Shortly afterward, at the Coney Island racetrack, Johnson met a 28-year-old white woman, Etta Terry Duryea, a tall, slender blond who had recently divorced an eastern horse-racing tycoon. Johnson began living with her, truly loved her, gave her a $2,500 engagement ring, and finally married her in Pittsburgh in 1909. The press was in an uproar, coast to coast, about this marriage. The pressure began to get to Etta, and she suffered long spells of depression. Johnson wanted children by her. Etta refused. Fearful of pregnancy, she began to sleep in a separate bedroom. Johnson then became the first black regular at the Everleigh Club. At heart he was devoted to his wife, yet on Sept. 11, 1912, Etta put a gun to her head and committed suicide. (When Johnson died, he was buried beside her in Chicago’s Graceland Cemetery.)
Three months after Etta’s death, a pretty 19-year-old white girl from Minneapolis, Lucille Cameron, applied to Johnson for a job as his secretary. He hired her. They lived discreetly apart but slept together. Lucille’s mother heard about it and came screaming into town to stop it. She insisted Johnson be charged with abducting her underage daughter. Headlines condemned Johnson. Lynch crowds gathered. Defiantly, Johnson married Lucille Cameron. The reformers decided to get Johnson once and for all, and for that purpose they employed the Mann Act, the federal white slavery law of 1912 that made it a crime to transport a woman across state lines for immoral purposes. But the government needed a witness. They found one in Belle Schreiber, who was determined to have her revenge on Johnson for discarding her. She told authorities that Johnson had taken her over one state line after another for the purposes of debauchery, prostitution, unlawful sexual intercourse, and crimes against nature. On May 13, 1913, a jury found Johnson guilty. He was sentenced to one year and one day in a federal penitentiary. Out of jail on bail, Johnson, at the urging of his mother, posed as a Canadian baseball player and skipped the country.
With Lucille, Johnson spent five years of exile abroad. In France Johnson had love affairs with the leggy star of the Folies Bergère, Mistinguette, and with actress Gaby Deslys. In Germany he had a love affair with Mata Hari. Later, in Hollywood, he had an intense relationship with actress Lupe Velez. After 12 years of marriage, his third wife, Lucille Cameron, quietly divorced him. In August, 1925, Johnson married the last of his white wives, Irene Marie Pineau, another blond who divorced her white husband, an advertising man, to wed him. His love for her, Johnson said, knew no parallel in his life. By this time, there was no public fuss. Despite his arrogance, Jack Johnson was an easygoing, affable fellow. He just had the misfortune of being born in the wrong time.
—I.W.
The Bambino Of The Bed
GEORGE HERMAN “BABE” RUTH (Feb. 6, 1895-Aug. 16, 1948)
HIS FAME: The best-known baseball player in the history of American sports, he was the first one to gain world renown. In WWII, when Japanese troops charged a U.S. Marine emplacement, they shouted, “To hell with Babe Ruth!” Babe Ruth was America. Born into an impoverished family in Baltimore, he was saved from becoming a juvenile delinquent when his exasperated parents sent him to St. Mary’s Industrial School. Excelling in baseball, he was hired by the minor-league Baltimore Orioles, then signed by the major-league Boston Red Sox, and finally sold to the New York Yankees. From the best left-handed pitcher in the American League, he was transformed into a full-time outfielder and hitter. At his peak he was 6 ft. 2 in. and weighed between 215 and 240 lb., and his fame came from his ability to lash out home runs. He led his league in home runs for 12 years, slugging a record-making 60 in 1927 (broken by Roger Maris during a longer season in 1961). He was called “the Sultan of Swat” and “the Bambino.” Lovable and sentimental, he was also undisciplined, crude, bawdy, vulgar. Although a selfish hedonist, Babe Ruth never forgot the advice Mayor Jimmy Walker of New York gave him: to remember that he was the idol of millions of “dirty-faced kids” out there, and that he must behave accordingly. After retiring from the Yankees in 1934, Ruth’s one ambition was to become a team manager. But no team would hire him as manager because of his irresponsibility. His last years were embittered, before he died of throat cancer at 53. Over 100,000 fans paraded past his bier in Yankee Stadium, “the house that Ruth built.”
Ruth and Claire Hodgson on their wedding day
HIS LOVES: His appetites were gargantuan. His excesses included eating (a stack of mutton chops for breakfast, endless hot dogs throughout the day), gambling, drinking, partying, spending, and copulating. Hardly a day passed during his career that he did not have sex with at least one woman. He liked women as much as baseball. He had no favorites, bedding tall women, short ones, fat ones, thin ones, beautiful ones, ugly ones, socialites, film starlets, secretaries, other men’s wives, and whores in every big city of the U.S. Whenever the team arrived in a new town and checked into a hotel, Babe Ruth left his suitcase with teammate Ping Bodie and hastened out to find some young woman. He was usually gone all night. When a reporter asked Bodie what Ruth was really like, Bodie said he did not know. “But you room with him,” the reporter persisted. Bodie shook his head. “I don’t room with him. I room with his suitcase.” Other times Babe Ruth entertained women in his hotel. In Detroit once, he rented four adjoining rooms, purchased a piano, and invited teammates and stray women to his party. After a while, Babe Ruth stood on a chair, waving his beer mug, and bellowed, “All right, ladies, any girl who doesn’t want to fuck can leave right now!”
When it came to sex he was insatiable, and he possessed great stamina. In St. Louis he took over a whorehouse for an entire night, stating he was going to have sex with every woman in the house. After that he took them on one by one, made love to each successfully, and in the morning celebrated by consuming an omelet made with 18 eggs.
Robert W. Creamer researched and described Babe Ruth in action—sexually—in his excellent biography, Babe:One teammate, asked if Ruth had an exceptionally big penis, frowned a little as he searched his memory and shook his head. “No,” he said. “It was normal size … Babe’s wasn’t noticeably big. What was extraordinary was his ability to keep doing it all the time. He was continually with women, morning and night. I don’t know how he kept going.” He was very noisy in bed, visceral grunts and gasps and whoops accompanying his erotic exertions. “He was the noisiest fucker in North America,” a whimsical friend recalled.
All this carnal activity got Babe Ruth into trouble from time to time. Biographer Ken Sobol noted, “The circumstances of one unsavory rape in which he had been involved were already known to several sportswriters.” Late in 1922 Babe Ruth was slapped with a breach-of-promise suit for $50,000, filed on behalf of Dolores Dixon, a teenage employee in a Manhattan department store. She claimed that she had become pregnant by Ruth, that he had promised to marry her, and that he had committed statutory rape. Ruth called it blackmail, his lawyer called it extortion. The matter went to trial in 1923, but the case was settled out of court.
The tragic part of Ruth’s sex life was that during his busiest years in bed with other women he had a wife whom he sorely neglected. Helen Woodford, an auburnhaired Texas girl and quite pretty, was a waitress in a Boston café when Ruth fell in love with her. They were married in 1914 in a Catholic church just outside Baltimore. He was 19 and she 17. Throughout their 14 years of marriage, Helen’s life with Ruth was hell. He gave her furs, an 80-acre farm, and an adopted daughter named Dorothy, but he gave her neither time nor fidelity. His affairs with other women caused her to have a nervous breakdown. She left Ruth in 1928, and the following year—while living with a dentist in Watertown, Mass.—she died in a house fire. Ruth mourned her briefly. Three months later he wed Mrs. Claire Merritt Hodgson, who had married a Georgia cotton broker at 14 and had had a child named Julia before divorcing him. She was classy, well-off, and still a beauty when she moved to New York to become a model and part-time actress. Ruth had been introduced to her at a ball game, had been smitten, and was having an affair with her when Helen died. He married Claire in April, 1929. Claire tamed him, changing his entire
lifestyle. She put him on a strict diet. She curbed his drinking. She saved his money. She forced a ten o’clock curfew on him when he went to parties, and she knew about all the other women. “The Babe brought out the beast in a lot of ladies the world over,” she wrote in her autobiography, “and I enjoyed very much setting them straight on their problem.” To the end, the marriage was a happy one.
—I.W.
Net Loss
WILLIAM TILDEN, JR. (Feb. 10, 1893-June 5, 1953)
HIS FAME: In 1950 a poll conducted by the Associated Press proclaimed that “Big Bill” Tilden was the greatest tennis player of the first half of the 20th century, and some of America’s leading sportswriters called him the greatest U.S. athlete in any sport at any time. Perhaps these writers hoped to bring solace to a onetime giant—a closet homosexual revealed—who was suffering his last years in disgrace and near oblivion.
HIS PERSON: He was Mr. Tennis to the world and to himself, a dazzling star fiercely dedicated to the game he dominated. Yet from the moment of his conception he was marked for personal tragedy. Seven years before his birth, Selina and William Tilden had watched in horror as all three of their babies—two girls and a boy—died one by one during a diphtheria epidemic. The following year Selina Tilden bore their fourth child, Herbert. Still stunned by her loss, and longing for a daughter, Selina yielded Herbert’s upbringing to his father. With the appearance of another son, Selina’s maternal instincts resurfaced. She named her new baby William Tilden, Jr., but from the beginning she called him “June” (short for Junior) and he became her obsession. To keep him close, she convinced herself he was a sickly child. When June reached school age Selina refused to relinquish him, hired tutors for his lessons, and deprived him of playmates. June adored his mother and absorbed every word she uttered. When she spoke to him of sex, it was to warn him of the frightful venereal diseases that could result from genital contact. Not until he was 18, when a crippling illness confined Selina to a wheelchair, was June released—to become Bill, at last.
Young Tilden moved in with two maiden relatives and was sent to school for the first time. Starting at Germantown Academy, he moved on to the University of Pennsylvania. During his freshman year in college, news of his mother’s death affected him so severely that he withdrew from Penn U. and returned to Germantown Academy as a tennis coach. There his two lifetime passions merged: the need to excel at tennis and the desire to cultivate the affection and playing skills of young boys. His own game remained unspectacular until he broke through at 27. For the next six years he never lost a championship match. When he was 29, an operation that amputated the tip of a middle finger seemed only to improve his game. In 1920 he became the first American to win the men’s singles at Wimbledon, England. Between 1920 and 1930, he led the U.S. Davis Cup team to victory in seven consecutive years.
Success transformed him into an egocentric prima donna. Dubbed “Big Bill” although he was no more than 6 ft. 1 1/2 in. tall, he became arrogant, opinionated, and belligerent. He was also messy, unwashed, and frequently smelly. After sweaty matches he would return to the locker room but refuse to disrobe and shower in the presence of his teammates. Not one of them ever saw his naked body. He chainsmoked, drank strong black coffee, and ate almost nothing but steak and ice cream. With growing fame, he affected a British accent as he consorted with the world’s notables, including four U.S. presidents. In Hollywood he was partnered with Errol Flynn, Spencer Tracy, and Montgomery Clift on Charlie Chaplin’s tennis court. At Clifton Webb’s he coached Greta Garbo, Katharine Hepburn, and Tallulah Bankhead.
After his first arrest on Nov. 23, 1946, and subsequent detention in a California honor farm for “contributing to the delinquency of a minor,” most of Tilden’s acquaintances fell away. Despite his considerable professional earnings and two inheritances, this tormented man died alone in a Hollywood side-street apartment with $10 in his pocket. His money had long since been dissipated on a pashalike lifestyle, ungrateful little boys, and disastrous investments, most notably a brief stage career wherein he financed and played the lead in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
SEX LIFE: In his autobiography, My Story, Tilden spoke of boyhood crushes on pretty girls. He claimed that upon reaching manhood he considered marriage, and later suffered from unrequited love at the hands of some of Hollywood’s most famous women—all a pathetic fabrication. Actually, he recognized early on that he was “different.” At age 10, somehow escaping Selina, he embarked on a five-year fondling affair with another boy. Traumatized by his mother’s preachings, living as he did at a time when words like pregnancy and menstruation hid behind such euphemisms as “with child” and “the curse” and homosexuality was an absolute taboo, he fought to sublimate his sexual urges in tennis. Sadly, he never enjoyed a fulfilling homosexual love affair, and it is unlikely he ever had complete physical contact with another human body, male or female. Mostly he fondled his boys and masturbated privately, increasing this activity as his career faded. Although he minced onto the tennis court before launching into his powerful game, very few knew his secret. Ty Cobb called him “that fruit,” and in Lolita Vladimir Nabokov’s nymphet takes tennis lessons from Ned Litam (“Ma Tilden” spelled backwards), but no one openly exposed his problem.
Describing the incident that led to his downfall, Tilden wrote: “I met one lad on the court who showed unusual promise…. Somehow we drifted into a foolishly schoolboyish relationship…. Coming home from a movie … we indulged in horseplay…. We were stopped by the police in Beverly Hills.” As a consequence, Tilden spent almost eight months at a California honor farm, polishing kitchen pots, setting the table, and serving other inmates. Arrested a second time after he violated a five-year parole by consorting with a minor, Tilden protested, but to no avail. The youth he had pursued identified Tilden unhesitatingly, using that missing fingertip as a clincher. He also testified that Tilden “was playing with my privates.” This time Tilden was sent to a road camp. Released in time for Christmas, he returned alone and abandoned to his apartment, where six lonely months later, fully dressed, he stretched out on his bed to rest, and quietly died. In his sensitive, definitive biography, Big Bill Tilden, Frank Deford wrote of Tilden’s Philadelphia funeral: “He was placed … at the feet of his mother, so that at last he could be her child again, for good, at peace.”
—S.W.
XIV
Holier Than Thou
The Papal Bull
POPE ALEXANDER VI (Jan. 1, 1431-Aug. 18, 1503)
HIS FAME: Pope Alexander VI’s corrupt, worldly, and ambitious papacy contributed to the decline of the Catholic Church’s prestige and paved the way for the Protestant Reformation.
HIS PERSON: The scion of Spain’s powerful Borgia family, Rodrigo was the protégé of his uncle, Alfonso Borgia, Bishop of Valencia. Uncle Alfonso supervised Rodrigo’s education, and after becoming Pope Calixtus III, he wangled his 25-year-old nephew into the College of Cardinals. Young Rodrigo so exuberantly enjoyed the trappings of wealth and power that he greatly scandalized the Church and embarrassed his uncle, not an easy thing to do in those freewheeling days. Rodrigo himself was never embarrassed by anything, least of all the vast number of children that he sired during his career as a churchman. A fully accurate roster of his offspring cannot be compiled.
Rodrigo’s own bought-and-paid-for tenure as Pope Alexander VI began in 1492. Once installed, he and his son Cesare commenced a campaign of diplomacy, assassination, strategic marriage, and treachery that brought the whole of northern Italy under Borgia control. Rodrigo and Cesare outflanked and routed the powerful Orsini and Colonna families and successfully resisted the reform movement of the Dominican monk Girolamo Savonarola, whom they burned at the stake as a heretic.
Folklore has made much of the Borgias’ reliance upon poison as a political tool, painting Rodrigo’s daughter Lucrezia as a specialist in its use. Actually, there is no evidence that she ever poisoned anybody. Her duty was to marry anyone Rodrigo told her to, whether she felt like i
t or not. As for the poison, the Borgias used it sparingly, preferring instead a straightforward strangling or bludgeoning carried out by hired thugs.
Although intrigue was Rodrigo’s lifeblood, he was given to spasms of repentance. But these were usually short-lived, thanks to the many temptations that accompany great wealth. Most of Rodrigo’s riches stemmed from his efforts to put Catholicism on a cash-and-carry basis. He was a foremost practitioner of simony, the buying and selling of religious favors. For 24,000 gold pieces Rodrigo, with the help of a bishop and a secretary, once sold a nobleman permission to commit incest with his sister.
The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People Page 57