The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People

by David Wallechinsky

  In 1914 pianist Magda von Hattingberg considered living with Rilke forever, but then decided that she did not love him as woman loves man. “For me he is the voice of God, the immortal soul,” she said. The following year the flamboyant painter Loulou Albert-Lazard became his mistress in Munich. In the winter of 1918 Rilke wrote impassioned letters to poet Clair Studer, with whom he had a “short ecstatic flowering of physical love.” Then there was 17-year-old Marthe Hennebert, a pathetic Parisian waif with whom Rilke carried on a lover-father affair from 1911 to 1919. And in Switzerland in 1921 he had an erotic liaison with the Russian painter Baladine Klossowska.

  Rilke also was linked romantically, but not necessarily sexually, with many other women, including poet Regina Ullmann and Countess Francesca von Reventlow. His last love was a young Egyptian beauty, Mrs. Nimet Eloui Bey, whom Rilke met shortly before his death. It is said that while picking roses for her, Rilke pricked his finger. An infection developed, and while treating it doctors discovered by chance that Rilke had leukemia. He was dead within weeks.

  HIS THOUGHTS: Rilke once confided to Princess Marie, “All love is an effort for me, a difficult task….” Among the manuscripts unpublished at his death were seven poems glorifying the human phallus; in these the sexual act is extolled in religious metaphors. The essence of earthly splendor is our “lovely” sex, which Christianity has always sought to suppress. “Why did they make our sex homeless for us?” Rilke asked.

  FROM THE PHALLIC POEMS: The fourth in the series of seven poems was written in October, 1915.

  You don’t know towers, with your diffidence.

  Yet now you’ll become aware

  of a tower in that wonderful rare

  space in you. Hide your countenance.

  You’ve erected it unsuspectingly,

  by turn and glance and indirection,

  and I, blissful one, am allowed entry.

  Ah, how in there I am so tight.

  Coax me to come forth to the summit:

  so as to fling into your soft night,

  with the soaring of a womb-dazzling rocket,

  more feeling than I am quite.

  —R.J.R.

  The Whippingham Papers

  ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE (Apr. 5, 1837-Apr. 10, 1909)

  HIS FAME: An innovative writer of the Victorian era, he gained fame with the poetic drama Atalanta in Calydon (1865) and notoriety with the sensual lyrics in Poems and Ballads (1866). Later he produced several volumes of literary criticism.

  HIS PERSON: Born of noble ancestry in London, the eldest child of a naval captain, Swinburne cut an odd-looking figure. He had a puny physique, an oversized head covered with carrot-colored hair set atop severely sloping shoulders, and a springy gait. His high-pitched voice turned into a falsetto during times of excitement, and a nervous constitution produced an effeminate manner, trembling hands, and cataleptic fits. Yet his ambition was to be a soldier, until his father prudently scotched the idea. In 1861 Richard Monckton Milnes introduced Swinburne to the writings of the Marquis de Sade, whom he emulated thereafter. He lived for a time with artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti and befriended a number of homosexuals and unusual types. His first success, Atalanta, was followed by volumes of poetry generally criticized for their obscene content. Heavy drinking and carousing so undermined the poet’s fragile constitution that in 1879 he lay near death. At that time he was “adopted” by Walter Theodore Watts (later Watts-Dunton). Watts-Dunton was a critic, poet, and novelist whose works include The Coming of Love and Aylwin. Swinburne was nursed back to health at the Pines, Watts-Dunton’s estate, where he resided until his death 30 years later. During that time he produced numerous volumes of poetry and criticism. Although Watts-Dunton clearly saved the dissolute poet from an early grave, some critics charge that his incessant mothering smothered Swinburne’s genius.

  SEX LIFE: Swinburne was a masochist who acquired a taste for flagellation at Eton’s infamous flogging block. He once rinsed his face with cologne just before a whipping in order to heighten his senses. He later was a regular customer at a flagellation brothel in the St. John’s Wood section of London. Euphemistically referred to as the “Grove of the Evangelist,” the house featured rouged blond girls who whipped to order while an elderly lady collected clients’ fees. Swinburne observed, “One of the great charms of birching lies in the sentiment that the floggee is the powerless victim of the furious rage of a beautiful woman.”

  He shared his love for the lash with his cousin Mary Gordon, but there is no evidence that they did anything more than talk about it. Swinburne may have proposed to Mary, and he reportedly was crushed at the announcement of her marriage to another. Later she denied that they had ever been lovers.

  Swinburne was positively obsessed with flogging. It dominated his whole life, his every fantasy, and a great deal of his writing. His widely published poems were shocking enough to earn him insults, full as they were of heterosexual sadomasochistic fantasy and references to death, delirium, and hot kisses. Punch magazine called him “Swine Born”; one literary critic accused him of “groveling down among the shameless abominations which inspire him with frenzied delight”; and Thomas Carlyle described him as “standing up to his neck in a cesspool, and adding to its contents.”

  But his unpublished and underground works would have been the real shockers to the critics, had they read them. They bore such titles as The Flogging-Block , Charlie Collingwood’s Flogging, and The Whippingham Papers. Some of these writings appeared anonymously in The Pearl, an underground journal of Victorian erotica.

  Swinburne, wistfully pining after the glorious Eton beatings, once wrote in a letter to his homosexual poet friend George Powell, who was at the college: “I should like to see two things there again, the river—and the block.” He asked for news of Eton whippings: “the topic is always most tenderly interesting—with an interest, I may say, based upon a common bottom of sympathy.” Powell sent him a special present: a used birch rod. Swinburne was delighted and wrote that he only wished he could be present at an Eton birching. “To assist unseen at the holy ceremony … I would give any of my poems.” Powell next sent him a photograph of the flogging block. Swinburne was happy but wished for an action picture. “I would give anything for a good photograph taken at the right minute—say the tenth cut or so.” An 1863 letter to his friend Milnes finds Swinburne irritated that Milnes would stoop to flogging a boy of the lower classes. Birching, he chastised, was an aristocratic sport.

  There is no concrete proof that Swinburne was gay. However, besides his friendship with Powell, he was close to the homosexual painter Simeon Solomon, who sent him drawings depicting flagellation. Swinburne was once seen chasing Solomon around the poet Rossetti’s home while both were naked. And his letters imply homosexuality. At an Arts Club dinner Swinburne got drunk and professed a horror of sodomy, but wouldn’t stop talking about it. He appears to have been impotent with women. In an attempt to cure him of his bad habits, Rossetti once paid Adah Isaacs Menken, a popular entertainer and lover of the period, £10 to sleep with Swinburne. After several attempts she returned the fee, explaining that she had been “unable to get him up to scratch” and couldn’t “make him understand that biting’s no use!” Perhaps to refute rumors of his homosexuality, Swinburne boasted to friends of the “riotous concubinage” he had enjoyed with Adah. The nature of the relationship between Swinburne and his mentor Watts-Dunton remains unclear. In Swinburne’s last will, he named the poet his sole heir.

  QUIRKS: Flagellation was not Swinburne’s only quirk. He also was inordinately fond of babies, especially plump, cherubic ones. He loved to cuddle and caress them. He collected baby pictures and kept on his desk a figurine depicting a baby hatching from an egg. Although there are no grounds for believing that he ever sexually abused an infant, his close relationship with Bertie Mason, the five-year-old nephew of Watts-Dunton, so alarmed Mrs. Mason that she temporarily removed her son from the Pines. The lad’s absence inspired Swinburne’s book
of poems A Dark Month.

  An extraordinary account of Swinburne’s experiences with George Powell in a French cottage is given by the writer Guy de Maupassant, who visited them when he was 18. After lunch “gigantic portfolios of obscene photographs” were produced, all of men. Maupassant recalled one of an English soldier masturbating. At a second luncheon, Maupassant tried to decide if the two men were really homosexuals. His conclusion was that they had sex with their pet monkey and with clean-cut 14-year-old servant boys. The monkey, he further reported, had been hanged by one of the jealous servant boys.

  Another young man claimed to have visited Swinburne when he was living in a tent on the Isle of Wight, again with a monkey, which he dressed in women’s clothes. Swinburne made advances toward the boy after expounding on “unisexual love.” At this, the jealous monkey attacked the visitor. Swinburne persuaded his young man to return for a second lunch. This time the main course was grilled monkey. Hearing these rumors, Oscar Wilde said that Swinburne was “a braggart in matters of vice, who had done everything he could to convince his fellow citizens of his homosexuality and bestiality, without being in the slightest degree a homosexual or a bestializer.”

  HIS THOUGHTS: Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev once asked Swinburne to name the most original and unrealizable thing he would like to do. “To ravish St. Geneviève,” the poet replied, “during her most ardent ecstasy of prayer—but in addition, with her secret consent!”

  —W.A.D. and A. W.

  The Sexual Vagabond

  PAUL VERLAINE (Mar. 30, 1844-Jan. 8, 1896)

  HIS FAME: One of the great French writers of the 19th century, Verlaine expanded the rhythmic and harmonic frontiers of French poetry. He was also well known for his bohemian way of life and bisexual love affairs, including one with the poet Rimbaud.

  HIS PERSON: His father was an army officer who amassed a comfortable nest egg, his mother a simple woman who kept the fetuses of her three stillborn infants in glass jars and jealously indulged her only surviving child. Throughout his life Verlaine would remain his mother’s beloved son, weak and irresponsible, demanding yet submissive, sexually ambivalent.

  Verlaine at age 49

  He was “overcome by sensuality” at the age of 12 or 13, Verlaine remembered, but his personal slovenliness and ugliness aroused antipathy rather than attraction. His face was broad and flat with narrow slanting eyes set under thick brows. Children taunted him, and a teacher said he looked like a degenerate criminal.

  At school he was attracted to younger boys, with whom he formed “ardent” friendships. One of them, Lucien Viotti, has been described as a pretty youth with “an exquisitely proportioned body.” At about the age of 17 Verlaine became a regular patron of female prostitutes, exploring with great relish the borders of illicit pleasure and pain. He also demonstrated a weakness for alcohol, with a preference for the deadly green absinthe. After an extended period of debauchery, he met and in 1870 married a young girl, Mathilde Mauté, who seemed the epitome of unsullied virginity.

  Verlaine settled down briefly to a civil service job, but the Franco-Prussian War soon broke out, and the arrival in Paris of Arthur Rimbaud in 1871 ended forever any semblance of bourgeois respectability in Verlaine’s life. His affair with Rimbaud lasted two years, followed by 18 months in prison for having assaulted the younger poet. While in jail, Verlaine consoled himself with religion.

  From then on Verlaine lived as a sexual vagabond, wandering from one disastrously messy relationship to another, alternating between violence and penitence, sobriety and debauchery, quarrels and reconciliation—all the while distilling the essence of his experience into verse. Even during affairs he lived with his mother in a tempestuous love-hate relationship which frequently erupted into open battles.

  After his mother’s death in 1886, Verlaine returned to heterosexuality for the first time since his marriage. His health was declining (his many complaints included cirrhosis of the liver, a heart condition, and a “bad leg,” possibly caused by tertiary syphilis), and he spent nearly half of his last years happily ensconced in public hospitals, where he was cared for like a baby and regaled as a celebrity. Two years before his death from pneumonia, he was elected “prince of poets,” by the young poets of Paris.

  MATHILDE: For Verlaine, it was love at first sight when he met the proper 16-year-old girl who admired his poetry. Having already seen the poet in literary circles, Mathilde was not put off by his appearance. Indeed, the infatuated Verlaine was so happy, Mathilde later wrote, that “he ceased to be ugly, and I thought of that pretty fairy tale, ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ where love transforms the Beast into Prince Charming.”

  During their 10-month engagement Verlaine remained adoringly devoted and chaste, writing trite poetry which idealized love. Marriage, however, revealed “Beauty” to be a vain and snobbish bourgeoise, while “Prince Charming” reverted to the “Beast.” He began to drink again, acting out his ambivalence, alternating between gentleness and brutality. He once tried to set his wife’s hair on fire, and in a burst of rage hurled his infant son against a wall. Finally, he ran away with the 17-year-old poet Rimbaud. After an unsuccessful attempt to seduce her errant husband into returning home, Mathilde obtained a formal separation and eventually divorced him. It had been a mere three years from her first encounter with Verlaine to his final desertion.

  RIMBAUD: He was the evil boy-genius of French poetry, a beautiful, precocious teenager who wrote startlingly original verse, ascribing colors to vowels and feelings to inanimate objects. He was also, by all accounts, an insufferable hooligan, ruthlessly perverse, gratuitously sadistic. His philosophy of exploring every form of love, suffering, and madness in order to achieve poetic “truth” made him sexual fair game for Verlaine.

  Preceded by some of his poems and a letter of introduction sent to Verlaine, Rimbaud arrived in Paris dirty and penniless. Verlaine put him up at his in-laws’, where he was living at the time, then housed him with a succession of friends. (One of them, a homosexual musician, introduced the boy to the mind-expanding experience of hashish.) Day and night the two poets caroused, drinking and engaging in deliberately provocative displays of public affection. Privately, Verlaine introduced Rimbaud to “nights of Hercules” and the exhilarating “love of tigers.”

  Of the two, Rimbaud was clearly the dominant partner. Verlaine, who considered himself “a feminine” seeking love and protection, fell under the spell of the “infant Casanova” with his irresistible combination of beauty, genius, and violence. Rimbaud, testing his powers, slashed Verlaine with a knife just to amuse himself, and taunted him about his marital respectability.

  In July, 1872, the two poets ran away together, apparently with the financial assistance of Verlaine’s mother, who was jealous of Mathilde. “I am having a bad dream,” Verlaine wrote to his wife from Brussels. “I’ll come back someday.” Recovering, he invited her to join them: “Rimbaud would be very happy to have you with us.” The escapade lasted for the better part of a year, which Verlaine would forever remember as a time of “living intensely, to the very top of my being.” They explored the Belgian countryside, then crossed the channel to London, living in cheap hotels and rooming houses. They made a perfunctory effort to support themselves by giving French lessons, but were glad to fall back on Verlaine’s indulgent mother, who estimated bitterly that Rimbaud cost her 30,000 francs.

  It was a period of great creativity for Verlaine. Rescued from bourgeois captivity, he wrote his Romances without Words. But it was also a time of constant bickering and vituperation, as Rimbaud vented his self-disgust and his hatred of being dependent on the older poet. Unable to bear it any longer, Verlaine left abruptly in July, 1873, for Brussels. Dispatching suicide notes to all concerned—including his wife—he waited to be rescued. Verlaine’s mother arrived first, followed by a truculent Rimbaud. In the drunken emotional disorder of the occasion, Verlaine turned his suicide weapon on Rimbaud, shooting him in the wrist. Threatened again and fearful of another at
tack, Rimbaud called the police, who arrested Verlaine and proceeded to investigate his sexual proclivities. Medical examination revealed signs of homosexual intercourse. Verlaine was subsequently sentenced to two years in prison for attempted manslaughter.

  Released in January, 1875—he got six months off for good behavior—Verlaine sought out Rimbaud. The latter repulsed these advances by knocking him out and leaving him by the roadside. Rimbaud soon abandoned poetry and lived the rest of his short life as a mercenary adventurer, dying of cancer in 1891. Verlaine, never one to harbor a grievance, would remember their time together as the peak experience of his life—intellectually, emotionally, and physically—a time of pleasure so intense it bordered on pain.

  SURROGATE LOVERS: Verlaine spent the rest of his life divided between demon-lovers and mother figures, the opposite poles of sexual attraction for him. While teaching in a provincial school in 1879, he met a young student whose impudence and opportunism reminded him of Rimbaud. Lucien Létinois at 19 was a handsome and straightforward peasant. (A friend of Verlaine’s described him maliciously as a “musical-comedy shepherd.”) Lucien accepted the effusive affection and financial support of the 35-year-old poet, only to complain privately that he wished they had never met.

  Verlaine maintained the sentimental fiction that Lucien was his adopted son. He took him to England and paid his expenses in London while he (Verlaine) taught at a private school in Hampshire. The poet later gave up his teaching post and rushed to London to rescue Lucien upon learning that he had fallen in love with a young British girl. Then Verlaine bought a farm in France and installed Lucien’s family to help run it. The venture was a romance of rural life that ended in bankruptcy. When Lucien went into the army, Verlaine became a camp follower, composing fatuous verse about “the handsome erect soldier sitting his steed.” Yet Verlaine, fortified by his religious conversion in prison, seems to have stopped short of sexually seducing his “son.” When Lucien died of typhoid in 1883, the poet had him buried in a coffin draped in the white cloth indicative of a virgin. He then launched into a period of drunken homosexual vagabondage.