The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People

by David Wallechinsky

  As an old woman, she told her 16-year-old granddaughter: “Kissing, petting, and even intercourse are all right as long as they are sincere. I have never given a kiss in my life that wasn’t sincere. As for intercourse, I’d say three times a day was about right.”

  —A.W.

  The Frustrated Sex Expert

  MARIE STOPES (Oct. 15, 1880-Oct. 2, 1958)

  HER FAME: A contemporary of the American birth-control crusader Margaret Sanger, Stopes established the first birth-control clinic in Great Britain, where, through her numerous writings, she advocated healthy pleasurable sex lives for women.

  HER PERSON: She and her younger sister were the product of an essentially sexless marriage. Her mother, who was 40 when Marie was born, confused sexual ignorance with virtue, and because of her influence Marie went through the first 36 years of her life, including a five-year marriage, as a virgin. At this unhappy juncture in her life, Marie turned from botany and coal research, in which fields she was a recognized authority, to write a manual called Married Love. In 1918 this book and its companion work, titled Wise Parenthood, created an international sensation, mostly for discussing the subject of birth control openly. (Both books were banned by the U.S. postal authorities as “obscene.”) The publication of her books, and the largely positive public response to them, inspired Stopes to found the Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress. She also engaged the religious establishment, especially the Catholic Church, in a vicious battle for the minds of the masses. That battle reached its climax in a prolonged libel suit brought by Stopes against the Catholic doctor Halliday Sutherland. In a book of his own on birth control, he had questioned Marie’s qualifications for dealing with the subject and accused her of “exposing the poor to experiment” in offering them the means to control birth. On a third appeal before the House of Lords, the suit was settled in favor of Sutherland. Stopes was made to pay a modest fine and court costs, but she more than made up for her losses since the publicity surrounding her trial generated an enormous sale of her book.

  SEX LIFE: Q.—With regards to your husband’s parts, did they ever get rigid at all?

  A.—On hundreds of occasions on which we had what I thought were relations, I only remember three occasions on which it was partially rigid, and then it was never effectively rigid….

  Q.—And he never succeeded in penetrating into your private parts?

  A.—No.

  Stopes was a certified virgin when she gave this testimony in a London divorce court in 1916. A sympathetic court annulled her marriage to Dr. Reginald Gates, who in five years had failed to consummate their marriage.

  In truth, most of Marie’s sex life was deserving of sympathy. She didn’t get her first kiss until she was 24, and then it was from a married Japanese who was culturally opposed to kissing and had to be shown how. She’d met Kenjiro Fujii in 1904 while they were both researchers at the University of Munich. She played down her interest in him by ridiculing his shortness in letters written home to her mother, but in private she’d wrap herself tightly in a girdle to simulate the feeling of his arms around her. After five “physically pure” years, the relationship ended when Fujii, who was by then divorced, developed a psychosomatic illness at the thought of marriage to Marie.

  Although against lesbianism throughout her career, Marie nonetheless attracted the attention of two older women. Clotilde van Wyss, one of Marie’s teachers at North London Collegiate, and Dr. Helen McMurchy, a Canadian she met in 1908, both took a passionate interest in Marie; however, biographer Ruth Hall doubts that either relationship ever became overtly sexual since Marie was so naive she didn’t even know what masturbation was until she was 29.

  Marie finally learned about sex from books and Aylmer Maude, a translator of Tolstoi 22 years her senior. He had come to live with Marie and Reginald Gates a year after their 1911 marriage, and it was he who first pointed out the abnormality of her relationship with Gates. For this observation Maude became Marie’s confidant and platonic lover, until Reginald Gates threw him out of his house.

  Marie finally lost her virginity in 1918 to Humphrey Verdon Roe, her second husband and partner in her birth-control campaign. The Roes viewed birth control as a means of purifying their race; Marie at one point even suggested that Britain pass a bill to “ensure the sterility of the hopelessly rotten and racially diseased.” In the latter group she put her daughter-in-law Mary Wallis, who married Marie’s only child, Harry Roe. Mary suffered from nearsightedness, and Marie therefore railed against the marriage as a eugenic disaster.

  In reality it was Marie’s second marriage that was the disaster. In 1938, after years of frustration, she demanded and received from Roe a letter in which he confessed his own sexual inadequacy and granted her the right to carry on extramarital affairs. Despite the existence of such a letter and the mutual attraction that existed between Marie and younger men, it seems probable that she lived vicariously, and that the high point of her sexual life may well have been 1918.

  QUIRKS: Even as a septuagenarian, Marie maintained that her real age was 26. On her 70th birthday, her son wrote to her: “Darling Mummy, Very many happy returns on your 26th birthday. Isn’t it funny that never again will we be the same age, and that from next March on I will be older than you.”

  —D.R.

  SCIENTISTS

  The Devoted Physicist

  ALBERT EINSTEIN (Mar. 14, 1879-Apr. 18, 1955)

  HIS FAME: In a succession of scientific papers authored during the 20th century’s first two decades, Albert Einstein revolutionized physics. His theories of special and general relativity rank among science’s most profound achievements, and he accordingly is considered to be among history’s greatest thinkers.

  HIS PERSON: Despite the universal acclaim for his genius that was to come, Einstein’s early school years in Germany proved inauspicious and his parents at first feared he was a bit below normal in intelligence. In 1895 his application to Zurich’s prestigious Polytechnic Academy was rejected. It took a year of remedial schooling before Einstein was accepted by that institution. In 1900 he graduated, but his request for an academic appointment was denied and he soon found it necessary to take a job as an examiner in the Swiss patent office in Bern. In 1905 he wrote “A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions,” which was published in a scholarly journal. For this thesis the University of Zurich awarded him a Ph.D. That same year he published a paper on the special theory of relativity, and soon afterward he embarked on his career as a university professor.

  A few years after the 1916 publication of his work on the general theory of relativity, Einstein found himself accorded “superstar” status. Universities clamored for him to join their faculties, fellow scientists sought his advice, and political and charitable groups competed for his support. But Einstein, true to his image as the genius lost in thought, restricted his nonscientific involvements to two causes that remained dear to him: pacifism and Zionism.

  LOVE LIFE: Einstein’s love life, what is known of it, starts with his 1903 marriage to Mileva Maric, a mathematics student he met while both were university students in Zurich. Their marriage was ill starred. For Einstein, physics came first; the demands made by a wife ranked a distant second. Yet Einstein soon fathered two sons—Hans Albert and Edward. In many respects the marriage seemed stable. In time, however, Mileva’s moody, introverted personality clashed with Einstein’s vitality and humor. Finally, in April of 1914, Einstein accepted a position at the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin. Mileva and the boys went along to the capital but decided to vacation in Switzerland during the summer. When the eruption of WWI prevented them from rejoining Einstein in Berlin, they stayed in Zurich. Einstein remained in Berlin and, during the war’s course, made only a few trips to visit his family in Switzerland. After a final visit in 1916, Einstein confided to a friend that his decision never again to see Mileva was “irrevocable.” She interfered, it seems, with his ability to concentrate on physics, his greatest love. I
n 1919 they were divorced, and Einstein confidently pledged to Mileva the proceeds of the Nobel Prize he anticipated. That confidence was well placed. He won the prize in 1921 and promptly delivered on his promise. It is not known whether he fulfilled a second, more mysterious, promise: “You will see,” he wrote Mileva, “that I will always remain true to you—in my way.”

  Meanwhile in Berlin, Einstein had been spending increasing amounts of time in the company of the daughter of his father’s cousin, Elsa Lowenthal, the widowed mother of two girls. Elsa and Einstein had known each other as children and had corresponded sporadically over the years. When, in 1917, Einstein fell seriously ill with stomach trouble, he had already moved in with Elsa, who nursed him back to health. After his recovery Einstein stayed on, and within months of divorcing Mileva he married his former “nurse.” Although Einstein accepted Elsa’s children as his own, all accounts point to his relationship with their mother as one rooted not in passion but in convenience. She kept the material aspects of his life in order, taking responsibility for feeding and clothing him and maintaining his home. Once, when asked what he gave in return, Einstein cryptically commented, “My understanding.”

  After Elsa’s death in 1936, Einstein—by then a resident of Princeton, N.J.—remained a widower until his own death. He remained close, in those years, to his elder son, Hans Albert, and saw to it that his younger son, Edward, who suffered from serious emotional disorders, received proper care in the institutions where he passed much of his adulthood.

  HIS THOUGHTS: “Don’t have any children. It makes divorce so much more complicated.”

  “When women are in their homes, they are attached to their furniture. They run around it all day long and are always fussing with it. But when I am with a woman on a journey, I am the only piece of furniture that she has available, and she cannot refrain from moving around me all day and improving something about me.”

  “Falling in love is not at all the most stupid thing that people do—but gravitation cannot be held responsible for it.”

  “It is a sad fact that Man does not live for pleasure alone.”

  —R.M.

  Women Versus The Wireless

  GUGLIELMO MARCONI (Apr. 25, 1874-July 20, 1937)

  HIS FAME: The Italian electrical engineer’s invention of wireless transmitters and receivers pioneered longdistance wireless telegraphy and opened a new era in communications.

  HIS PERSON: Marconi struck many people as a dull, humorless man obsessed with his work and interested in little else. While his public presence was usually formal and preoccupied, there was another side of his personality, replete with volatile moods, sudden sunburst smiles, and paranoiac tantrums. Lionized for most of his life, he could be surprisingly reckless in his treatment of those who cared the most for him. The son of well-to-do parents (Irish mother and Italian father), Marconi worked out the technology for his basic achievements by age 21, and the attic of his family’s house in Bologna became the world’s first radio station. Incredible as it seemed, the Italian government showed no interest in his invention, so Marconi traveled to London to continue his experiments. In 1901 he received the first transatlantic wireless signal at St. John’s, Newfoundland. Even though he won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1909, it was the 1912 Titanic disaster that vividly dramatized the importance of his work. The Titanic’s SOS was heard by a rescue ship, and 711 of the passengers were eventually saved. (Marconi had booked passage on the Titanic, but had canceled at the last moment.) That same year Marconi lost his right eye in a head-on auto collision in Italy. Fitted with a glass eye, he soon resumed his frenetic pace and after WWI conducted most of his work on the steam yacht Elettra, his floating laboratory. Despite his brooding nature and polite taciturnity, Marconi was an honored guest of government officials as well as of the international celebrity set. Intensely patriotic if politically naive, he became a strong Fascist supporter of Mussolini, who sent him on numerous political missions. His later years were occupied by research on shortwave and microwave transmission. When he died in Rome at age 63, radio transmitters throughout the world shut down in tribute, and for two minutes in this century the ether was silent.

  LOVE LIFE: “My father’s eye for feminine beauty was unerring,” wrote Marconi’s daughter Degna, and he lost his heart “with fair regularity,” but seldom impulsively. Shipboard romance was a recurring motif of his love life, partly because he spent so much time afloat and also because he seemed able to unbend at sea more than anywhere else. Women chased him, perhaps because of his intriguing Valentino-like features and air of moody disdain. His first serious love affair was with Josephine B. Holman, a rich girl from Indianapolis, whom he met on a transatlantic liner in 1899. They were engaged before the ship docked, and remained so for two years. Josephine broke it off, apparently after realizing that this strange, driven man would never make an Indianapolis-style husband.

  In 1903 he met another beautiful American woman, Inez Milholland, on board the Lucania. However, her beauty was about all that he could relate to. A dedicated feminist and pioneer suffragist, she embodied “everything he basically disapproved of,” wrote Degna. He proposed and she accepted, but the romance quickly died and instead became an enduring friendship.

  Marconi met his first wife, 19-year-old Beatrice O’Brien, daughter of an Irish peer in the House of Lords, when he was 30. The courtship was strictly old-world, grave and formal. She refused his first proposal but, despite a disapproving family and the fact that the couple scarcely knew each other, accepted his second. “I don’t love him,” she wrote her sister. “I’ve told him so over and over again; he says he wants me anyhow and will make me love him. I do like him so much and enough to marry him.” They married in 1905 and produced four children, of whom three survived infancy. From the outset, however, Bea often found herself abandoned for long periods as “Marky” pursued his work. When present, Marconi constantly rocked the marriage with his explosive jealousy and possessiveness. Not exactly the domestic housewife type, Bea was an extrovert and “born flirt” who could no more resist smiling at a handsome man than her husband could stop fiddling with transmitters. At one point he taught her Morse code, hoping to give her a hobby to occupy her free time. The couple underwent years of tense separations and hopeful reconciliations. Beatrice tolerated his extramarital flings because they always “ended in home-comings,” wrote Degna. As their daughter further explained: “She played on the side of his nature that dreaded permanence, fearing that it would trap him.” Joining the first Elettra cruise in 1920, Beatrice learned that her husband’s latest paramour was also aboard. Marconi made no attempt to hide his newest love, and Beatrice was no longer able to remain deaf and blind to his indiscretions. “A man like Marconi should never marry,” Queen Elena of Italy sympathetically told her. Still beautiful at 38, Beatrice soon began to see other men, divorced Marconi in 1924, and then promptly married the Marchese Laborio Marignoli. Marconi, whose Elettra affair had ended, became much more friendly and wrote long, confidential letters to his ex-wife. His sporadic diaries indicate that he sometimes had several affairs going at once, but he never seemed terribly passionate about any of them. Women came so easily to him that, though necessary, they were a distinctly secondary pursuit.

  In 1925, at 51, he became engaged to 17-year-old Elizabeth Paynter, a Cornwall debutante. Beatrice was astonished and wondered “after all the years we were together when your own desire expressed continually was for freedom … as your family impeded and oppressed you, why you should suddenly find … this craving for fresh ties!! I fail to understand.” The engagement lasted only a few months.

  His next one, however, led to marriage. He met Christina Bezzi-Scali, a quiet, serious, blue-eyed Italian of 25, on the Elettra and promptly took her into the solitary wireless room. Because she was Catholic—her parents of Vatican nobility—Marconi had to construct an elaborate ruse, with Bea’s ironic complicity, to annul his first marriage. Both had to swear that they had wed with mental reservations,
as in a virtual “trial marriage,” thus providing grounds for lack of consent. In an impressive wedding ceremony, with Mussolini as his best man, Marconi married Christina in 1927. Several months later he suffered the first in a series of heart attacks. A daughter, Maria Elettra, was born in 1930. In declining health, Marconi pushed away from his first family, virtually ignored them in his will—leaving most of his $25 million fortune to Maria Elettra—and spent his last years as an apparently faithful if semi-invalid husband.

  HIS THOUGHTS: Not given to intimate expressions on paper, Marconi usually wrote several drafts of his love letters before sending them. Probably his most typical and self-revealing line was “In very great haste. Yours affectionately, Guglielmo.”

  —J.E.

  The Virgin Genius

  SIR ISAAC NEWTON (Dec. 25, 1642-Mar. 20, 1727)

  HIS FAME: Newton was an English physicist and mathematician whose discoveries earned him a place as one of the greatest scientists in history. He is perhaps best known for his formulation of a theory of gravitation.

  HIS PERSON: Newton was born three months after the death of his father, a poor farmer. Until he was three years old he had no rivals for the love and attention of his mother, Hannah. Then she married Barnabas Smith, a minister, and the newly wedded couple moved away to a nearby village. Newton was left in the care of his grandmother for the next eight years. He remained absolutely devoted to his mother, even in the face of seeming abandonment, but he hated his stepfather. Later he remembered “threatening my father and mother Smith to burne them and the house over them.” Hannah had three children by Smith. When Smith died, she and 11-year-old Isaac were reunited. Perhaps his fixation on her developed new dimensions at that point. Regardless, she remained the central figure in his life.