According to Elvis: What Happened?, Elvis had another quirk. He would give his girl of the moment a sleeping pill and put her in his bedroom. Then he would go to a nearby room, where he would watch two especially pretty prostitutes have sex. When this show had sufficiently excited him, he would “make a dead run to his bedroom and make it with his girl.”
His overall preference in women ran to the young and inexperienced, because they were less likely to compare him with other men or reject him. The King, for all his glory, was terribly insecure.
—A. W.
California Love
TUPAC SHAKUR (June 16, 1971-Sept. 13, 1996)
HIS FAME: The son of black revolutionaries, Tupac Shakur was, and is, the number one hip-hop artist of all time, both in sales records and in social importance. A thinking man’s rapper, the socially conscious and fiercely intelligent Shakur showed promise beyond that of just a hip-hop artist and actor, but as a leader of the black community, all the way up to his untimely assassination in the East Coast-West Coast rap wars at the age of 25.
HIS PERSON: Born to Black Panther Alice Faye Williams, who took the name Afeni Shakur (he never knew his father), Tupac was raised as an intellectual. Tupac considered himself effeminate and unmanly; and in the hard times of his youth he turned to acting with a theater group in Harlem at the age of 12. At 15, with the family relocated to Baltimore, he discovered his route to manhood—rap. By 1990, he had scored a gig as a backup dancer for Digital Underground; his apprenticeship was short-lived, and his first solo album, 1992’s 2Pacalypse Now, established him as a major voice in the new genre of gangsta rap. He starred in the gang film Juice in the same year, simultaneously establishing himself as a major new talent in both mediums. 1993’s Strictly 4 My N.I. G. G.A.Z. was released the following year, along with Shakur’s headlining role across from Janet Jackson in John Singleton’s Poetic Justice; a star had been born. However, the long shadow of his medium had followed him—Pac had found himself on the wrong end of the law after allegations of sexual misconduct and an attack on an off-duty police officer. Violence followed Tupac in higher and higher-cresting waves but he sprang back with the climax of his short career, the powerful masterworks Me Against the World and All Eyez on Me, which sold two and three million copies each, respectively. Yet it was at his pinnacle that the final blow came: after leaving a Mike Tyson fight he attended with notoriously mercenary Death Row Records president Suge Knight, Tupac was shot four times in a drive-by; he died shortly thereafter of cardiac arrest. Conspirators have suspected the involvement of not only the Southside Crips, but also Las Vegas P.D., rival rappers Puff Daddy and the Notorious B.I.G. and even Knight himself—not to mention the persistent conspiracy theory that 2Pac somehow remained alive.
In contrast to his Thug persona, Tupac wrote sensitive and vulnerable love poems to girls, many of which were published after his death in the book, The Rose That Grew From Concrete.
SEX PARTNERS: Tupac more than lived up to the virile self-image he constructed for himself in his lyrics, engaging in such legendary antics as having sex with almost all of the women who appeared in the promotional video for “How Do U Want It?” and subsequently collapsing from exhaustion. On a darker note, Shakur was controversially charged with sexual assault in December 1993; a 19-year-old woman he had previously received oral sex from in a club (half an hour after meeting her) and then had consensual sex with in his hotel room complained that Shakur had later forcibly sodomized her and then egged members of his entourage on in gang-raping her. Under testimony, the woman stated she had rendezvoused with Shakur four days after their initial sexual encounter in order to reclaim items she had left in his hotel room; after beginning a second sexual round with Tupac, his three friends allegedly barged into the room and began fondling her while Shakur grabbed her hair and stripped her clothes off, telling her that she’d been selected as a reward for his three friends and that “millions of other women would be happy to be in her situation.” Shakur maintained he had slept through the act and had failed only in leaving her alone with his friends; the judge was not particularly sympathetic to his claims. The defense’s only witness was Talibah Mbonisi, Tupac’s publicist, who stated that Tupac had been with another woman that night, and that she (Mbonisi) had been talking to Shakur later when his accuser burst into the room demanding to know who was the woman that Shakur had been with. The defense’s main argument was that Tupac’s accuser had been motivated to make false claims because she had been spurned for another woman (one of many other women). After both sides concluded their arguments, Shakur was convicted of “sexual abuse (forcibly touching the buttocks)” and sentenced to one-and-a-half years in prison; he was wheeled into the courtroom to receive his sentence the day after being shot in the lobby of Quad Recording Studios in Manhattan (as with the shooting that killed him, Shakur suspected the involvement of Sean “Puffy” Combs and Christopher Wallace, a.k.a. the Notorious B.I.G.—Shakur, as part of his ongoing feud with Wallace, claimed to have had sex with his wife, R&B singer Faith Evans, in the track “Hit ’Em Up.”) He was released on bail pending appeal after serving part of his sentence. Yet more than any sexual relationship, it was with the young actress Jada Pinkett (later to marry Will Smith) that Tupac formed his most lasting bond; the two were classmates at the Baltimore School for the Arts. Pinkett recalled of him at the time, “When I met Tupac, he owned two pairs of pants and two sweaters. He slept on a mattress with no sheets.” Shakur said of the pair’s apparently Platonic relationship in the posthumous documentary Tupac: Resurrection: “Jada is my heart. She will be my friend for my whole life”; and Pinkett said of Shakur that he was “one of my best friends. He was like a brother. It was beyond friendship for us. The type of relationship we had, you only get that once in a lifetime.”
HIS THOUGHTS: “I’m somewhat psychotic... I’m hittin’ switches on bitches like I been fixed with hydraulics.”
IX
Command Performances
The Little Corporal
NAPOLEON BONAPARTE (Aug. 15, 1769-May 5, 1821)
HIS FAME: In 1804 Napoleon became France’s first emperor, thus climaxing his military triumphs on European battle-fields. His rise to power was aided by timely political patronage from French revolutionary leaders. During his rule he birthed the modern nation of France by bringing major reforms to the country’s judicial, financial, and administrative institutions.
HIS PERSON: A relatively obscure artillery officer in his early military career, Napoleon won distinction—and a general’s rank—by capturing Toulon (1793) from British forces aiding the French royalists. Called to Paris in 1795, his ruthless suppression of a rebel mob saved the new republic, and he was given command of French armies in Italy. There, in battles against the Austrian armies, Napoleon’s outstanding victories made him a national hero. Returning secretly to Paris after his Egyptian campaign (1799), Bonaparte took advantage of the Directory’s internal dissension and, aided by Abbé Sieyès, executed a coup d’état. The Consulate was then created, and as first consul Napoleon became master of France at age 30. He set up a military dictatorship, camouflaged by a constitution that gave him unlimited political power. Continental Europe fell under his domination during the ensuing Napoleonic Wars. His efforts to exclude British goods by boycott caused Spain to revolt, and other nations joined in. A disastrous Russian campaign (1812) and a crushing defeat at Leipzig (1813) led to a forced abdication and his banishment to Elba. Although Bonaparte escaped briefly to wage the “Hundred Days” struggle, his effort to regain the French throne ended in his defeat by the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo (1815). Exile for life on the island of St. Helena followed.
SEX LIFE: During his two official marriages, Napoleon had a dozen known mistresses. Another 20 were said to have shared his bed before he was sent into exile. By his own admission, he lost his virginity at 18 to a prostitute he picked up on a Parisian boulevard. This commercial experience did little to overcome the future emperor’s timidity toward women. I
n 1795, eager to wed, he courted his first real love, his sister-in-law Eugénie Désirée Clary, hoping that his brother Joseph, who was married to Eugénie’s older sister, would smooth the way. Joseph’s effort failed, and Napoleon withdrew the marriage proposal abruptly, possibly fearing he would be impotent with the young beauty who was destined to become Sweden’s future queen. Thereafter, he shifted his wooing to more mature women, making firm offers to at least five. Two were old enough to be his grandmother and mother, respectively: Mademoiselle de Montansier (age 60) and Madame Permon (age 40). Both were shocked to learn that he was deadly serious.
His frantic search for a suitable wife finally ended when Count Paul Barras, seeking to rid himself of his expensive and aging Creole mistress Joséphine de Beauharnais, arranged for the two to meet. Relying on the count’s assurance that the match would have great benefits both monetarily and socially, on March 9, 1796 Napoleon married the “28-year-old.” (She knocked four years off her age on the marriage certificate and he added two to his to make the gap between them less obvious.) Their marriage night proved to be an unexpected shocker. Engaged in vigorous intercourse, the bridegroom suddenly uttered a shriek as Joséphine’s pet pug, Fortuné, joined the act. Believing his mistress was being attacked, the dog had jumped on the bed and bitten le petit général on his bare left calf. Two days later the wounded warrior cut the honeymoon short and left for Italy, freeing the lusty Joséphine—who rarely slept alone—to resume her liaisons with standby lovers.
Irked by Joséphine’s constant unfaithfulness—a contemporary once smirked that the empress seemed to believe “farsighted nature had placed the where-withal to pay her bills beneath her navel”—Napoleon took Pauline Fourès as his mistress during the Egyptian campaign of 1798. He soon became smitten with the 20-year-old blonde, who had disguised her boyish figure in male attire to be with her soldier-husband. The cuckolded lieutenant was cunningly sent back to Paris with dispatches, and Pauline moved into a house near Napoleon’s Cairo headquarters. Nicknamed “Our Lady of the Orient” and “Madame la Générale,” she heightened the general’s passion by wearing plumed hats, gold-braided coats, and skintight white pantaloons, which stoked his buttocks fetish into a near frenzy. (A lifelong connoisseur of bottoms and buttocks, he had once fondly described Joséphine’s rump as “the prettiest little backside imaginable.”) The notorious affair was spiked by the British, who captured the ship on which Lieutenant Fourès had sailed and maliciously returned him to Egyptian soil to play the role of outraged husband.
For Napoleon’s casual romps, Géraud Duroc, his chief aide-de-camp and intimate confidant for 15 years, served as pimp. The overnighters were brought to a bedroom adjacent to Napoleon’s study in the Tuileries. Duroc admitted the girls secretly and gave orders for them to strip and slip beneath the bedcovers, to be ready for instant sex once Bonaparte’s workday was over. Some intrigues of longer duration, like those with court ladies-in-waiting Eléonore Denuelle and Marie Antoinette Duchâtel, were deliberately arranged by conniving members of Napoleon’s family, eager to sponsor any mistress who could prove the hated Joséphine to be barren. They succeeded with Denuelle. In 1806 she gave birth to a son, Léon, and Napoleon proudly claimed credit as the father. Although Bonaparte preferred to keep his trysts secret, the affair with Mademoiselle George (real name: Marguerite Weymer, later called “the Whale” because of a huge gain in weight) erupted publicly, to his great embarrassment. An erotic book surfaced, with illustrations showing his mistress engaged in graphic homosexual acts with her lesbian lover, Raucort.
Napoleon’s favorite partner, Marie Walewska, was an unsolicited “gift” from her fellow Poles, who needed France’s might to achieve independence for their homeland. The liaison began unevenly. Taken to Napoleon’s private apartments in Warsaw, the nervous young countess fainted when he became sexually aggressive. Undeterred, Napoleon raped her. Regaining consciousness, she quickly forgave him, and the affair flourished for over three years. Her quiet charm and devotion captivated the emperor, and Marie left her mark on history as the only woman he ever really loved. In 1810 she gave him his second son, Alexander, further proving that he was far from impotent.
Meanwhile, the problem of producing legally acceptable offspring became of even greater concern. In 1809, after his tempestuous marriage to Joséphine failed to result in a much-wanted heir, Napoleon reluctantly annulled the union. Out of political necessity, he chose as his second wife Archduchess Marie Louise of Austria, an 18-year-old virgin so sheltered during childhood that all male animals were kept from her view. Checking over her prolific ancestors like a farmer seeking a prize brood mare, the heirless emperor concluded that she had “the kind of womb I want to marry.” Marie Louise proved true to her breeding and presented Napoleon with a son a year after their marriage in 1810. Both wives were showered by thousands of love letters while he was absent on campaigns during their marriages, letters worded so passionately that they seemed unreal. The flaming prose often closed with such provocatives as “I kiss your breasts, and lower down, much lower down!” or “I kiss the little black forest.”
Napoleon not only tolerated homosexuality among his associates but also refused to permit punitive legislation against its practice. His habit of caressing his soldiers intimately while tweaking noses or pulling ears hinted strongly at his own homosexuality. Aides were often chosen for both their youth and their effeminate behavior. To one, Napoleon himself gave the nickname “Miss Sainte Croix.” Another, Baron Gaspard Gourgard, was the emperor’s personal orderly for six years. Gourgard was furiously jealous of any who dared to pay undue personal attention to “Her Majesty,” his affectionate name for the master he curried. After age 42, the question of Napoleon’s true gender did not matter. He became impotent, fulfilling Joséphine’s derisive charge of earlier years that “Bon-a-parte est Bon-à-rien” (“Bonaparte is good-for-nothing”).
MEDICAL REPORT: Napoleon’s known loss of sexual potency, combined with a pronounced lemon-yellow cast to his skin in his last years, hinted at a progressively fatal malfunctioning of the endocrine glands. The medical examination and autopsy performed by Dr. Antommarchi, witnessed by several English doctors, provided further evidence that Napoleon’s pituitary, thyroid, renal, and gonad glands had been rapidly failing and were almost certainly tumorous. A huge gastric ulcer and extensive calcium deposits throughout the urinary system were found to be the primary causes of his lifelong indigestion and painful urination. The urethral obstruction probably was responsible for his complaint of being afflicted by la chaude pisse (“burning urine”). The ulcer was seen to be cancerous, although it had not yet spread elsewhere in the body. Napoleon’s penis had shrunk to an inch in length and both testicles were minuscule, showing an advanced case of hypogonadism. The body hair was almost nonexistent, and the pubis was feminine in appearance. Glandular changes had produced softly rounded, creamy-textured breasts that many women would have envied, and had reduced the hands and feet to an abnormally small size. Napoleon’s final height, as recorded in the autopsy, was 5 ft. 2 in., perhaps reduced several inches because of the ravages of his multiple ailments.
—W.K.
Reclining Venus
PAULINE BONAPARTE (Oct. 20, 1780-June 9, 1825)
HER FAME: Pauline Bonaparte belongs to history mainly because she was Napoleon’s favorite sister, one of the classical beauties of her time, an unremitting nymphomaniac, and the model for Antonio Canova’s most popular sculpture.
HER PERSON: Pauline came from Ajaccio, Corsica, the sixth of her parents’ 13 children. When she was 12, her family moved to Toulon, France. As her older brother moved up in the world, she was right behind him, transformed from a peasant to a princess. When Napoleon graduated from general to emperor, his pet sister, Pauline, also stood in the limelight of Parisian society.
Men of the top rank constantly pursued her. According to the French dramatist Antoine Arnault: “She was an extraordinary combination of perfect physical beauty and the strangest mo
ral laxity. If she was the loveliest creature one had ever seen, she was also the most frivolous.” After she was married, Napoleon wrote her: “Love your husband, make your household happy, and above all do not be frivolous or capricious. You are 24 years old, and ought to be mature and sensible by now.” Of her, Countess Anna Potocka wrote: “With the finest and most regular features imaginable she combined a most shapely figure, admired (alas!) too often.”
Pauline loved fornication and luxury. She owned 600 dresses and millions of dollars’ worth of jewels and traveled in a carriage drawn by six horses. In a time when most French women did not bathe frequently, Pauline made a fetish of cleanliness because her body was constantly exposed. She bathed every morning in a tub filled with 20 liters of milk mixed with hot water. After disrobing, she had her young black servant, Paul, carry her to the tub. When onlookers were scandalized, Pauline said, “But why not? A Negro is not a man. Or are you shocked because he is unmarried?” To remedy this, she married Paul off to one of her white kitchen maids—and he continued to carry her to the tub. To immortalize her perfect body, Pauline commissioned Antonio Canova, the Italian sculptor who had done statues of Pope Clement XIV and Napoleon, to do her in marble as a nude Venus. Afterward, when someone asked how she could pose naked, she answered, “It was not cold. There was a fire in the studio.”
The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People Page 41