HIS THOUGHTS: “My mother died on me when I was nine years old. What does she expect me to do? Do it all by myself?”
—A. W.
The Juggler
W. C. FIELDS (Jan. 29, 1880-Dec. 25, 1946)
HIS FAME: William Claude Dukenfield was the product of English working-class parents who lived in Philadelphia, a city he always spoke of with disgust. He left home at the age of 11 to pursue a career as a vaudeville juggler, adopting the stage name W. C. Fields. In 1915 he settled in New York and worked in various Broadway reviews, notably the Ziegfeld Follies. He moved to Hollywood to break into the movies, and people soon flocked to their local theaters to see the man with the bulbous nose, cigar, and top hat be tormented by children and dogs in films such as Tillie and Gus (1933), The Bank Dick (1940), and Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941).
LOVE LIFE: Much of Fields’ boyhood was spent in poverty, and as an adult he was constantly fearful of being broke. As a result, his girl friends found him a tight man with a dollar.
In 1900 Fields married Hattie Hughes, his vaudeville assistant, who bore him a son named Claude. Although Fields faithfully supported his wife and child for 40 years, he called them “vultures” who were always after his money, and he very rarely saw them. A typical Fields letter to Hattie in 1933 began, “I am in receipt of your complaint No. 68427.” Fields and Hattie never obtained a legal divorce.
For seven years during the 1920s, Fields shared an apartment with Ziegfeld show girl Bessie Poole, who also bore him a son. Although Fields never publicly acknowledged the child, he sent Bessie a check every month. Friends said of Fields that he changed mistresses every seven years, but the truth is that few of his loves lasted that long. His stinginess, his drinking, and his unwarranted suspicion were more than most women could take. In Hollywood, Fields began the practice of hiring detectives to follow his girl friends. One of them, a New York show girl, fell in love with her detective and married him.
In 1932, when Fields was 54 years old, he was introduced to 24-year-old Carlotta Monti, a dark-haired, olive-skinned beauty of Italian-Mexican-Spanish descent. He doffed his stovepipe hat, bowed low, and said, “It is a pleasure, my dusky beauty.” On their first date Monti asked him if he had ever been married. “I was married once,” Fields replied. “In San Francisco. I haven’t seen her for many years. The great earthquake and fire of 1906 destroyed the marriage certificate. There’s no legal proof. Which proves that earthquakes aren’t all bad.”
In her book, W.C. Fields and Me, Carlotta describes their love life: “Beginning with the first intimate night together when we consummated our love … it was ecstasy…. Woody [her pet name for Fields] seemed starved for real love and affection, and I gave it to him in large quantities…. He was as much a perfectionist in his lovemaking as he was in his juggling. He never dropped a cigar box accidentally, and by the same token, he never fumbled during a golden moment.” However, alcohol eventually disrupted his sex drive completely.
Carlotta put up with Fields’ eccentricities for the last 13 years of his life. He would sometimes leave piles of money around the house to test her. Wise to him, she would add $5 to the pile to confuse him. When it came her turn to be followed by a detective, she responded by leading the man on long meandering drives around the California countryside, knowing that Fields would be charged by the mile. As soon as he got his first bill from the detective agency, Fields ended the surveillance.
When Fields died in 1946, his final words were, “Goddamn the whole friggin’ world and everyone in it but you, Carlotta.”
HIS THOUGHTS: “Women are like elephants to me: I like to look at them, but I wouldn’t want to own one.”
—M.J.T. and D.W.
In Like Flynn
ERROL FLYNN (June 20, 1909-Oct. 14, 1959)
HIS FAME: One of the greatest swashbucklers in motion picture history, Errol Flynn was among Hollywood’s top money-making stars in the late 1930s and early 1940s, appearing in such films as Captain Blood, The Charge of the Light Brigade, and The Adventures of Robin Hood.
HIS PERSON: In his prime Flynn stood 6 ft. 2 in., and his astonishingly handsome looks rivaled those of any idol of the silver screen. Born in Hobart, Tasmania, of Irish-American parentage, Flynn was a chronic runaway as a youth. He left home for good after finishing secondary school and spent the next few years traveling the South Seas. In the early 1930s he was leading a tour expedition of New Guinea when he met film producer Charles A. Chauvel. Soon after, Chauvel cast him as Fletcher Christian in the semidocumentary In the Wake of the Bounty. Bitten by the acting bug, Flynn landed a contract with Warner Bros. and spent the next 15 years playing action-adventure heroes in sea tales, costume epics, and war pictures.
In the 1950s Flynn moved first to Europe and then to Jamaica, meanwhile making a series of unsuccessful movies. He aged quickly—no doubt owing to high living, alcohol, and narcotics—and died of a heart attack at 50.
SEX LIFE: Errol Flynn boasted that he had spent between 12,000 and 14,000 nights making love. If he never actually reached that figure, it wasn’t for lack of trying. Although he had three wives—actresses Lili Damita and Patrice Wymore, and Nora Eddington—Flynn did not practice fidelity during any of these unions and preferred to live apart from his wives and four children, once claiming, “The only real wives I have ever had have been my sailing ships.”
Biographers have surmised that his emotional indifference to women was due to his relationship with his own mother, Marelle Young Flynn, who instilled in her son the idea that both sex and his genitals were dirty. Flynn was also obsessed with a fear of castration, having once been attacked by a knife-wielding Indian rickshaw driver. The blade, which barely missed Flynn’s organs, left a deep scar in his groin.
Despite his constant sexual urges, Flynn rarely bragged about his endurance as a lover, but did claim to practice Oriental sexual techniques learned during a stay in Hong Kong. He was concerned about being able to perform whenever called upon, and was known to apply a pinch of cocaine to the tip of his penis as an aphrodisiac. His enjoyment of sex was heightened by watching other couples make love at the same time, and he also got a tremendous kick out of exhibiting himself—with a full erection—to his “straight” male friends. Flynn even installed a one-way mirror in his home so that he could observe his houseguests making love. He often indulged his taste for kinky sex in Mexico, where one could see men and women copulate on stage or have intercourse with animals. Flynn made no apologies for his self-proclaimed “wicked ways” and even urged his son, Sean, to follow in his footsteps, once sending the lad $25 for “condoms and/or flowers.”
SEX PARTNERS: Certainly, Errol Flynn had a penchant for teenage girls. Nora Eddington was barely 18 and pregnant when they married, and at the time of his death he was planning to marry Beverly Aadland, then 17. When not working at the studio, Flynn would often drive with his good friend David Niven to Hollywood High School, where he would linger on the sidewalk and lament that the beautiful young girls he saw were “jailbait” or “San Quentin Quail.”
In fact, Flynn’s reputation as a lover stemmed partly from his being charged with statutory rape. In 1942 he was accused of having had intercourse with Betty Hansen, 17, and with Peggy LaRue Satterlee, 16. According to Hansen, a waitress with aspirations of becoming a studio employee, she had attended a tennis party at the house of one of Flynn’s friends. She admitted to having flirted with Flynn, but feeling ill, she had gone upstairs to lie down. Flynn followed her and, meeting with no resistance on her part, took off her clothes except for her shoes and socks. Then, she explained, he “put his private parts in my private parts.” Satterlee, who claimed Flynn had forced her to have intercourse twice on his schooner Sirocco, said that the actor had not made any effort to bare her feet either.
After a much-celebrated trial, Flynn was acquitted amid suspicions that the charges were not based on fact but reflected the desire of certain corrupt city officials to extort large bribes from the studio bosses.
Also, the defense was able to establish that pending charges against the two girls—Hansen for oral intercourse and Satterlee for an illegal abortion—had been dropped after they agreed to testify against Flynn. Neither of these activities had involved Flynn.
Flynn emerged from the trial characterized as a “charming rogue,” his popularity enhanced, and during the latter part of WWII, servicemen began to use the expression “in like Flynn” to denote a successful night with a woman. Flynn reportedly grew to despise both this expression—which implied he was a fun-loving rapist—and the snickers that greeted him when he walked into a room, but he still had not learned his lesson. Years later he was charged with raping a little-known attractive young French girl. Again he was acquitted, but the publicity intensified his self-destruction, which by this time included a dependence on vodka and an addiction to morphine.
Some 20 years after his death, in 1980, Flynn was once again in the news. Author Charles Higham published a biography, Errol Flynn: The Untold Story, which claimed that the swashbuckling actor had aided the Nazi and Japanese causes during WWII. Further, Higham claimed that Flynn had been bisexual, and had participated in homosexual affairs with actor Tyrone Power and writer Truman Capote. Two of Flynn’s daughters, Deirdre and Rory, angered by the allegations in what they labeled “a dirty book,” determined to prove the author’s so-called facts were falsehoods. To clear their father’s name, they considered filing suit against Higham.
HIS THOUGHTS: “There is only one aphrodisiac—the special woman you love to touch and see and smell and crush.”
—A.L.G. and the Eds.
“Pa”
CLARK GABLE (Feb. 1, 1901-Nov. 16, 1960)
HIS FAME: Clark Gable reigned as “King of Hollywood” for more than 30 years, starring in 61 films between 1930 and 1960. Often cast as the ultimate macho male, Gable became one of the screen’s greatest sex symbols. His portrayal of a newspaper man in It Happened One Night won him an Academy Award, but he gained his most lasting fame playing the role of Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind.
HIS PERSON: Gable was raised by a strong-minded but indulgent stepmother without much interference from his itinerant oil-driller father. Never a schol-ar, Gable dropped out of high school in his junior year, and after putting in some time at a tire factory in his home state of Ohio and in the Oklahoma oil fields, he decided to pursue his dream of becoming an actor. Ignoring his father, who said that “acting was for sissies,” Gable worked his way across the country as a roustabout in a traveling tent show. Ending up in Portland, Ore., he joined a small Portland theater group in which he received his first real dramatic training. More interested in the theater than in the movies, Gable nevertheless went to Hollywood and began working as an extra on movie sets. Although studio executives were slow to realize Gable’s potential, women quickly recognized his sexual magnetism. When MGM caught on, the studio fixed his decaying, crooked teeth and began grooming him as an “outdoorsy, he-man” type. Gable remained modest even after his rise to stardom and would make a point of striding through screaming hordes of fans to sign autographs, saying that if it weren’t for them, he wouldn’t have a job. An impeccable dresser who carried his 6-ft. 1-in. frame with grace, Gable was obsessed with cleanliness. He took several showers a day and shaved not only his armpits but his chest as well. Somewhat of a loner, he preferred the company of extras and studio technicians—men with whom he could drink and fish and hunt—to that of his movie-star peers. He refused to let his fame go to his head and mumbled after winning the Oscar, “I’m still going to wear the same size hat.”
Carole Lombard and Gable
SEX LIFE: That women loved Gable and he loved them back is made evident by the dozens—perhaps hundreds—of affairs he carried on throughout his career. Some said he had a fixation for older women, and pointed to his first two marriages as proof. But those marriages seem to have been more a matter of convenience than of passion. Gable’s first wife, Josephine Dillon, who was his acting coach and 17 years older than him, later claimed that she and Gable had no physical relationship, that theirs was a marriage “in name only.” Gable next married a wealthy 46-year-old Houston divorcée, Ria Langham, who encouraged and mothered him considerably at the beginning of his career. Gable himself admitted to a preference for older women and once remarked, “The older woman has seen more, heard more, and knows more than the demure young girl … I’ll take the older woman every time.”
Still, Gable wasn’t firmly trapped in an older-woman syndrome. During one of his first leading-man roles he jumped into a red-hot affair with his co-star, Joan Crawford, who was 27 at the time. Crawford was to credit Gable later with “animal” attractiveness, which she attributed to the fact that “he had balls.” She added that she didn’t believe that any woman who worked with Gable “did not feel twinges of sexual urge beyond belief.” Although Crawford and Gable were to remain friends for many years, they stoically cooled their romance on studio orders since they were both married to other people at the time.
Then he met Carole Lombard, the Hollywood screwball actress who was to become the greatest love of his life. Gable, who tended to be quiet and reserved, was instantly attracted to the petite, blond actress’ zaniness and ribald humor. The two adopted the incongruous nicknames of “Ma” and “Pa” for each other and became inseparable. Lombard loved to pull pranks on Gable such as leaving a gift-wrapped knitted “cock-warmer” in his dressing room with a note: “Don’t let it get cold. Bring it home hot for me.” Irreverent about his sexy image, she told him that she’d arranged to have him make his “cockprint” as well as his footprints and handprints in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. Lombard was once heard to remark, “I adore Clark, but he’s a lousy lay.”
Lombard gamely trekked alongside Gable on his fishing and hunting expeditions, sleeping in the open and once even making love in a duck blind. When Gable’s divorce from Ria became final, the two eloped to Kingman, Ariz. After their marriage, Lombard tamed down considerably in order to fit in with Gable’s sedate ways, causing a friend to comment that she was a different person from the one who had once flippantly remarked during a press conference that Gable wasn’t circumcised. The only thing that marred the happiness of “Hollywood’s favorite couple” was their failure to have children. “They were forever checking sperm,” a friend said, and “tried every position known to humans,” according to another. “They would have done it hanging out a window if somebody said you got pregnant that way.” But no matter how much Gable loved Lombard, he would never be a one-woman man, and Lombard would periodically explode when rumors grew too hot about Gable’s latest escapade with his current leading lady.
Gable was devastated by Lombard’s death in a plane crash just three years after they were married. “Ma’s gone,” he said brokenly to a group of friends when her body was finally recovered. He was to spend the rest of his life searching for another Lombard. After going through an endless parade of women, ranging from a Palm Beach socialite to the daughter of a fishing resort owner, he recklessly plunged into a marriage with Lady Sylvia Ashley. The match ended quickly, and Gable later was to say he was drunk when he married her. At the age of 54, Gable was wed a fifth and final time to a former actress 10 years his junior, who was as close to a facsimile of Lombard as he was apt to find. Fair-haired, tiny, lovely Kay Spreckels was willing to fit herself into the mold set by Lombard, and she and Gable led a peaceful, quiet life on their ranch until he died of a heart attack after making The Misfits. They had one son, John, who was born five months after Gable’s death.
SEX PARTNERS: Gable was promiscuous and often indiscriminate about whom he went to bed with. Screenwriter Anita Loos noted that Clark had “that old early American male idea that you must take on any girl that comes your way.” Although the King could snap his fingers and get almost any woman he wanted, at times he preferred to go to bed with high-priced call girls. Asked why, when he could get it for free, Gable replied, “Because I can pay her to go away. The othe
rs stay around, want a big romance, movie lovemaking. I do not want to be the world’s greatest lover.” He also did not confine himself to attractive women. When an army buddy with whom he was stationed in Europe during WWII asked Gable why he was going out with a certain “dog,” Gable said, “Well, she’s there.” Gable had one long-term love affair—it lasted over a decade—with a diminutive, plain-looking Hollywood female writer that was a secret to all but a few of his intimates. He slept with this woman regularly, and she once remarked to her closest friend, “Whenever Clark got on top of me and entered me, and started going, it never amounted to much and was never very good. But then I would open my eyes and realize this was the Clark Gable—Gable himself—and only then would I truly feel excited.”
Gable also took advantage of a ready supply of leading ladies, making love to them both on and off the screen. Once, when looking at an MGM publicity photo of all the studio’s female stars, Gable exclaimed admiringly, “What a wonderful display of beautiful women, and I’ve had every one of them!” Gable’s name was linked romantically with nearly all his co-stars, from Grace Kelly to Ava Gardner to Jean Harlow, whether there was substance to the rumors or not. The King not only played the role of quintessential male, he was one. More than one actress was to remark, “I think every woman he ever met was in love with him.” Marilyn Monroe said she “got goose bumps all over” when he accidentally touched her breast. Or as Joan Blondell put it, “He affected all females, unless they were dead.”
The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People Page 9