The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People

by David Wallechinsky

  Hitherto sovereign in her sexual caprices, Maria Louisa became enthralled at 37 by handsome 21-year-old guardsman Manuel de Godoy, an impoverished provincial nobleman whose brother had preceded him into the royal bed (and thence into exile). Godoy, amusing, indolent, sensual, aroused in her a grand passion compounded of lust, maternal instinct, hero worship, and jealousy. The balance of sexual power shifted to Godoy, who in 1792 at the age of 25 became prime minister of Spain. “It is difficult to imagine,” French Ambassador Bourgoing wrote to Paris, “that a young man without any previous political experience could have been appointed to one of the most important ministries; a man whom the queen’s love demands leave little time to dedicate to government affairs.” Three years later, after concluding a catastrophic war against France, he was elevated to “Prince of the Peace,” second in stature only to the king of Spain.

  Most of Godoy’s diplomacy was devoted to handling the queen. The Prussian ambassador described their typical day thus: At eight o’clock in the morning Godoy goes to his country house riding school where the queen joins him every day at nine o’clock, while Charles IV is away hunting. The riding takes place until eleven. At one o’clock in the afternoon Godoy returns to the palace to be present during the queen’s lunch, which is one of his “duties.” Afterward, he goes to his rooms, which are located under the queen’s. Maria Louisa soon joins him, using a secret staircase.

  Aristocratic ladies vied for Godoy’s favors, emerging rumpled and flushed from the prime minister’s chancery, while their husbands contributed to his growing personal fortune. There was also Josefa “Pepita” Tudo, a beautiful, plump, dark-haired commoner who bore Godoy two children out of wedlock. It was to break up this affair that Maria Louisa arranged for her lover’s marriage to the king’s cousin, Maria Teresa de Vallabrige, Countess of Chinchon, in 1797. The countess, however, could not abide her husband, who continued to sleep with the comely Pepita.

  Jealousy drove the aging, toothless queen, absurd in her girlish frocks, into even further sexual excesses. “To appease the queen’s unnatural sensuality,” the French ambassador reported, “the assiduity of the king, the fleeting attentions of the Prince of Peace, and the frequent assistance of the choicest of the bodyguards are all required.” During periods of estrangement from Godoy, Maria Louisa consoled herself with fresh young bodies: an Italian named Malaspina, whom she goaded to intrigue against Godoy; Don Luis de Urquijo, who was promoted by the queen to first secretary of state; and Don Manuel Malló, another handsome guardsman, who was rewarded for his services with a carriage and horses so splendid that even the phlegmatic Charles took notice. Seated with Maria Louisa and Godoy, the king one day asked, “Manuel, who is this Malló whom I see every day with a new carriage and horses?” Replied Godoy, “Your Highness, Malló does not have a penny, but it is well known that Malló is kept by some toothless old woman who robs her husband to enrich her lover.” The king laughed and turned to the queen. “What do you think of this, Louisa?” Flushed, the queen replied, “Charles, you know that Manuel is always joking!”

  Godoy is even said to have provided the queen with lovers. Whatever the case, the bond between Maria Louisa and her favorite was so compelling that it lasted the rest of her life. Godoy fathered two of the queen’s children, a son named Francisco and a daughter named Maria Isabella. Far from being suspicious, the complacent Charles was genuinely fond of Godoy, to whom he abdicated all power and responsibility. This aroused the undying enmity of the heir apparent, Ferdinand, who conspired to overthrow the regime. The French intervened, Napoleon installed one of his brothers as king of Spain, and Maria Louisa and Charles were dispatched into exile. With them, as the fulcrum of the royal sexual triangle, went Godoy and his assorted children, legitimate and otherwise. They were joined by Pepita shortly afterwards. This complicated ménage survived until the death of Maria Louisa in Rome, followed by that of her husband just three weeks later. Free at last, Godoy moved to Paris, where he married his Pepita in 1828. Bored and weary of their poverty, Pepita left him and went back to Spain in 1833.

  —C.D.

  The Monk And The Harem

  KING MONGKUT OF SIAM (Oct. 18, 1804-Oct. 1, 1868)

  HIS FAME: This king of Siam is known to the Western world as the inspiration for the Broadway musical The King and I. In Asia his popularity was due to his ability to befriend foreigners, thus sparing his people the violence that accompanied the coming of the Europeans to the rest of the continent. He was a progressive leader who initiated many democratic reforms before his subjects even asked for them. After his death he was called Rama IV.

  HIS LOVES: Few people in history have gone through such a sudden and radical change in their sex lives as did Mongkut at the age of 46. He began normally enough, marrying early and fathering two children. When he turned 20 he followed tradition by leaving his family to become a monk, intending to return in a few months. However, while he was away his father died, and Mongkut’s elder half brother was chosen to replace him as king. In order to avoid any hint of political intrigue, Prince Mongkut remained a monk and spent the next 26 years practicing celibacy in the priesthood.

  In 1851 his half brother died, and it was Mongkut’s turn to be king. He moved from his simple quarters in a monastery to the luxurious accommodations of the Inner Palace in Bangkok, which he shared with 3,000 women. No other men were allowed in the Inner Palace except priests and an occasional doctor, and these visitors had to be escorted by members of the all-female palace guard.

  Assuming the throne in early April as Phra Chom Klao, Mongkut wasted little time returning to action after two and a half decades of abstinence. By mid-August he had taken 30 wives, and early in 1852 royal children began appearing at a rapid pace. By the end of his 17-year reign he had fathered 82 children, 66 of whom were alive at the time of his death.

  The rigid laws of custom stipulated that he spend the period between 11:00 A.M. and 1:00 P.M. each day being “attended by the ladies of the palace.” Unlike his predecessors, Mongkut felt that he had more than enough wives and concubines. In the most dramatic reform of his career he announced that his wives and concubines, if they so desired, could leave the palace to return to their parents or to marry other men. Only the mothers of his children could not remarry. Very few women took advantage of the king’s offer.

  —D.W.

  The Passionate Prude

  VICTORIA (May 24, 1819-Jan. 22, 1901)

  HER FAME: The longest-reigning monarch in English history (1837-1901), Victoria became symbolic of the era of prudery and sexual repression which bears her name. There is increasing evidence, however, that Albert, her adored husband and stern consort, was the true inspiration behind Victorianism.

  HER PERSON: Victoria’s father, fourth son of King George III, died when she was an infant. She grew up simply at Kensington Palace, sharing a room with her mother and companionship with her German governess, Baroness Lehzen.

  Queen Victoria and Prince Albert

  Despite a solitary childhood, she was a merry, mischievous, and willful little girl; her imperious tendencies were reinforced on becoming heir apparent to the throne at age 11 and queen at 18.

  The young Victoria was a romantic figure. Although only 5 ft. tall (“Everybody grows but me,” she lamented) and with a hearty appetite that early portended stoutness, she was fair, charming, and as sprightly as a hummingbird. During the first visit of her cousins Ernest and Albert, 16-year-old Victoria danced and romped to her heart’s content. “All this dissipation does me a great deal of good,” she remarked.

  LOVE LIFE: In her time the most prized match in the world, Victoria was courted by a succession of royal suitors, many of them her cousins. She described them all in her diary with enthusiastic approval, particularly the tall, dashing Grand Duke Alexander, heir to the Russian throne, with whom she fell just a little in love. But the dominant male figure during her first years on the throne was Lord Melbourne, prime minister of England, a gallant, sophisticated man of great er
udition who educated the young queen in her public role and took private pleasure in gossiping with her on the sofa at Windsor Castle. The widowed Melbourne, who was 40 years older than his pupil, has been described as “more than a father, less than a lover” to Victoria. They spent several hours a day together, obviously delighted with one another’s company, and corresponded when they were separated even briefly.

  Although she was susceptible all her life to strong men with roguish charm, Victoria chose to marry her cousin Albert, a young German princeling with operatic good looks, because she found him pure and fair, gentle and winning. As queen she was the one to propose marriage, and she maintained her ascendancy during an engagement otherwise noted for fervent embraces and ecstatic letters. “I am the Sovereign,” Victoria reminded her betrothed, denying his request for a quiet honeymoon. Shortly after the 20-year-olds were wed, Albert complained to a friend that he was only “the husband, not the master of the house.” But his influence grew with every day, and with every night, and with every royal pregnancy, of which there were nine. By the second child, Albert had succeeded in supplanting the governess, Baroness Lehzen; by the third, the royal “I” had been changed to “we.”

  Was Victoria a true Victorian or not? The evidence is contradictory. The wedding night injunction to “Close your eyes and think of England” has been attributed to her; but she also wrote with such frankness of the delights of the marriage bed that her journal was destroyed after her death. She hated pregnancy (“a complete violence to all one’s feelings of propriety”) and complained of the

  “shadow side of marriage,” i.e., the sexual slavery of woman to man; yet she liked to call Albert her angel, worshiped him effusively, and presented him with gifts of nude works of classical art. When advised to have no more children, she is said to have replied to her doctor, “Oh, Sir James, can I have no more fun in bed?” However, Victoria was naive about some aspects of sexuality. In 1885, when presented with the anti-homosexual Criminal Law Amendment, she crossed out all references to females. Lesbianism simply did not exist, insisted the queen.

  Victoria and Albert had, by any account, an intimate companionship. What the straitlaced and abstemious consort lacked in passion he made up for in devotion, calling Victoria “little wifey” in German, choosing her bonnets, and even putting her stockings on for her. He knelt at her feet and held her hand even while enduring her emotional outbursts. The two shared a mutual love for music, mountains, history, and family. Both were jealous and possessive—Albert of influence over his wife, Victoria of attractive women, even her oldest daughter. For it was the queen who was the child in the royal family, enjoying in her patient and protecting husband the father she never knew.

  Albert’s public role was to foster the national climate of piety and prudery which typified “Victorianism.” Lacking the queen’s natural vigor, he damaged his health irreparably in a fit of hysterical indignation over the Crown Prince Bertie’s illicit escapades. After Albert’s sudden death at the age of 42, Victoria was consumed with grief and longing. “Poor Mama,” her daughter Vicky said, “has to go to bed and has to get up alone—for ever.” Not quite alone. There were Albert’s nightshirt clutched in her plump arms, a portrait of him on his pillow, and a cast of his hand nearby.

  A WIDOW’S CONSOLATIONS: The usual image of the widowed Victoria is a plump, plain figure with bulbous eyes and a little kerchief on her head, mourning for her sainted Albert. Remarriage was unthinkable, but there were diversions. Chief among these was John Brown, a burly, brusque Scots manservant who became the queen’s closest companion after Albert’s death. “Wumman,” he would say familiarly, “what’s this ye’ve got on today?” Victoria’s son and successor, Edward, was appalled at her attachment to Brown. He ordered a wooden pavilion dismantled which had been a favorite resting place of his mother’s when she went on outings with Brown. Victoria promptly commanded that it be rebuilt, and retaliated by giving Edward the silent treatment for several weeks. The pavilion most likely harbored drinking buddies and not lovers, since Victoria and Brown shared a fondness for whiskey. Victoria for her part publicly acknowledged Brown as her “friend and most confidential attendant,” refusing to give him up despite scandalous rumors that they were secretly married. (It has even been argued that Victoria bore Brown a son, who died a recluse in Paris at the age of 90.) Brown himself died in 1883.

  One of Victoria’s last conquests was Benjamin Disraeli, who as prime minister (1868, 1874-1880) became the queen’s close friend and confidant. Also a bereaved spouse, Disraeli was a romantic who consoled and flattered Victoria, restoring her taste for power by making her empress of India. Although Victoria once paid “Dizzy” the honor of visiting him at his country house, he declined another royal visit from her on his deathbed, saying, “No, it is better not. She will only ask me to take a message to Albert.”

  —C.D.

  X

  Follow the Leader

  U.S. LEADERS

  The Master Of Monticello

  THOMAS JEFFERSON (Apr. 13, 1743-July 4, 1826)

  HIS FAME: The third president of the U.S. wrote his own epitaph. It reads, “Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, Author of the Declaration of Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and Father of the University of Virginia.”

  HIS PERSON: Irony and ambivalence were as much a part of his makeup as were his red hair and 6-ft. 2-in. stature. One of history’s most complex characters, he once asked the Virginia legislature for permission to free his slaves and later in his first draft of the Declaration of Independence he condemned slavery. However, in his Notes on Virginia of 1785, he compared blacks to whites unfavorably, citing “a very strong and disagreeable odor,” laziness, and the inferior intellect of the former. Furthermore, he said, blacks themselves prefer the beauty of whites much like “the preference of the orangutan for the black women over those of his own species.”

  Psychohistorians have suggested that his role in the rebellion against the mother country was due in large part to hostile feelings toward his own mother, Jane Randolph Jefferson, who was widowed when Tom was 14 and with whom he lived until he was 27. Jefferson once told John Adams that if he had to live his life over again, he’d skip the first 25 years, and in a letter to his mother’s brother in England, dated May, 1776, he dismissed news of his mother’s death the previous March with three unsentimental lines.

  LOVE LIFE: His first love was Rebecca Burwell. He was 19 and she was 16, and the relationship had a certain adolescent air about it. She gave him a silhouette of her profile, and he referred to her in code in his letters. But because he failed to make his intentions clear, he lost her to another man. “Never again,” says biographer Fawn Brodie, “would he fall in love with a virgin with whom marriage would be in every case socially acceptable.”

  His first nonvirgin was Betsey Walker, wife of his friend and neighbor John Walker. Jefferson had been a member of the Walker wedding party in 1764 and was named executor in Walker’s will, but in 1768, while Walker was away for the summer, Jefferson made advances to Betsey. She admitted that much to her husband almost 20 years later. In 1802 the Walkers and President Jefferson became the object of a national sensation over the President’s past relationship with another man’s wife. Only through the mediation of mutual friends was the President able to avert a duel with John Walker, who—34 years after the fact—had become the most famous cuckold in the land.

  Martha Wayles Skelton’s husband had also been a friend of Jefferson’s. After Skelton’s death Tom and Martha were married, on New Year’s Day, 1772. Jefferson virtually removed himself from politics during the marriage, preferring his gentleman-farmer pursuits at Monticello, his Virginia estate. Martha was a bit of a Tory and historians contend that Jefferson never would have become president had she lived longer. But she was not a healthy woman. She lost three children in infancy and after giving birth to their third daughter she herself died in 1782, leaving Jefferson with a suicidal sadness and a deathbed p
romise that he’d never marry again.

  After overcoming his grief he agreed to succeed Benjamin Franklin as minister to France, and he set sail for the Continent in 1784. The carefree lifestyle he encountered was a revelation to him, and everywhere he looked it seemed that men such as his friend Lafayette and his aged countryman Benjamin Franklin were in joyous pursuit of women. In 1786 Jefferson, too, succumbed. He met Maria Cosway, a 27-year-old artist and the unhappy wife of English miniaturist Richard Cosway. Their mutual attraction was immediate, and their private correspondence, including Jefferson’s famous “My Head and My Heart” letter, reflects the emotional depth of their relationship. Part of that 12-page letter reads: “Deeply practised in the school of affliction, the human heart knows no joy which I have not lost, no sorrow of which I have not drank! Fortune can present no grief of unknown form to me.” Maria left her husband in London and spent almost four months in Paris in the fall of 1787, but because of her Catholicism or her fear of Cosway or simple confusion, she returned to London in December, leaving Jefferson with a letter of good-bye. She was to write him many more letters, almost until the day he died. Most of her letters the heartbroken Jefferson left unanswered.