abortion. Lita refused. Then Chaplin offered her $20,000 if she would marry some other man. Again Lita refused.
Threatened with a paternity suit and a charge of statutory rape, Chaplin agreed to marriage. On the ride from Mexico to Los Angeles after their Nov. 24, 1924, wedding, Chaplin suggested to his pregnant wife that she commit suicide by throwing herself off the train. Yet, despite his hostility, Chaplin managed to separate sex from affection, claiming he could make love to Lita even though he detested her.
Two years and two children later, Lita filed for divorce. Her 42-page legal complaint was made public and was sold on the streets for a quarter a copy. It exposed such shocking and intimate details of their marriage as: Chaplin had no fewer than five mistresses during their two-year marriage; he threatened her with a loaded revolver more than once; he wanted to engage in a ménage à trois and expressed a desire to make love to her in front of an audience; and he frequently belittled her because she refused to perform fellatio on him (she said it was perverted; he insisted “all married people do it”).
Chaplin’s third marriage is masked in mystery. He met actress Paulette Goddard when she was 20. Some journalists claim he married the starlet in April, 1934, while at sea on his yacht, Panacea. Supposedly he paid the skipper to tear the telltale page from the ship’s logbook. While many skeptics insist the couple never married, Chaplin gave 1936 as the year of their marriage. Though Paulette played stepmother to Chaplin’s sons—Charles, Jr., and Syd—for a time, wedded bliss was once again undermined by the demands of filmmaking.
In 1941 Chaplin met 22-year-old Joan Barry when she came to his studio for a screen test. This time it was Chaplin who was pursued, at first quite willingly. But he tried to call a halt to the affair when she began coming to his home at any hour, bathing in the sprinklers, breaking windows, and threatening suicide. When she finally decided she didn’t want to be an actress after all, he gladly gave her the fare back to New York. But in May of 1943 she returned to Los Angeles, broke into his home, and as a consequence spent 30 days in jail. At the time of her arrest, she was three months pregnant. In the meantime, Chaplin met Oona O’Neill, the 17-year-old daughter of famed playwright Eugene O’Neill. While Chaplin’s sons engaged in a friendly rivalry for Oona’s affections, their father easily outdistanced them. In June, 1943, she became his fourth and final wife.
Chaplin’s marriage did not prevent Joan Barry from slapping him with a paternity suit. And, because Chaplin had given her money which she used for traveling back and forth across state lines, the federal government indicted him on morals charges. After Miss Barry’s child was born in October, 1943, a blood test proved that Chaplin was not the father. During the trial the prosecuting attorney referred to Chaplin as “a runt of a Svengali” and a “lecherous hound.” While on the stand, the 55-year-old actor was questioned about his virility and was forced to admit that he was still sexually quite potent. In April, 1944, Chaplin was acquitted; nonetheless, he was ordered to pay child support.
Persecuted by the U.S. press and politicians as a “debaucher” and a “leftist,” he and Oona settled down in Vevey, Switzerland, to a life of domestic happiness and serenity. “If I had known Oona or a girl like her long ago, I would never have had any problems with women. All my life I have been waiting for her without even realizing it,” he said. By the time he passed away, Chaplin had fathered eight more children—the last one when he was in his early 70s.
SEX PARTNERS: Chaplin prided himself on making love to prominent women. Among his conquests were Clare Sheridan, cousin of Winston Churchill; actresses Mabel Normand, Edna Purviance, Pola Negri, and Marion Davies, the starlet who carried on a long-lasting affair with William Randolph Hearst; and Peggy Hopkins Joyce, a Ziegfeld Girl who became one of the wealthiest women in the world by marrying five millionaires. She and Chaplin were sometimes seen swimming nude off the island of Catalina.
QUIRKS: This human sex-machine, who, as a prelude to sex, recited erotic passages from Fanny Hill and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, was good for as many as six “bouts” in succession with scarcely five minutes’ rest in between.
Chaplin also practiced voyeurism. He erected a high-power telescope in his house that gave him a bird’s-eye view of John Barrymore’s bedroom.
HIS THOUGHTS: “No art can be learned at once. And lovemaking is a sublime art that needs practice if it’s to be true and significant.”
—A.K. and V.S.
Coop
GARY COOPER (May 7, 1901-May 13, 1961)
HIS FAME: He won the Oscar for best actor in 1941 for Sergeant York and another in 1952 for High Noon. He was nominated for the award three more times and in 1961 received an honorary Oscar “for his many memorable screen performances” in 95 pictures.
HIS PERSON: Despite his screen persona as an American Everyman, he was hardly unworldly. He was educated in England, safaried in Africa, and conquered women everywhere. Despite his art school background he failed to sell any of his political cartoons, but his horseback riding experience, gained on the family ranch in Montana, did land him a job as a movie stunt man in the early twenties. However he soon grew tired of falling off horses (sometimes as both cowboy and Indian in the same picture), and hired agent Nan Collins to help him get feature roles. She changed his name from Frank to Gary after her hometown in Indiana, and he soon obtained his first starring role, in The Winning of Barbara Worth in 1926. Paramount signed him to a contract, and an unprecedented popularity followed. It wavered but few times. In 1944 his fans reacted negatively to his only political venture—a scathing anti-Roosevelt broadcast during the Dewey campaign. And in 1957 the critics castigated him for playing the lover of 18-year-old Audrey Hepburn in Love in the Afternoon. He was 56 at the time and immediately went out for a face-lift. In 1959, two years before his death from spinal cancer, he converted to Roman Catholicism.
Patricia Neal and Cooper in The Fountainhead
LOVE LIFE: “Yup” and “Nope” weren’t his only trademarks. When asked why she was leaving New York for Hollywood, Tallulah Bankhead said for the money and “to fuck that divine Gary Cooper.” Making love to Gary Cooper became as popular a pursuit among Hollywood’s leading ladies as getting their prints enshrined in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. Director Howard Hawks commented on Cooper’s technique: “If I ever saw h
im with a good-looking girl and he was kind of dragging his feet over the ground and being very shy and looking down, I’d say, ‘Oh-oh, the snake’s gonna strike again.’ He found that the little bashful boy approach was very successful.”
Helen Hayes said she would have left her husband for Coop if he’d only given the word during their filming of A Farewell to Arms. When John Gilbert found out that his own Marlene Dietrich was in love with Cooper, he went off the wagon and drank steadily until his death—the day after Cooper was named her co-star in Desire. Ingrid Bergman’s husband accused her of having an affair with Cooper. Said Bergman, “Every woman who knew him fell in love with Gary.” But a love affair with Cooper? Bergman flatly denied it.
Coop’s wife Rocky, née Veronica Balfe, was a New York debutante and would-be actress whom Coop wed in New York in 1933, saying he was “delighted to be rescued from his career as a playboy.” The couple omitted the word obey from their wedding ceremony and allowed each other plenty of space thereafter, once even arriving at a ski resort separately, rooming separately, skiing briefly together, and then departing separately.
The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People Page 7