HER DEATH: The rumor that Smith died because a white hospital refused to treat her after a car accident is false, but this story has persistently been used as an example of Southern racism. The facts are that Bessie—who hated racism as much as anyone—died at the Afro-American Hospital in Clarksdale, Miss., where she had been taken after receiving first aid from a white doctor who happened on the scene of the auto accident.
LOVE AND SEX LIFE: Smith was married young to Earl Love, who came from a prominent black Mississippi family. The wedding took place following WWI (the exact date is unknown), and Love died soon after.
In 1922 Bessie met Jack Gee, a watchman who falsely claimed to be a policeman, and moved in with him. Although Gee was illiterate, he wanted to manage Smith’s career, and did so for a while. Because of his carelessness, Bessie received only $125 per recording, and not a penny of royalties during her entire career.
In fairness to Gee, it should be remembered that while he did take advantage of Bessie later on, their affair began before Bessie was discovered. On June 7, 1923, they married in a simple ceremony. The marriage was good in the beginning but deteriorated into wild jealousy in less than three years. One time, while on tour, Bessie heard that Gee was “messing around” with a chorine in her show. Without bothering to verify the story, Bessie beat up the girl and threw her out of their railroad car onto the tracks. Gee appeared on the scene and stopped to comfort the bleeding and bruised chorine. An outraged Bessie emerged from the car and emptied Gee’s own pistol in his general direction as he fled down the tracks. The train left without Gee.
Bessie was not innocent of indiscretions herself. She had her own lover on tour, a young male dancer named Agie Pitts. Bessie’s affair with Pitts ended when Bessie was jailed for beating another chorine. Pitts, entrusted with the $1,000 bail money to free Bessie, skipped town instead and was soon jailed himself.
Despite their violence and infidelities, and Gee’s opportunism, the couple seemed unable to break up. Whenever Gee was around, the fun-loving, carousing Bessie would be on her best behavior. They never divorced, but a final separation did occur. In early 1929 Gee financed a show with Bessie’s money, making his girl friend, Gertrude Saunders, the star. This hurt Bessie more deeply than anything else Gee had done. When she read about the show in a newspaper, she took a cab from Cincinnati to Gee’s hotel in Columbus, O. Fortunately, Saunders was out when Bessie arrived, for the ensuing fight with Gee left the furniture in the hotel room in a shambles, and Bessie emerged bleeding. Though Gee reunited briefly with Bessie, he returned to Gertrude. Bessie’s married days were over.
She took the breakup very hard and began drinking heavily. A brief affair with blues singer Lonnie Johnson did not relieve her loneliness. The Great Depression finally began to affect Bessie, a year and a half after most other performers had been forced to give up. But she still toured, and when her troupe stopped in Chicago in the summer of 1939, an old platonic friendship with bootlegger Richard Morgan grew into the love she had never had before. Morgan genuinely admired Bessie both as an artist and as a person, and she was happier than she had ever been. Morgan was tall, handsome, a sharp dresser, and he liked having a good time as much as Bessie did. His profitable bootlegging operations, and his management of Bessie’s business affairs, helped end her financial decline. He also filled the void left by Gee and Bessie’s adopted son Jack, Jr. (whom Gee had kidnapped and placed in foster homes). Bessie and Morgan lived together happily until Bessie’s death in 1937.
It is not known when Bessie began to enjoy sex with women, but the first provable affair was in late 1926. Lillian Simpson was a young chorine in Bessie’s show, and she regularly slept in Bessie’s room on the railroad car. One night Bessie kissed Lillian publicly in the car, and the girl objected. Bessie threatened to throw her out of the show, saying, “The hell with you, bitch. I got 12 women on this show and I can have one every night if I want it.” Simpson attempted suicide four nights later. Bessie saved her life, and the episode seemed to release Lillian’s inhibitions, for she never complained again. But the whole troupe feared Gee might visit the tour at any time, as he usually did when he ran out of money, and discover the lesbian affair. Gee finally did catch Bessie in a compromising situation with another chorine named Marie. He chased them through the hotel corridors, and Bessie hid in a girl friend’s room, terrified as only Gee could make her. When Gee ran down the street thinking Bessie had escaped from the hotel, Bessie quickly told the entire troupe to grab what they could carry and run for the train depot. Still in pajamas, the entourage quietly slipped out of Detroit in a darkened railroad car.
Another of Bessie’s fears was that Gee would discover her visits to “buffet flats.” Buffet flats were small, private establishments run by women which featured gambling, sex shows, and kinky or straight sex for the customers. Bessie went only to watch, afraid word would get back to her husband if she participated.
HER SONGS: The lyrics of Bessie’s songs, some of which she wrote, were masterpieces of the sexual double entendre. A classic example is “Kitchen Man,” written by Razaf and Belledna, in which “Madame Bucks” who is “quite deluxe” receives notice from her cook:His frankfurters are oh so sweet;
How I like his sausage meat;
I can’t do without my kitchen man.
Oh how that boy can open clams;
No one else can touch my hams;
I can’t do without my kitchen man.
When I eat his donuts, all I leave is the hole.
Anytime he wants to, why he can use my sugarbowl.
—J.M.
The Maestro Seducer
LEOPOLD STOKOWSKI (Apr. 18, 1882-Sept. 13, 1977)
HIS FAME: A flamboyant showman, Leopold Stokowski served as conductor or music director for the Cincinnati, Philadelphia, NBC, Hollywood Bowl, New York Philharmonic, and Houston Symphony orchestras during his 75-year career. He popularized avant-garde compositions, instituted “pops” and youth concerts, and introduced modern technology to the concert hall.
HIS PERSON: Born in London, England, Stokowski was the son of an immigrant Polish cabinetmaker and his Irish wife. By the age of seven Leopold was introduced to music, and he learned to play the violin, piano, and organ before he was 13. While working as a church organist, Stokowski was discovered by a wealthy member of the congregation, who sponsored him at the Royal College of Music, after which he entered Queen’s College, Oxford.
Stokowski at age 54
Stokowski then studied in France and Germany before playing as an organist in prestigious churches in London and New York City. In 1909 the ambitious young musician became the conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra despite the fact that he had no experience as a conductor. From Cincinnati he went to Philadelphia, where in the next three decades he created a symphony orchestra that gained world renown.
A great experimenter, Stokowski was one of the first conductors to record classical music and the first to introduce electrical instruments in the orchestra. Working in Hollywood during the late 1930s, he was musical supervisor for Walt Disney’s Fantasia and performed in two other films.
After an amazingly productive and creative career, Stokowski died in his sleep in Nether Wallop, England, at the age of 95.
SEX LIFE: Tall, handsome, slender, and blond, Stokowski devoted almost as much time and energy to the seduction of women as he did to his music. Of his early affairs we have only rumors until 1906, when he met concert pianist Olga Samaroff—born Lucie Hickenlooper in San Antonio, Tex. After five years as lovers, they married. Stokowski demanded that his new wife give up her career to help further his. For a decade she used her time and influence to secure his advancement. However, upon moving to Philadelphia Stokowski began his bedroom wanderings, and in 1923 Olga—tired of her husband’s domineering personality and sexual escapades—sued for divorce.
After Olga’s departure, Stokowski conducted his sexual affairs openly. In his bedroom with its chartreuse walls, he entertained Philadelphia s
ociety women, actresses, and chambermaids. Also, he became well known for his labors with the teenage female student body of Philadelphia’s prestigious music school, the Curtis Institute. His liaisons with these students became so notorious that the local citizens often referred to Curtis Institute as Coitus Institute. Stokowski showed little prejudice in his selection of bedmates, sleeping with single and married women alike. He referred to his sex companions as “nurses” because, in his words, “They are angels of mercy who rejuvenate us.” (Stokowski’s sex partners praised his general performance but complained of his sporadic impotence.)
In 1926 at the age of 44, Stokowski suddenly dropped his 19-year-old debutante girl friend to marry Evangeline Johnson, an heiress to the Johnson and Johnson fortune, whom he had known for three weeks. A liberated woman active in social causes, Evangeline accepted her new husband’s claim that he needed his sexual maraudings to stimulate his musical creativity.
During the 1920s and 1930s, Stokowski’s musical fame and reports of his bedroom conquests raised him to the rank of a national sex symbol. This was reinforced in 1937, when Stokowski seduced Greta Garbo, who reported, “I felt the electricity going through me from head to toe.” During this tumultuously romantic affair, the couple resided in Italian villas, where Stokowski—a health fanatic—introduced Greta to yoga. However, after 10 months the flame suddenly died, and so did Stokowski’s second marriage. Complaining of her husband’s oppressive personality, long absences, and headline affairs with movie stars, Evangeline sued for divorce.
Stokowski continued his libertine ways until 1945, when he stopped off in Reno, Nev., on his way from New York to Los Angeles. There he married Gloria Vanderbilt, who had just divorced her first husband. Like his two previous wives, Gloria was beautiful, young (23 years old), and rich (two years earlier she had inherited $5 million). At the age of 63, Stokowski had changed little. In 1956 Look magazine reported that Gloria’s position in the marriage was “like that of an Arab wife: obedient, almost slavish, doing everything for her husband and her children and nothing for herself.” Stokowski’s demands on Gloria led her to a psychiatrist, who helped her become more assertive, which, in turn, ended the marriage. In 1962 she sued Stokowski for a divorce.
After this last divorce, Stokowski’s sexual adventures decreased in frequency, probably because he was then over 80. However, until his death 15 years later, Stokowski continued to have occasional affairs.
HIS THOUGHTS: When asked by a friend whether he felt guilt over the fact that he was sleeping with a fellow musician’s wife, Stokowski replied, “None. Conscience is that which hurts when everything else feels marvelous. The percentage is against it!”
—R.J.F
The Closet Z
PËTR ILICH TCHAIKOVSKY (May 7, 1840-Nov. 6, 1893)
HIS FAME: By composing such works as Swan Lake, The Nutcracker, Sleeping Beauty, and his Sixth Symphony, known as the “Pathétique,” Tchaikovsky established a reputation as one of the world’s great musical geniuses.
HIS PERSON: Though strong, handsome, and abundantly talented, Tchaikovsky suffered from neurasthenia throughout his life. This precarious emotional condition was touched off when his governess, Fanny Durbach, left the family employ in 1848. This was the first in a series of painful separations from mother figures which he was to experience. His actual mother died when he was 14, leaving him so inconsolable that 25 years later he wept uncontrollably for days after coming across a packet of her letters.
Tchaikovsky in 1868
Following a miserable four-year stint as a clerk in the ministry of justice in St. Petersburg, he turned his full attention to music in 1863. He taught at the Moscow Conservatory of Music and threw himself into Moscow nightlife, becoming a gay young fop who was popular at parties for his ability to create spontaneous melodies on the piano. But even his successes had a pathetic side. The first time he conducted a piece of his own in public, he hallucinated that his head was going to come off unless he held it absolutely rigid. He didn’t conduct in public again for 10 years. In 1866 he suffered a nervous breakdown one night while composing and was so frightened by the experience that he gave up nocturnal composing forever.
SEX LIFE: He called the murky undercurrent of his sexual life Z, using the letter in his diaries to refer to his homosexuality (alternately called “This” in letters to his homosexual brother, Modest). “Z tortures me unusually today,” reads one diary entry. Another reads: “Was very tortured, not by the sensation of Z itself, but by the fact that it is in me.” Who his homosexual lovers were is uncertain since he so feared exposure that he kept his activities extremely circumspect. One likely candidate, however, is Vladimir Shilovsky, his favorite student at the conservatory and his frequent, often secret, traveling companion, to whom he dedicated two of his early piano pieces. Another is Vladimir “Bob” Davidov, his nephew, whose attraction for him is made clear in a number of diary entries. “Oh, how perfect is Bob,” he wrote in one. “Am terribly reluctant to go away from here. I think it’s all on account of Bob,” he wrote in another. Havelock Ellis called the Sixth Symphony, which Tchaikovsky dedicated to Davidov, “the homosexual tragedy.”
His agonizing homosexuality, and the earlier heartbreak at losing Fanny and then his mother, made it just about impossible for him to have a normal relationship with a woman. The closest he came to such a thing was with Désirée Artôt, a French opera singer he met in 1868, while she was touring Russia. He fell madly in love with her and they became engaged, but his friends’ concern that he would fall into Désirée’s shadow awakened his own fears and caused him to postpone the wedding. Artôt resumed her tour and almost immediately married a Spanish baritone. Tchaikovsky was crushed.
In 1877 he married Antonina Ivanova Milyukova, a student of his at the conservatory. Antonina had professed an undying love in her letters, and she determined to marry him despite his admission of homosexuality. By all accounts she was deluded and stupid, constantly imagining that men were trying to seduce her and unable to name a single piece of her husband’s music. Tchaikovsky married her out of pity, confusing her with Tatyana, the victim of love in Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (the basis for an opera Tchaikovsky produced in 1877-1878). Three months after the marriage the composer fled, and he spent the rest of his life trying to extricate himself from the commitment. He attempted suicide, standing up to his armpits in the Moscow River one October night in hopes of catching pneumonia. He tried confessing to adulteries he hadn’t committed in order to secure a divorce, but she wouldn’t hear of it. He even contemplated murdering Antonina. Finally he learned of her own adultery in 1881, but now he hesitated to seek a divorce for fear she might tell the world about him. In the ensuing years she became increasingly deranged and carried on an endless string of affairs which resulted in several children. Nonetheless, Tchaikovsky faithfully supported her until his death in 1893. Three years later she was committed to an asylum, where she died in 1917.
As odd as his marriage was, it was no more bizarre than his relationship with Nadezhda Filaretovna von Meck, a wealthy widow nine years Tchaikovsky’s senior, who had such an addiction to music that she included pianists (among them Debussy) as members of her household staff. She fell in love with Tchaikovsky’s music and was his patron for 14 years. They communicated solely by letter, filling three volumes of oftentimes intimate correspondence. Even while he occupied an apartment of hers in Italy and she lived but a half-mile away in a villa, the two never spoke. In 1890, for some unknown reason, she broke off all communication with Tchaikovsky, and when he lay dying of cholera in St. Petersburg three years later, he repeated her name over and over again in what his brother Modest described as a “reproachful tone.”
HIS THOUGHTS: When asked by Nadezhda Filaretovna von Meck if he had ever experienced love, he replied: “If you had phrased your question differently, if you had asked me whether I had ever discovered complete happiness in love, I should have answered no, and no again…. If, however, you ask me whether I have ever exp
erienced the entire power and inexpressible tension of love, I must answer yes, yes, yes. For time and again I have labored to render in music all the anguish and ecstasy of love.”
—D.R.
The Cocksure Composer
RICHARD WAGNER (May 22, 1813-Feb. 13, 1883)
HIS FAME: A multitalented genius, Wagner was the leading German composer of the late 19th century, and his revolutionary composition techniques crucially affected the development of modern opera. His magnum opus is The Ring of the Nibelung, a four-opera series based on Norse mythology.
HIS PERSON: Wagner was an arresting figure, with piercing blue eyes set in a large head, severe features, and an initially reserved manner. He had little formal musical education but was adept at reading music in his childhood. Skilled as a writer and poet, he became his own librettist, and his operas are recognized as much for their poetry as for their musical scores. Unfortunately, his amazing knowledge doomed Wagner to continual disappointment when his works were produced, because no musician or performer could conduct, act, or sing them as well as he.
The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People Page 37