—J.H.
The Exuberant Satyr
ALEXANDRE DUMAS (July 24, 1802-Dec. 5, 1870)
HIS FAME: The most prolific author of the French Romantic school, Dumas wrote or collaborated on 91 plays and hundreds of volumes of fiction, travel, cookery, and biography. He is best remembered for The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo, and The Man in the Iron Mask.
HIS PERSON: Dumas’ paternal grandparents were a French nobleman and a black woman from Santo Domingo. His father, a general during the French Revolution, died when Alexandre was three years old, and from him he inherited vitality, fearlessness, and great physical strength. Dumas’ African ancestry was evident in his coarse hair and Creole accent, and a salon habitué who was crude enough to comment on the writer’s heritage received the reply: “My father was a mulatto, my grandmother was a Negress, and my great-grandparents were monkeys. My pedigree begins where yours ends.”
Dumas and Adah Isaacs Menken
Young Dumas received a scanty education from a priest in his home village of Villers-Cotterêts near Soissons. At age 20, thanks to his beautiful handwriting, he was employed in Paris as a clerk for the Duc d’Orléans, later King Louis Philippe. Dumas set up housekeeping with Catherine Labay, a dressmaker eight years his senior, who bore him a son in 1824. Alexandre Dumas fils was destined to become an author like his father.
In 1829 the elder Dumas scored his first great dramatic success with the play Henri III et sa cour, and by 1831, when the drama Antony was staged, he was the darling of Paris and a Byronic hero in his own right. A lifelong pattern of mistresses, extravagance, and superhuman work habits began to crystallize. Dumas was earning huge sums, but he spent all he received and then some. His estate, Monte Cristo, was a carnival of starving artists, predatory actresses, playmates of the moment, and unclassified parasites.
Dumas was a first-rate cook, an excellent hunter, and with age became a devoted father. He liked to boast that he had sired 500 illegitimate children, but the figure was somewhere closer to the three he acknowledged.
SEX LIFE: Dumas was a tireless satyr from the time he lost his virginity at 17 until his death at 68. His women described him as being like a “force of nature.” Incapable of fidelity himself, he never demanded it of others, not even his wife. Once he caught her with his friend Roger de Beauvoir in her bedroom. It was a cold night, and Dumas, although piqued, invited de Beauvoir to share their bed. At dawn Dumas looked across the sleeping form of his wife and caught de Beauvoir’s worried glance. “Shall two old friends quarrel about a woman, even when she’s a lawful wife?” Dumas asked and shook de Beauvoir’s hand.
In his later years Dumas amused himself by presenting his many young lovers with ribald epigrams and obscene poems that he had written. When a lady was offended, he pointed out that “all that comes from Daddy Dumas will fetch a good price someday.”
A female visitor once surprised Dumas while he was “at leisure.” She barged in on the author to find his obese body stuffed into crimson tights, while three naked girls were festooned around his chair. To Dumas’ vast amusement, the woman turned and fled. However, the maestro found the infrequent visits of his disapproving son anything but a laughing matter, and he would run around the house frantically hiding women in closets whenever the younger Dumas was announced. Dumas fils would tell friends that his father was a “grown-up child I had when I was very young.”
As time went on, father and son reached an understanding. How close they eventually became is illustrated by a conversation overheard by a group of mutual friends. “You know, Father,” said Dumas fils, “it’s a great bore, you always giving me your old mistresses to sleep with and your new boots to break in!” “What are you complaining about?” his father replied. “You should look on it as an honor. It proves you have a thick prick and a narrow foot.”
SEX PARTNERS: Dumas did not believe in the sanctity of wedlock, and his one official marriage was the result of blackmail. Ida Ferrier, a small, rotund actress with whom the author was having an affair, had an accomplice buy up all of Dumas’ unpaid IOUs and gave him the choice of either marriage or debtors’ prison. The Viscount of Chateaubriand, who acted as a witness at their wedding, is said to have stared at the sagging bosom of the bride and remarked to a guest, “You see, my friend, everything I bless collapses.” The marriage itself collapsed about four years later, when Ida ran off with an Italian nobleman.
Dumas favored actresses, and at one point three of his lovers found themselves in the awkward position of acting together in a Dumas play. The author bore up well under the resultant friction. However, Fanny Gordosa, a dark, passionate Italian, was more trying. Her first husband had become so overwhelmed by her enormous sexual appetite that he had forced her to wear wet towels around her middle in an effort to cool her off. Dumas unwrapped the lady, but her habit of receiving visitors while perched on a chamber pot and chasing his other women out of the house he found intolerable. He finally sent Fanny away, pretending that he suspected her of “playing duets” with her music teachers.
Dumas toured Garibaldi’s Italy in the company of Émilie Cordier, whom he called “the Admiral.” By day he kept her dressed up as a sailor lad, thereby fooling nobody. The ruse proved impractical when Émilie became pregnant, and the “Admiral” finally presented Dumas with a daughter, Micaella, whom he loved dearly. Much to his sorrow, Émilie refused to let Dumas acknowledge the child legally, and thus Micaella was deprived of her rightful share of her father’s royalties when she came of age.
The author had a brief affair with dancer Lola Montez, whose lurid stage performances shocked women, delighted men, and made her the reigning sex symbol of her day. She spent only one or two nights with Dumas, but she performed on those occasions with unparalleled panache.
Even when Dumas was in his 60s, he remained a favorite subject of gossip. His final fling came with Adah Isaacs Menken, a Jewish girl from New Orleans, whom the world knew as “the Naked Lady.” Adah’s most famous stage role called for her to be bound to the back of a galloping horse, clad only in a sheer leotard. The spectacle impressed both bondage fetishists and morality crusaders, who called her show “a libel upon women, whose sex is hereby depraved and whose chastity is corrupted.” Needless to say, she was everything Dumas asked for in a woman.
Adah was something of a literary groupie, an aspiring poet who boasted of her friendships with Bret Harte, Mark Twain, and other authors. She cajoled Dumas into having his picture taken with her. The resultant photo, which shows vampish Adah draped all over the aging Papa Dumas, circulated throughout Paris and went a long way toward destroying his waning prestige. It was his last great scandal. He died soon after, unrepentant, but depressed by his fears that his literary works were of no value.
MEDICAL REPORT: It has been rumored that Dumas died of the effects of advanced syphilis, contracted around the time of his affair with Lola Montez. Like many high-living men of his century, the author regarded the disease as an unfortunate adjunct to having a good time, a minor ailment that usually disappeared. According to one of his friends, Dumas “continued his irregular mode of life until the very moment that disease paralyzed both his brain and his limbs.”
FROM HIS OWN LIPS: “I need several mistresses. If I had only one, she’d be dead inside eight days.”
—M.S.
The Farmer
WILLIAM FAULKNER (Sept. 25, 1897-July 6, 1962)
HIS FAME: Though he often referred to himself as a farmer, William Faulkner was one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. His novels, which include The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, The Hamlet, and As I Lay Dying, won him great critical acclaim, as well as the Nobel Prize for literature in 1949.
HIS PERSON: William Faulkner (he added the u himself ) was born in New Albany, Miss., not far from Oxford, which was to become the model for his fictional town of Jefferson, in the fictional county of Yoknapatawpha—the setting for most of his novels and stories. His ancestors were wealthy and
powerful Southerners, ruined by the Civil War. His father, Murry, who owned a livery stable and hardware store—both of which failed—became business manager of the state university. Faulkner—shy, slow-moving, and soft-spoken—was the eldest of four brothers. He dropped out of high school after two years and worked in a bank. When WWI broke out, he tried to enlist in the army, but was rejected because he was only 5 ft. 5 in. tall and underweight. He joined the Royal Air Force in Canada, and though the war ended before he could see action, his experiences left him with a lifelong love of airplanes. He returned home and took several odd jobs to earn enough for “paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey,” while he read voraciously and began to write. In 1925 he moved to New Orleans and met Sherwood Anderson, who recommended Faulkner’s first novel, Soldiers’ Pay, to his own publisher.
Faulkner’s mistress’ favorite photo
The hard-drinking, nattily attired (he leaned toward tweeds), pipe-smoking Faulkner made little money from his fiction and was forced to go to Hollywood, where sporadically, for more than a decade, he wrote for the screen while he continued writing novels and short stories. “I write when the spirit moves me,” he said, “and the spirit moves me every day.” By 1946 his books were out of print, but upon publication of The Portable Faulkner his star rose rapidly. In spite of the fact that he despised ceremonies, he interrupted a drinking spree and came out of his alcoholic stupor long enough to accept a Nobel Prize in 1949. He won the Pulitzer Prize for The Fable in 1954 and traveled abroad extensively for the State Dept. in later years. In May of 1962 he returned to Oxford, the town he had made famous in his novels. He died there a few months later of a coronary thrombosis, with his wife and family by his side.
SEX LIFE: As a teenager, Faulkner’s first love was the daughter of a neighbor, Estelle Oldham, but she married another man and moved to China, leaving Faulkner’s world in pieces. He was usually attracted to small, childlike women. His next love, Helen Baird, fitted this description, and he dedicated his novel Mosquitoes to her. Eventually she spurned him and married someone else. Eleven years after Estelle departed for China, she returned as a divorced woman, and Faulkner began courting her again. They were married in 1929. Their first child, Alabama, died soon after birth. They had a second daughter and named her Jill. The Faulkner marriage was a rocky one. Whether out of predilection or despair, both drank heavily. However, neither moved toward divorce.
While in Hollywood Faulkner met Meta Carpenter, secretary to director Howard Hawks, for whom Faulkner was also working. Meta was 10 years his junior, very attractive, petite, and a fellow Southerner. Faulkner pursued her ardently until they became lovers. He was, according to her, a very passionate lover. “In the art of love, Bill, the restrained, remote man by day, was seized with a consuming sexual urgency…. Sexual gratification made him voluble and outgoing. He told bawdy stories and kissed the blushes that inflamed my skin.” Faulkner reportedly told Meta, “I’ve always been afraid of going out of control, I get so carried away.” He was a romantic (he once covered their bed with gardenia and jasmine petals), and he often presented her with erotic drawings and poems like the following:Meta
Bill
Meta
who soft keeps for him his love’s
long girl’s body sweet to fuck.
Bill.
In a letter he wrote, “For Meta, my heart, my jasmine garden, my April and May cunt; my white one, my blonde morning, winged, my sweetly dividing, my honeycloyed, my sweet-assed gal. Bill.” In 1937 Meta married someone else, but she kept in touch with Faulkner for the next 16 years. In 1950 Faulkner met Joan Williams, a 21-year-old writer. They became lovers, but the difference in their ages proved too great and they broke up in 1953.
HIS THOUGHTS: From a 1925 letter to his mother: “After having observed Americans in Europe I believe more than ever that sex with us has become a national disease. The way we get it into our politics and religion, where it does not belong any more than digestion belongs there. All our paintings, our novels, our music, is concerned with it, sort of leering and winking and rubbing hands on it. But Latin people keep it where it belongs, in a secondary place. Their painting and music and literature has nothing to do with sex. Far more healthy than our way.”
From a letter to Joan Williams: “One of the nicest conveniences a woman can have, is someone she can pick up when she needs or wants him; then when she doesn’t, she can drop him and know that he will still be right there when she does need or want him again. Only she should remember this. Sometimes when she drops him, he might break. Sometimes, when she reaches down for him, he might not be there.”
—C.H.S.
Paradise Lost
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD (Sept. 24, 1896-Dec. 21, 1940)
HIS FAME: As the young author who christened the 1920s “the Jazz Age,” Fitzgerald enjoyed early success as spokesman for a rebellious generation. However, his popularity had waned by the end of the decade, and when he died at age 44, not one of his books was in print. Ironically, his novels The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night are today regarded as classics of American literature.
HIS PERSON: While still a boy in St. Paul, Minn., Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was more comfortable in the company of girls than with his own sex. He made a sincere effort to play football in school, but he preferred Mr. Van Arnum’s dancing class, where a gentleman danced with a handkerchief in his right hand so he would not soil the back of the girls’ dresses. Scott’s father, who was by no means coarse, once said he would give $5 just to hear his son swear.
In contrast to his contemporary Ernest Hemingway, Scott was put off by blood, sweat, grime, and the seamy side of life. His stories and novels dealt mainly with the very rich, whose intrigues and decadence fascinated the middle-class, Irish Catholic Fitzgerald. He once remarked to Hemingway, “The very rich are different from you and me.” To which Papa replied, “Yes, they have more money.” Scott’s first novel, This Side of Paradise, was about flaming youth at Princeton University, a hotbed of liquor and indiscriminate kissing. The book was quite scandalous for 1920, and as a result it sold well. At the age of 23 Fitzgerald was a best-selling author with all the money, fame, and opportunities that go with that distinction. He married Zelda Sayre, the daughter of an Alabama Supreme Court justice, and with her began a party that would last 10 years and span two continents. Scott never again duplicated his initial literary success. Although his subsequent novels were well received by critics, they did not sell. Gatsby earned him about $1,200, a third of what The Saturday Evening Post paid him for hack-written short stories. So Scott stayed busy writing short stories, at first to support his and Zelda’s extravagant lifestyle, and later on to pay for Zelda’s care after her nervous breakdowns. In 1937, deeply in debt to hospitals and friends, Scott went to Hollywood to write screenplays for MGM. The pay was substantial, but Fitzgerald often found himself at odds with the Hollywood establishment and eventually lost his contract with the studio. He was at work on a novel about the film industry, The Last Tycoon, when he died of a heart attack at age 44. Eight years later Zelda burned to death in an asylum fire.
SEX PARTNERS: As an army lieutenant stationed in the South, Scott met Zelda Sayre at a Montgomery Country Club dance. The strikingly beautiful blond 17-year-old was surrounded by a pack of hopeful young men, but Scott would not be outdone. “I was immediately smitten and cut in on her. She was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen in my life. And from the first moment I simply had to have her.” Scott later said Zelda had been “sexually reckless” during their courtship. He had wanted to postpone sex until their wedding night, but Zelda delighted in flouting conventions, and they became lovers a year before their marriage. Scott’s Catholic upbringing made him reluctant to use any form of birth control, yet he never appeared to share Zelda’s guilt about the three abortions she had during their marriage. Their union produced only one child, a girl they called Scottie.
Both Scott and Zelda were extremely jealous, and one rarely went anywhere without the o
ther. Once Isadora Duncan flirted openly with Scott, and Zelda flung herself down a flight of stairs in protest. When Zelda found herself attracted to a handsome French aviator named Édouard Jozan, Scott went so far as to lock her in their villa for a month to keep her away from his rival. The affair was probably quite innocent, and it is doubtful whether Zelda and Jozan ever slept together. Still, Scott was tormented for years by the episode.
Scott contended that he was unfaithful to Zelda only after she had been committed. In the summer of 1935, while Zelda was hospitalized, Scott lived at a resort hotel in Asheville, N.C. There he blatantly carried on with a married woman named Rosemary, who was vacationing in the South with her sister. It was also in Asheville that he met the prostitute Lottie, who recalled an evening when Scott made the mistake of spouting white-supremacist rhetoric in her presence. “I asked if he’d ever gone to bed with a colored girl. He gave me the damnedest look, like I’d accused him of sleeping with his sister. Before he could answer, I told him that he had. Yes, not once or twice, but a dozen times…. When he got over that shock, he walked away like I had leprosy and told me to put on my clothes.”
The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People Page 20