While on tour Mozart stayed with the musical Weber family of Mannheim and seriously lost his heart for the first time. The object of his affections was Aloysia Weber, 16, a lovely girl who was studying to be an opera singer. Encouraged by her designing mother, she flirted with Mozart, who was enchanted. They played and sang together by the hour. Wolfgang’s father heard about it and ordered him summarily back on his tour since he thought the “loose-living” Weber clan was socially beneath the Mozarts. Some months later Wolfgang returned to Mannheim to find that Aloysia, now ensconced as a member of the Munich opera, had forgotten him. Their meeting was so awkward that Mozart sat down at the piano and played a ribald song to cover his hurt feelings. Long after Mozart’s death, when Aloysia was asked why the relationship had cooled, she replied, “I did not know, you see. I only thought he was such a little man.”
At 25 Wolfgang transferred his affection to Aloysia’s younger sister—uneducated, unmusical Constanze. When writing to his father, Mozart described her as plain but with a good heart and wonderful housekeeping skills. This time Mother Weber used strong tactics to keep Mozart in the family. She spread the story that he was being too familiar with Constanze, then told him that people were talking and that she feared for her daughter’s reputation. The conniving mother engineered an ultimatum for Mozart: either he must stop seeing Constanze or sign a marriage contract which stipulated that if he defaulted he would have to pay 300 guldens ($150) a year. Wolfgang certainly had no intention of giving up Constanze, and she proved her good heart by tearing up the contract as soon as he had signed it. Their wedding took place when he was 26, she 19. Leopold’s grudging consent came in the mail the next day, but he never approved of Constanze.
The nine-year marriage was genuinely happy; the Mozarts were companionable and physically compatible. Constanze was easygoing, tolerant, uncomplaining, and usually pregnant and ailing (only two of their six children survived). A visitor once found the couple dancing around their living room in each other’s arms to keep warm as they had no money to buy wood.
When Mozart died, Constanze was hysterical with grief. Later she scrupulously paid off all his debts. She was married a second time, to one of her lodgers, Danish diplomat Georg Nikolaus von Nissen, and went to live in Copenhagen. Nissen helped her write the first biography of Mozart, whom she survived by 50 years.
Legend attributes many extramarital affairs to Mozart, but most stories seem to be mere gossip.
Mozart was no Don Juan like the hero of his opera (when he and librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte required a living model for that character, they called in Casanova for advice). His strenuous work habits were not conducive to dalliance. Until the end of his life he wrote to his wife almost daily whenever they were separated. His letters brim with warmth and affection: “Adieu, my dear, my only love! Hold your hands in the air—2,999 1/2 kisses are flying from me to you and waiting to be snapped up.” In the letters Mozart seems the ideal of marital fidelity. Also, by his own admission, he avoided promiscuity because of the perils of venereal disease.
QUIRKS: In his youth Mozart wrote a great many letters to his mother and his favorite cousin, Maria, which indicated that he was something of a coprophiliac, or human-waste fetishist. In one letter, he wrote Maria: “Oh, my ass is burning like fire! … Perhaps some muck wants to come out? … What is that?—Is it possible … Ye gods!—can I believe those ears of mine? Yes indeed, it is so—what a long, melancholy note! … I shit on your nose and it will run down your chin…. Do you still love me?” As soon as Mozart began writing home to his father asking for permission to marry Constanze, he ceased to discuss his bowels in his letters.
HIS THOUGHTS: “A bachelor, in my opinion, is only half alive.”
—The Eds.
The Sensuous Soprano
ADELINA PATTI (Feb. 19, 1843-Sept. 27, 1919)
HER FAME: A coloratura soprano, Patti reigned for 56 years as undisputed queen of world opera, the most popular and richest prima donna of the late 19th century.
HER PERSON: She came from a completely musical family. Her father was Sicilian, her mother Roman, and Adela Juana Maria Patti was born in Madrid while her parents were on tour. She was only a few years old when her father moved the family from Italy to America, where he helped manage New York’s Astor Place Opera House. Patti made her U.S. singing debut at the age of eight. After a decade of small tours, she made her London debut at Covent Garden in La Sonnambula at the age of 18. She was an overnight sensation. Soon she took Brussels, Paris, St. Petersburg, Milan, Monte Carlo, and Madrid by strom.
She was a quick study. She could sing a role to herself twice and know it. At the height of her career she had a repertoire of 42 operas. Her most acclaimed roles were Rosina in Rossini’s Barber of Seville and Zerlina in Mozart’s Don Giovanni . Chiefs of state showered her with diamonds. In 1881, using her own luxurious private railroad car, she began to give concerts (at $5,000 a performance) around the U.S., featuring popular songs like “Comin’ Thro’ the Rye.” Summoned to Windsor Castle, Patti sang “Home, Sweet Home” for Queen Victoria, who wept at its conclusion. On another occasion, Jenny Lind was also moved to tears upon hearing Patti’s soaring voice. Giuseppe Verdi proclaimed Patti the greatest singer he had ever heard. The elderly French composer Daniel Auber said of her, “I have never heard so perfect an artist as Patti.” There were few dissenters; one of them, George Bernard Shaw, said: “She seldom even pretends to play any other part than that of Adelina, the spoiled child with the adorable voice.”
In her prime Patti was described by an admiring critic as a young woman with a “delicately chiseled head, fine mobile features, and the guileless eyes of a doe—white marble turned into flesh, surrounded by a dark frame of hair.” A male friend spoke of her as “a child of nature, half timid and half wild … good-humored and violent.” Poorly educated, Patti was nonintellectual. Another friend said he had “never perceived in Adelina the least interest in the higher problems of mankind—in science, politics, religion, not even in belles lettres.”
SEX PARTNERS: The major interest in her life, next to singing, was men. In 1868, when she was 25, she married Henri, the Marquis de Caux, equerry to Napoleon III. The emperor had seen Patti perform in Paris and had sent the marquis backstage to convey his congratulations. Middle-aged, dapper, refined—but with an income of only 10,000 francs a year—Henri became enamored of Patti. She rather liked him, liked the idea of a title, although she never loved him. At their Catholic wedding in England, Patti wore a virginal white satin gown trimmed with lace and designed by Worth of Paris. But she was anything but a virgin. One of the guests at the wedding breakfast was Giovanni Mario, the handsome 58-year-old Italian tenor who had played opposite Patti in many operas. During the breakfast, Mario leaned over to British music critic Sutherland Edwards and whispered, “The marquis, much as he might be attached to his fascinating bride, has never made love to her as much as I, her constant lover, have done.”
The marriage produced no passion and no children. After seven years Patti fell in love with her new leading man, the Italian tenor Ernesto Nicolini. The pair played Romeo and Juliet onstage, and offstage as well. Nicolini’s wife and five children were distressed. The Marquis de Caux was furious. He forbade his wife ever to appear on a stage with Nicolini again. Patti ignored her husband and appeared with Nicolini in La Traviata in St. Petersburg. Enraged, the marquis cornered Patti in her dressing room and shouted that her adultery had besmirched the title he had given her. “You can take your title back!” Patti cried, scooping up a handful of jewelry and throwing it in his face. The marquis hit her. She screamed. Stagehands had to break down her door to evict her husband. The pair separated in 1877. It took Patti eight years to get a French divorce, and she got it then only after she agreed to give the marquis half her fortune. His share came to 1.5 million francs.
Even before the divorce Patti and Nicolini had been scandalously living together in Craig-y-Nos Castle on their magnificent rural estate in South Wales.
He had his billiard room illuminated by the first electric lights to be installed in a country house in Britain, and she had her private theater. He was 52 and she 43 when they finally were wed in a Protestant ceremony in June, 1886.
The happy union lasted a dozen years, until Nicolini’s death in 1898. Less than a year later Patti, almost 56, married her third husband, Baron Rolf Cederström of Stockholm, who was 30 years younger than she was. They remained together until her death 19 years later. The baron lived until 1947.
QUIRKS: Adelina Patti was not as sexually straight as she seemed. Occasionally she fancied something different in a heterosexual partner. One day in 1882, when she was 39, she was riding in her carriage in New York, gazing out at the storefronts. Momentarily, her eyes held on Bunnell’s Curiosity Dime Museum, for something in the window caught her attention. She stopped her carriage, stepped down, and walked to the window. She stared at a photograph advertising the appearance of an attractive male midget named General Mite. The midget’s actual name was Dudley Foster, and he came from Nova Scotia. He was 20 years old, less than 2 ft. tall—actually, his height was 22 in.—and he weighed 10 lb. Something about him excited Patti. She went into the museum and told Foster she would like to take him home for a while. The midget was delighted. Patti made arrangements with the proprietor and then carted the tiny Foster off to her boudoir. Their subsequent coupling (or whatever) and bizarre affair became the talk of show business for years.
—I.W.
Sparrow
ÉDITH PIAF (Dec. 19, 1915-Oct. 11, 1963)
HER FAME: A cabaret singer who rose from the streets to receive worldwide acclaim, Piaf was the beloved of her fellow Frenchmen because she was the very voice of romance. “La Vie en Rose,” “Les Trois Cloches,” and “Non, Je ne Regrette Rien” are just a few of the hundreds of songs she sang about the suffering and sweetness of love.
Piaf with her own true love, prizefighter Marcel Cerdan
HER PERSON: Édith Giovanna Gassion was born on a sidewalk in a poor district of Paris. She was promptly deserted by her mother, and later by her acrobat father as well. Consequently Édith and her half sister, Momone, were raised in their grandmother’s house of prostitution. Momone, who was younger, became Édith’s confidante and alter ego; they remained close in later life.
Édith was discovered and renamed by her first impresario, Louis Leplée, who took her off the streets to sing in his cabaret. To him she looked like a sparrow, so he used the French slang term for that bird—piaf—for her stage name. She had an emotionally powerful, rich, throbbing voice which often reduced audiences to tears. Maurice Chevalier, when he heard her sing, exclaimed, “Cette môme; elle en a dans le ventre” (“That kid, she’s got it inside”).
Thin, only 4 ft. 10 in. tall, Piaf looked plain and frail. But her passion for life and love shone in her large, luminous eyes. “I’ve got sagging breasts,” she said, “a low-slung ass, and little drooping buttocks … but I can still get men!”
She drank enthusiastically and excessively for years, and alcohol—combined with drug problems, several auto accidents, and a turbulent emotional life—killed her at 47. Thousands paid homage at her Paris funeral, and a generation later fans were still placing flowers on her grave in Père Lachaise Cemetery.
SEX LIFE: Piaf ’s sexual activity was prodigious. She had already slept with many men before she was 15, and couldn’t remember the first one. Like a romantic schoolgirl she fell desperately in love with each of them. Although she made millions of francs and thousands of dollars singing in Europe and the U.S., she gave most of it away; she bought wardrobes for her lovers and provided generous financial assistance to friends—like Charles Aznavour—and lovers alike. When Piaf died, she left nothing.
She was attracted to all kinds of men and jokingly subdivided her affairs into “the streets,” “the sailors,” “the pimps,” “the flings,” “the professors,” and “the factory” group (so named for her part in turning out new singing talent, notably Yves Montand). “You never know a guy till you’ve tried him in bed,” she said. “You know more about a guy in one night in bed than you do in months of conversation. In the sack, they can’t cheat!”
SEX PARTNERS: Regardless of the circumstances, Édith Piaf enjoyed her innumerable lovers. During her early days of singing in the street, all she could afford was a hotel room with one bed. One young lover, Louis Dupont, didn’t object to sharing the bed with Édith and Momone. “There was a deep purity in Édith,” said Momone, “which nothing ever spoiled. Three in a bed may not be right, of course, but at 17 and as poor as we were, love is so marvelous, it’s made silently. It lulled me and I dropped off to sleep like a little kid.”
Despite the many men in her life, there was but one true love, a shy, muscular, and graceful Arab-French prizefighter. Marcel Cerdan already had a wife and three sons. Called the “Moroccan Bomber,” he took the middleweight crown from Tony Zale at Madison Square Garden on Sept. 21, 1948. Even when Cerdan was in training for the Zale return fight, Piaf needed to be with him constantly. She took a room in the Waldorf-Astoria for appearance’ sake, but it was Momone who used it. Hiding in the trunk of Cerdan’s car, Édith was smuggled into his training camp, where she stayed in a shabby bungalow that smelled of sweat and liniment, but she did not dare open the windows. Marcel joined her there during breaks in his grueling training. One day they chanced a relaxing afternoon in the open air. A friend walked by and warned them of an approaching group of reporters. Luckily there was a large willow basket close by. Cerdan stuffed Édith inside and sat down on the lid just as the reporters arrived. For the next three hours he answered questions without moving. When Piaf, cramped beyond endurance, groaned aloud, Cerdan growled a Moroccan curse and silenced her by digging his heel into the basket. She didn’t complain when she finally crawled out. For Marcel she had only embraces.
A year later Piaf was in New York while Cerdan held boxing exhibitions in Europe. She missed him terribly and persuaded him to visit her, insisting that he travel by plane rather than by ship. He was killed when his plane crashed in the Azores. Momone had to have her sister sedated to prevent suicide.
Among Piaf ’s other lovers were actors Eddie Constantine, Yves Montand (one of the few men she was faithful to), and John Garfield. She spotted Garfield when he was in a play in Paris, and sat through the performance every night for weeks, entranced by this “handsome beast.” Finally she spent the night with him. He didn’t try to see her again until months later, and by then she had lost interest.
Piaf claimed not to believe in marriage, but she was married twice. In 1952 she wed Jacques Pills, a singer. They divorced five years later. In the last year of her life she married Theo Sarapo, a 26-year-old Greek hairdresser and singer, who was deeply devoted to her. After she died, he cradled her body in his arms for hours.
QUIRKS: For Piaf, men with blue eyes were especially irresistible, but she was not indifferent to the charms of any man. Each time she fell in love, it was love at first sight. Her need for love produced such tension that she slept with her hands clenched into fists. She was so obsessed by love that, as Momone said, “She went wild. She ate her heart out, she was jealous and possessive … she howled, she locked her guys up. She was demanding, she was unbearable; they slapped her around and she cheated on them.”
Whenever her lover was a blue blood, she itched to provoke him into coarse behavior. Of Paul Maurisse she said, “He’s an iceberg … a handbook of etiquette … I’m going to make him forget his good breeding. He’s going to smack me yet, do you hear? I’ll get my smack out of him.”
HER THOUGHTS: Édith Piaf valued love above all. Her songs and her life were full of the search for it and the pain of its loss. She said to her sister, “Can’t have a house without a man, Momone. It’s worse than a day without sunshine. You can get along without the sun—there’s electricity. But a house without some guy’s shirt lying around, where you don’t run across a pair of socks, or a tie … it’s like a widow’s house—it ge
ts you down!”
—B.J. and K.P.
Bighearted Bessie
BESSIE SMITH (1894?-Sept. 26, 1937)
HER FAME: Bessie Smith is regarded by many as the greatest blues singer in history. Columbia Records released 44 of her recordings during her lifetime, some of which were million-sellers, and 8 posthumous LPs. Smith toured with her own vaudeville-type show and performed as a special guest in others. Her accompanists included such jazz notables as Louis Armstrong, Fletcher Henderson, Coleman Hawkins, and Benny Goodman. In 1929 she starred in a short sound film called St. Louis Blues, a musical dramatization of the famous W. C. Handy song. Her career declined in the 1930s, primarily because of widespread economic disaster brought on by the Depression, evolution of musical tastes from blues to swing, and the advent of movies and radio as cheap entertainment. She continued to perform, but never again for the big crowds and money.
Smith by Carl Van Vechten in 1936
HER PERSON: Bessie Smith was born into total poverty in Chattanooga, Tenn. Her birth date is unknown, although Apr. 15, 1894, appears on her marriage license. Smith’s appearance was striking, for she was a tall, heavy, very dark black woman who wore strange hats and colorful costumes onstage. She had a quick temper and would not hesitate to attack a man or woman with her bare fists. Bessie especially hated to see black people behave with servility toward whites. Occasional bouts with alcoholism were a problem in her personal life, although they rarely affected her performances. She never learned the value of money and would hand out cash to strangers. At the same time she was tightfisted about paying her own performers and crew. Despite her lusty, violent, pleasure-seeking ways, Smith was religious and would attend church whenever possible.
The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People Page 36