The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People

by David Wallechinsky

  A young Parisian artist and writer named F. A. Cazals became for a time the poet’s platonic friend, heir, and obsession. Liberated by the death of his mother, Verlaine spent his last years—when not in the hospital—alternating between two aging prostitutes. Philomène Boudin and Eugénie Krantz were both slatterns who satisfied his adolescent craving for tainted sex and stimulated his masochism with their physical and verbal abuse. They were also greedy, urging him to write poetry which they exchanged for cash at his publisher’s office. Composed under the influence of absinthe and the broomstick, these poems reveal a preoccupation with thighs, breasts, and buttocks.

  Philomène came equipped with a pimp, who extended his protection to the poet, but Eugénie, who was semiretired, provided him greater stability. Eugénie was with Verlaine when he died and presided over his funeral in widow’s weeds. She soon drank herself to death with the proceeds from a lively trade in bogus literary souvenirs.

  —C.D.

  VII

  Let’s Make Music

  The Moody Bachelor

  JOHANNES BRAHMS (May 7, 1833-Apr. 3, 1897)

  HIS FAME: Renowned as one of the “three great B’s,” along with Bach and Beethoven, Brahms is considered the major orchestral and nonoperatic vocal composer of the late 19th century.

  HIS PERSON: Brahms was raised in the poverty-stricken red-light district of Hamburg, and this environment left its effects upon both his personality and his love life. At an early age he played the piano in taverns in order to earn money, and most of his audiences consisted of prostitutes and their clients. His mother, a lame and homely woman, was 17 years older than his father, who was a timid orchestral musician, and she lavished her affections on her young son. Maintaining an unnaturally strong attachment to her until her death in 1865, Brahms cried out over her grave, “I no longer have a mother! I must marry!”

  Brahms in his early 30s

  This was not to be, however. He moodily vacillated between protecting his bachelorhood and considering marriage. An infinitely kind man who secretly supported struggling musicians when he was able, Brahms was also subject to fits of temper, and he was singularly lacking in tact and the social graces. Although he enjoyed bawdy nights of beer drinking and folk songs, his music tended to reflect his darker side. While he was serving briefly as a conductor in Vienna, his programs were so invariably serious that people joked, “When Brahms is really in high spirits, he gets them to sing ‘The Grave Is My Joy.”’

  His first few recitals brought him little public attention. But after his initial concert tour, at age 20, he met composer Robert Schumann in Düsseldorf, and Schumann was so greatly impressed by Brahms’ compositions that he recommended that they be published. Schumann also wrote about Brahms for a music magazine. His article created a sensation, and the young composer’s fame and reputation began to spread throughout Europe. Eventually Brahms adopted Vienna as his home, where he produced his four symphonies and the famous German Requiem.

  LOVE LIFE: As a lover, Brahms led a double life; he fell in love with numerous respectable women (always singers or musicians) but slept only with prostitutes. One possible exception to this was Clara Schumann, the charming and beautiful wife of Robert Schumann. When Schumann suffered a nervous breakdown and was confined to a mental institution, Brahms stayed at Clara’s side. Her appeal as a mother figure (she had seven children) was combined with that of friend and musical adviser (she was an accomplished pianist). His feelings for her quickly deepened, as their correspondence shows. Addressed at first to “Dear Frau Schumann,” Brahms’ letters soon were being sent to a “Most Adored Being.” During Schumann’s confinement, the conflict Brahms felt between his friendship for Schumann and his passion for Clara made him so miserable that he gave only occasional concerts. He later described the mood of a quartet he started during this period as that of “a man who is just going to shoot himself, because nothing else remains for him to do.” When Schumann died after two years in the mental institution, however, the couple shied away from further romantic involvement. They remained close friends for the rest of their lives, and Brahms rarely published any music without Clara’s approval.

  Brahms’ other affairs went much the same way. Unable to resist a comely figure or a beautiful voice, he had at least seven major, unconsummated relationships, but he always bolted before exchanging marriage vows. The objects of these romances often appeared in his music. After his affair with Agathe von Siebold, a fiery singer with lustrous black hair, he immortalized her in a sextet in which the first movement evokes her name three times by using the notes A-G-A-D-H-E (H is the German designation for B-natural). Another of his passions was Schumann’s daughter, Julie. When she became engaged to a count, the miserable Brahms presented her with his famous Rhapsody (Opus 53), a piece highly evocative of loneliness, and referred to it as his wedding song.

  Yet he remained single. A fellow bachelor once remarked: “Brahms would not have confided to his best friend the real reason why he never married.” He may have been scarred by his relationship with Clara or by his strong attachment to his mother. His early exposure to the “singing girls” of Hamburg had certainly left its mark. He occasionally burst into tirades against women in general, and in an attempt to explain his behavior to a friend, he spoke of his early encounters with the tavern prostitutes: “These half-clad girls, to make the men still wilder, used to take me on their laps between dances, and kiss and caress and excite me. This was my first impression of the love of women. And you expect me to honor them as you do!” Always courteous to prostitutes, who found him an eager if awkward lover, his caustic side was more likely to surface with society women. In his relationships with women, Brahms liked to do all the wooing; he was put off if the object of his affection displayed any initiative. A flirtatious woman once asked him if he thought she resembled a famous beauty, and Brahms growled: “I simply can’t tell you two apart. When I sit beside one of you, I invariably wish it were the other!”

  While he longed for domestic happiness and often complained bitterly of having missed the best part of life, Brahms continued to fall in love well into his 50s, only to abort the affairs before they threatened his bachelorhood, and he continued to immortalize his feelings in the rich, darkly passionate music for which he is known today.

  HIS THOUGHTS: “I feel about matrimony the way I feel about opera. If I had once composed an opera and, for all I care, seen it fail, I most certainly would write another one. I cannot, however, make up my mind to either a first opera or a first marriage.”

  —J.H.

  Life Of The Party

  FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN (Mar. 1, 1810-Oct. 17, 1849)

  HIS FAME: As a pianist, Chopin amazed all who heard him; he was an innovator who made the piano sing in romantic style. He also gained lasting fame as the composer of bittersweet, deceptively simple, short pieces for the piano—the first Polish music to be played worldwide.

  HIS PERSON: A musical prodigy, Chopin debuted with a concert at age eight and became a local celebrity in his early teens. Warsaw then was a musical backwater, and Chopin’s father, a French-born high school teacher, had little money. In 1830 the young Chopin left Poland forever to seek his fortune as a traveling virtuoso, though he lacked the physical strength to give public concerts. He settled in Paris, where he found a niche as piano teacher to rich men’s wives, composer of best-selling sheet music, and recitalist to the elite; a gifted mimic, he also became the life of fashionable parties. The social round wore him down and he contracted tuberculosis. In 1848 revolution drove his pupils out of Paris and forced him, despite his coughing up blood, to play for his supper in the stately homes of England and Scotland. He returned to Paris a total invalid and died there after months of suffering.

  Chopin in his last year

  SEX LIFE: Most women were as charmed by Chopin’s romantic good looks as by his music. Chopin, in turn, was drawn to women, but not sexually; their tender adoration reminded him of his mother and sisters. In his late teens
he pestered a male friend, Tytus Woyciechowski, with girlish mash notes. He was obsessed with kissing the reluctant Tytus’ lips. “Give me your mouth,” Chopin wrote, and once, while waiting for lunch, he said, “In a while, the semolina! But for now, your mouth!” With girls he showed no such aggressiveness. Imagining himself in love with a fellow music student named Constantia Gladkowska, he could not even bring himself to write her a letter. Constantia soon married someone else and was amazed to learn many years later what she had meant to Chopin.

  The temptations of Paris did not appeal to Chopin, but he appears to have caught a mild dose of venereal disease from a woman named Teressa. Perhaps this confirmed his distaste for sex. Still, ever since his death, there have been rumors—possibly supported by a cache of erotic letters—of an affair between him and one of his first pupils, the musical and sexually liberated Countess Delfina Potocka. “I would like again to plop something down your little hole in D-flat major [a black key between two white keys],” he wrote in one of the alleged letters, of which only a photocopy remains. The document may well have been faked by its “discoverer,” one Pauline Czernicka, who committed suicide in 1949.

  Chopin had always wanted a family life of his own. In 1836 he proposed to Maria Wodzinska, the pretty and musically accomplished daughter of a Polish count. Maria accepted him, but the countess, disturbed by his evident poor health, made them keep their engagement secret. Chopin ignored the countess’ pleas to take better care of himself, and soon Maria’s letters stopped. Either unwilling or unable to protest this rejection, he abandoned all hopes of marriage.

  In this frame of mind, he met the free-living novelist George Sand (née Amandine Aurore Dupin), who admired him and pursued him. Chopin was not immediately attracted to her, declaring to a friend, “What a repellent woman that Sand is. Is she really a woman? I am very much inclined to doubt it.” Eventually he did succumb to her advances, but she appears to have broken off sexual relations after the first year or two of their nine-year association despite Chopin’s complaints that abstinence would kill him. His bedroom performance, she let it be known, was corpselike, and contrary to his protests, he showed little interest in lovemaking. Preoccupied with raising her two children, she was prepared to make him the third. Chopin enjoyed his part-time family, especially little Solange, the daughter. As she grew up she took to flirting with him, calling him “no-sex Chopin.” When, in his absence, Sand married her off to a rascally sculptor known for his suggestive nudes, Chopin was aghast. In a violent quarrel between Sand and Solange’s husband, Chopin was tricked by Solange—a pathological liar—into siding against her mother, who then broke off with him. Chopin’s conscious feelings for Solange remained paternal.

  The last woman who seriously tried to attract him was his wealthy pupil and financial savior Jane Stirling, of whom he remarked, “I would as soon marry death.” Chopin dreamed in his music of a love that life denied him. Jane Stirling knew this when she said, “He had such a noble idea of what a woman should be!”

  —J.M.B.E.

  The Temperamental Diva

  MARIA CALLAS (Dec. 3, 1923-Sept. 16, 1977)

  HER FAME: One of the foremost sopranos in 20th-century operatic history, Maria Callas reigned as a leading diva for more than a decade. She was particularly renowned for her desire to try new roles and the resultant variety of her repertoire.

  HER PERSON: She was born in Manhattan, the daughter of two recent Greek immigrants, Georges and Evangelia Kalogeropoulos. Her father changed the family name to Callas when he opened a drugstore in the borough. The Callases already had a daughter—Jackie—when Maria was born, and had hoped for a son to replace one who had died earlier. Con sequently, Maria never felt wanted.

  Callas, 30 as Alceste

  It is quite possible she was not wanted. An overweight, myopic child, she was shy and unpopular. In 1929 her father lost his drugstore at the outset of the Depression, and her mother, realizing that both Jackie and Maria had musical ability, set out to find them fame. When Maria was 13, Evangelia took her daughters back to Greece.

  The Callas women lived in Greece during WWII and became friendly with some Italian army officers stationed in the country. Maria would delight them by occasionally singing arias from Italian operas; in turn, the officers taught her how to converse in their native tongue. During the war she also acquired some formal musical training by studying with the well-known soprano Elvira de Hidalgo, but her career didn’t really get started until her triumphant performance in La Gioconda at Verona, Italy, in 1947. Throughout the 1950s her success was constant.

  Slimmed to 135 lb. by the time she was an international star, Maria Callas was relatively tall for a woman—5 ft. 7 in.—and prone to fragile health. Nevertheless, she had one of the most penetrating voices of modern opera.

  LOVE LIFE: Despite the publicity her private life received, Callas was involved with only two men in her adult life. While singing in Verona in 1947, she met Giovanni Battista Meneghini, an Italian industrialist and opera patron 30 years her senior, who was not put off by the fact that she weighed 230 lb. She later remarked, “I knew he was it five minutes after I first met him…. If Battista had wanted, I would have abandoned my career without regrets, because in a woman’s life love is more important than artistic triumph.” Their marriage plans were complicated by the fact that both families were opposed. Meneghini’s family feared that he would immerse himself in operatic matters and neglect the family business. Maria’s mother was upset because of the age difference and because Meneghini was not a Greek. With no family members in attendance, the two were wed on Apr. 21, 1949, in Verona. Maria’s new husband immediately took over the guidance of her career. Under his tutelage the overweight bride quickly grew trim and learned to dress with style. Her debut at La Scala, the famous Milanese opera house, in 1950 was a triumph. Meneghini would not let his wife bear children because it might harm her career, but their marriage seemed to be on smooth ground until they took a fateful sea cruise in the summer of 1959.

  That cruise was aboard the Christina, a yacht owned by Aristotle Onassis. The Meneghinis boarded with Onassis, his wife Tina, and Sir Winston and Lady Churchill. Throughout the 2 1/2-week voyage Maria vented the full force of her hot temper on her husband. Meanwhile she and Onassis grew closer, often taking side trips to the Mediterranean ports, leaving the others behind. By the end of the cruise both the Meneghini marriage and the Onassis union were destroyed.

  Maria and Meneghini separated a month later. He claimed, “I created Callas and she repaid my love by stabbing me in the back.” She alternated between such public statements as a shrill “To hell with him” and a more subdued “The breaking of my marriage is my greatest admission of failure.” Tina Onassis divorced Ari; however, it was not Callas who was named as corespondent, but Jeanne Rhinelander, a Riviera socialite with whom Ari had had an affair much earlier.

  Callas had met Onassis before; he was the uncle of one of her classmates. Although she claimed he was her “best friend,” their subsequent spats were legendary. He admired her talent but fell asleep when she sang. After Callas was freed from Meneghini in 1966, she and Ari discussed marriage, but two years later Onassis married Jacqueline Kennedy instead. Callas was stunned. She felt that Onassis had taken their nine-year affair for granted. In addition, she believed that the former First Lady was all wrong for Onassis. As Callas later explained to her accompanist Robert Sutherland: “The Gold Digger [Jacqueline Kennedy] doesn’t understand him. She’s always away attending some American anniversary or other. He’s married a national monument! She was never right for him. She tried to change his whole way of life. It’s typical that she redecorates everything—even the yacht. That’s a big mistake. It’s like taking away his past. I never did that—I wouldn’t have dared.” Eight days after Onassis married Kennedy, Callas said that the groom was “back at my door. But I wouldn’t let him in.”

  Afterward her temper cooled, and she and Onassis resumed their relationship, creating quite a sp
lash in the newspapers when they were photographed kissing under a beach umbrella. Looking back on her years with Onassis, Callas once commented, “We were doomed, but oh how rich we were.”

  Callas’ last years were lonely. She had more or less abandoned her singing career, and she had also rejected Meneghini’s offer of a reconciliation after Onassis’ death in 1975. Callas died in September, 1977, still a legendary opera figure and an object of public interest.

  —A.L.G. The Operatic Lover