HIS THOUGHTS: Once, when depressed over problems with Rebecca, Wells wrote a letter to her in which he poured out his feelings: “I can’t—in my present state anyhow—bank on religion. God has no thighs and no life. When one calls to him in the silence of the night he doesn’t turn over and say, ‘What is the trouble, Dear?”’
—C.O.
The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name
OSCAR WILDE (Oct. 16, 1854-Nov. 30, 1900)
HIS FAME: Wilde was the best-known homosexual of the Western world, one of the most written-about authors in history, and one of the greatest wits of all time. He was the author of several plays, including The Importance of Being Earnest; a novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray; and poetry, essays, stories, and fairy tales.
HIS PERSON: Wilde was born in Dublin, Ireland, to eccentric parents. His mother badly wanted a daughter, so when a second son, Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde, was born, she dressed the child like a girl. As a youth Oscar was tall, almost overgrown, yet somehow graceful and, in any case, always striking in appearance and dress. Leaving Dublin to attend Oxford, he began to develop the unique style of manners, garb, and wit which was later characteristic of members of the “aesthetic movement.” His theory of “art for art’s sake” developed further after he left Oxford, and soon he was the rage of London society as people strove to imitate his sensual velvet costumes and sparkling aphorisms. Oscar was the ultimate party entertainment, and he was in great demand. Wrote a contemporary, “He was, without exception, the most brilliant talker I have ever come across…. Nobody could pretend to outshine him, or even to shine at all in his company.”
Wilde with Bosie (Lord Alfred Douglas)
Wilde supported himself by writing art criticism and book reviews for ladies’ magazines and other journals and by lecturing in England and America. He eventually moved on to plays, becoming England’s foremost comedic playwright. He was extravagant, generous, outrageous, and, above all, happy. The story of his ruin sounds incredible today, but it remains one of the great modern tragedies.
SEX LIFE: As a young man Wilde was decidedly heterosexual, despite his affectations. In fact, he was mildly shocked at the idea of homosexuality. His earliest love was Florrie Balcombe, whom he met when he was 21. Wilde suffered his first heartbreak over her, when she decided to marry Bram Stoker, who went on to write Dracula. Some years later Wilde unsuccessfully courted society beauty and actress Lillie Langtry, who was married. He eventually became her good friend, and also became friends with the French actress Sarah Bernhardt.
In addition to a few youthful affairs, Wilde occasionally used prostitutes. One evening he announced to his friend Robert Sherard that “Priapus was calling” and went out and picked up a high-class whore. Meeting Sherard the next morning, Wilde said, “What animals we are, Robert.” Sherard expressed his concern that Wilde might have been robbed, to which Wilde replied, “One gives them all in one’s pockets.”
In 1881 Oscar met Constance Lloyd, a sweet, pretty girl whom he courted with passionate, poetic letters. Madly in love, the two were blissfully married in 1884. They honeymooned in Paris, and the morning after the wedding night, while Wilde strolled with Sherard, he described so vividly the joys of the previous evening that Sherard was terribly embarrassed. Indeed, for the first few years Oscar and Constance were deeply in love. They had two sons, Cyril and Vyvyan. Though Oscar adored his children, he was not much suited for a life of domesticity.
The story of how Wilde drifted from heterosexuality to homosexuality is open to some debate. It is probable that while at Oxford he had contracted syphilis from a prostitute. The treatment at that time was mercury. (This caused severe discoloration of the teeth, which Oscar certainly suffered from.) Before proposing to Constance, he consulted a doctor, who assured him that he had been cured of his venereal disease. Two years later he discovered that the dormant spirochetes had broken out again, so he gave up sex with Constance and began to indulge his interest in boys.
Robert Ross, a lively, cultivated young man who remained Oscar’s lifelong devotee, boasted that he was Oscar’s “first boy,” when he was 17 and Wilde was 32. However, it was not until 1891 that Wilde met the great love of his life, in the person of 21-year-old Lord Alfred Douglas, called “Bosie” by his friends and family. The attraction was immediate. Bosie was young (16 years Oscar’s junior), a poet, from a prominent family, extraordinarily good-looking, passionate, impulsive, and proud—in short, everything that Wilde admired. And for Bosie’s part, it was an incredible thrill to be admired by London’s premiere playwright and wit. They both adored luxury and began their whirlwind friendship by dining daily at the best restaurants in England, completely inseparable. Even Constance liked Bosie.
According to Bosie’s confessions later in life, he kept his sexual relations with Wilde to a minimum. He did not respond to Oscar’s overtures for six months, and when he did, the extent of their activity was probably oral sex. Bosie insisted that no sodomy took place, that “Wilde treated me as an older boy treats a young man at school.” (Bosie had had relations with both men and women before meeting Oscar.) Bosie’s reticence was probably due to the fact that he too preferred boys. This is well illustrated in the story of their adventures on a trip to Algiers. By sheer coincidence, their hotel in the small town of Blida was occupied by an acquaintance of Wilde’s, the younger writer André Gide. Gide had been struggling against his homosexuality for five years, and when he realized that Oscar and Bosie were guests at the hotel, he almost left. Preparing for an evening out, Bosie took Gide by the arm and said, “I hope you are like me. I have a horror of women. I only like boys. As you are coming with us this evening, I think it’s better if you say so at once.” A nervous Gide accompanied them on a tour of the Casbah, finally winding up in a homosexual brothel and bathhouse, where men danced together to the sounds of exotic music. There Wilde gleefully pronounced the sentence that sealed Gide’s fate: “Dear, do you want the little musician?” And Gide’s downfall was complete. As the vacation neared its end, Bosie was making arrangements to run off with an Arab youth he had purchased from the boy’s family, but the lad left him for a woman.
In London, Wilde and Douglas were introduced to Alfred Taylor, a gracious gentleman and semiprofessional procurer, who enjoyed wearing ladies’ clothing and burning incense in his dimly lit apartment. He acquired for Wilde a number of young boys—out-of-work clerks, grooms, and newsboys who were willing to sell their favors, and who in addition unexpectedly found themselves dining in the best restaurants in London with Wilde, drinking champagne, and receiving expensive gifts.
Although there was gossip surrounding Wilde and Bosie, all would probably have gone on happily had it not been for Bosie’s father. The 8th Marquis of Queensberry was a short, coarse, nearly insane sportsman—he laid down the Queensberry Rules for boxing—who had been on a slow burn for years about his son’s questionable friendship with Wilde. His rage vented itself in abusive letters to his son and finally culminated when he delivered a card to Wilde’s club, which read, “For Oscar Wilde posing as a somdomite [sic].” Enraged himself, and fed up with the marquis’ harassment, Wilde took a reckless action. With Bosie’s encouragement, he pressed charges against Queensberry for criminal libel, having assured his lawyer that there was no basis whatsoever for the marquis’ accusation. But to the prosecution’s immense surprise, Queensberry had prepared his case well. Hiring a team of private detectives and paid informers, he had bought the testimony of many of the young boys Wilde had met through Taylor. When it was clear that the boys would be produced, the prosecution withdrew and the marquis was acquitted. Oscar’s friends begged him to leave the country while he still could—even his wife hoped he would flee—but he refused. Within a month he was arrested, charged by Queensberry with committing acts of gross indecency with various boys. The procurer Taylor had also been arrested, having refused to turn state’s evidence against Wilde.
During the second trial, one of the most sensational in Engli
sh history, Wilde handled himself with great poise and wit, but they were not enough to save him. One by one the boys testified. “I was asked by Wilde to imagine that I was a woman and that he was my lover…. I used to sit on his knees and he used to play with my privates as a man might amuse himself with a girl…. He suggested two or three times that I would permit him to insert ‘it’ in my mouth, but I never allowed that,” and so on. Hotel chambermaids even testified that they had found curious stains on the hotel sheets, though that evidence proved dubious. From these proceedings it emerged that the preferred form of lovemaking was mutual masturbation, or fellatio, with Wilde as the active agent. (He told a friend it gave him inspiration.) Sodomy was seldom, if ever, performed.
Wilde was also forced to defend his published writings, such as Dorian Gray, and his personal letters, which were accused of having homosexual overtones. It was in this context that he gave his now famous speech on the “Love that dare not speak its name” (a line from one of Bosie’s poems), which was so moving that it brought spontaneous applause from the gallery. In the end the jury could not reach a decision, and a third trial was called. Between trials, Wilde again refused to attempt an escape. The outcome of the third trial was grim: Wilde and Taylor each received the maximum sentence—two years of hard labor.
Prison conditions in England at that time were extremely cruel, and the horror of the experience drove Wilde slightly mad. He wrote a long, scathing denunciation of Bosie, now published as De Profundis, accusing Bosie of having led him to his ruin. But despite all, Bosie remained completely loyal, unlike most of Wilde’s other friends, and wrote, “Though he is in prison he is still the court the jury the judge of my life.” In later years, Bosie turned the tables, writing several books whitewashing himself while viciously denouncing Wilde.
After Wilde’s release he lived, broken and exiled, using the name Sebastian Melmoth, in France and Italy. Constance Wilde, Bosie’s family, and numerous friends plotted to keep the two men apart, but their friendship and love prevailed. The last three years of Wilde’s life were spent on and off with Bosie, both having returned to consorting with young boys.
While living in France, Oscar succumbed to an attempt to reform him. The poet Ernest Dowson took him to a brothel, hoping he might acquire “a more wholesome taste.” When Wilde emerged, he remarked, “The first these ten years—and it will be the last. It was like cold mutton.” But he asked Dowson to “tell it in England, for it will entirely restore my character.”
THOUGHTS: Trying to explain in court the “Love that dare not speak its name,” Wilde said, “It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, where the elder has intellect and the younger man has all the joy, hope, and glamour of the life before him. That it should be so, the world does not understand. The world mocks at it and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.”
—A. W.
The Giant And The Jew
THOMAS WOLFE (Oct. 3, 1900-Sept. 15, 1938)
HIS FAME: Wolfe was an American writer who established his literary reputation at home and abroad with four highly autobiographical novels. Look Homeward, Angel (1929) and Of Time and the River (1935) were published during his lifetime. The Web and the Rock (1939) and You Can’t Go Home Again (1940) were issued posthumously.
HIS PERSON: The youngest of eight children, Wolfe could talk well at age one and do simple reading at age two. His father was a stonecutter, and his mother kept a boardinghouse in Asheville, N.C., where Wolfe was born and raised. Mama nursed him until he was three and a half, and they slept together until he was nine, at which time he was allowed to cut off his curly, shoulder-length hair. Wolfe took a lot of ribbing about his hair. Once, when two older boys began calling him a girl, Wolfe protested vigorously, then whipped out his penis to dispel all doubts.
He entered the University of North Carolina at 15, became editor of the school paper and magazine, and wrote several one-act plays. After graduation he enrolled at Harvard, with the intention of becoming a playwright, but he often said, “I’d rather be a poet than anything else in the world.” In 1923, armed with an M.A., he went to New York, where he taught English at Washington Square College. In 1930, when royalties from Look Homeward, Angel started rolling in and a Guggenheim Fellowship came through, Wolfe quit teaching and from then on devoted himself to writing. While he made seven trips to Europe and also traveled in the U.S., he lived primarily in New York for the rest of his life.
Wolfe, whose powerful body stood at 6 ft. 5 in., had a mop of unruly black hair and dark, penetrating eyes. His giant appetite for food, sex, and alcohol was well known. He drank especially heavily when his writing was not going well. Normally, he would write for days on end, supported by nothing more than coffee, canned beans, and endless cigarettes. Wolfe died in Baltimore after surgery revealed tubercular lesions on his brain.
LOVE LIFE: With a combination of boyish good looks, masculinity, and fame, Wolfe appealed to a wide variety of women. Some were publicity seekers, some were literary groupies, and some primarily wanted to mother him. Said one of the women: “He was intolerable and wonderful and talked like an angel and was a real son of a bitch.” Wolfe “loved women and was somewhat oversexed,” wrote Elizabeth Nowell, his agent and one of his biographers. At a party, for example, Wolfe would take a receptive girl into another room and make love to her. Later that night, when someone pointed to the girl, he would shoot back, “Who’s she?”
Wolfe lost his virginity and first experienced “the coarse appeasement of the brothel,” as he put it, at age 16. With two fellow students from the university, Wolfe went to a Durham, N.C., whorehouse, where a prostitute named Mamie Smith took him to bed. She ignited “all the passion and fire,” Wolfe said afterward. He soon made another visit to Mamie and was a steady customer for the next four years. During Christmas vacation back in Asheville that first year, he slipped away from a family gathering to be with a “red-haired woman” at a cheap hotel.
In the summer of 1917 Wolfe fell in love. “A nice young boy, here, the son of my landlady, has a crush on me,” wrote 21-year-old Clara Paul to her sister. Since she was engaged, nothing came of it, but Wolfe recalled: “Clara—moonlight and the holding of a hand. How her firm little breasts seem to spring forward, filled with life….” Writing to a friend years later, he confessed that he had forgotten what the girl looked like but insisted that he had never quite got over the love affair.
On Wolfe’s 25th birthday, Aline Bernstein, then 44, became his mistress. A highly successful theatrical designer, she was attractive and tiny, with streaks of gray in her hair. They had met one month before on a liner returning from Europe; both fell madly in love. That Aline was married and the mother of two grown children did not seem to matter. Their often stormy relationship continued for six years without protest from her worshipful husband, Theo, who remained devoted and compassionate throughout her turbulent affair with Wolfe. At first the pair would meet in Wolfe’s New York apartment; then she rented a loft for them to share at 13 East 8th Street. They made love often, and Wolfe referred to her as his “plumskinned wench,” his “dear Jew,” and his “grayhaired, wide-hipped timeless mother.” Aline would write, “He called me a lecherous old woman and cursed me that he could not get me out of his soul.” He was insanely jealous of her. Sometimes he would call her at two in the morning to see if she was out on some “bawdy mission.” Wolfe’s compulsive whoring and his mother’s anti-Semitic hostility toward Aline eventually diminished his sexual desire for her. Aline knew he was bringing girls into their loft. “You’ve gone with dirty, rotten women all your life,” she would say, “and that’s the only kind you understand!” At one point Wolfe asked her to marry him, but she refused. Before one of his European trips, Aline made him promise not to fool around. “By God, I kept the faith,” he noted in his diary. At another time, however, both were in Paris. As soon as she left for New
York, Wolfe headed for the nearest brothel. Aline mothered him and fostered his career, and when, at the urging of his editor, Maxwell Perkins, Wolfe finally broke away in 1931, she attempted suicide with sleeping pills. To console her, Wolfe wrote: “I shall love you all the days of my life, and when I die, if they cut me open, they will find one name written on my brain and in my heart. It will be yours.” When she was 70, Aline suffered the first of a series of small strokes that eventually resulted in widespread paralysis. She was 75 when she died. Loyal Theo, aged and ailing, was with her till the end.
Besides Aline and countless one-night stands, there were at least three other women who briefly came into Wolfe’s life. One was the actress Jean Harlow, whom he met on a Hollywood set one day in 1935. That evening both left in Jean’s limousine, and they returned to the studio together the next morning. What happened in between is not recorded. Another woman was Thea Voelcker, a 30-year-old German artist, whom Wolfe met just before the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. He persuaded the tall, shapely divorcée to accompany him to the Austrian Alps, where they enjoyed themselves briefly. She was deeply in love with Wolfe and wrote affectionate letters to him after his return to New York. Wolfe, however, would have nothing more to do with her. While in Germany Wolfe was also in the company of Martha Dodd, the American ambassador’s daughter. He was a bit in love with her, but there is no indication that sex was involved.
The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People Page 29