The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People

by David Wallechinsky

  He grew into an almost stereotypical recluse, an absentminded, ascetic, and devoted scientist. He lived in the world of the mind, often simply forgetting to sleep or eat.

  LOVE LIFE: Newton apparently experienced some sort of tender feelings for Anne Storey, the stepdaughter of a family he boarded with while he was in school. They may even have been formally engaged for a short time, but almost certainly they did not have a sexual relationship. They parted in 1661, when Newton went off to Cambridge University, but remained friends over the years.

  Historians who have studied Newton are divided into two schools of thought concerning his sex life. Some insist he died a virgin. Others, referring to the rumors that circulated during and after his life, believe that he had at least one great love affair.

  It seems that Newton did indeed love Fatio de Duillier, a handsome young Swiss mathematician. The two men were inseparable companions for several years, starting in 1687, when Fatio was 23. They shared a burning interest in science and mathematics; whether they also shared a bed is speculation. For reasons known only to them, Newton and Fatio broke off their intense relationship in 1693. For the next 18 months Newton suffered a complete mental breakdown. He was depressed and hostile and had delusions that his friends had abandoned him. He reacted by writing poisonous letters, accusing them of betrayal and deceit. To John Locke he wrote, “Sir, being of opinion that you endeavored to embroil me with women and by other means, I was so much affected by it … ‘twere better if you were dead.” When Locke calmly and kindly replied, Newton apologized, explaining that he had been delirious from lack of sleep and didn’t know what he was writing. Newton and Fatio exchanged occasional letters for the rest of their lives, but the friendship remained distant.

  A rather mysterious “love triangle” involved Newton with the young, witty, and beautiful Catherine Barton, who was Newton’s niece and lived in his London home for over 20 years, and Charles Montague. Contemporary observers believed that Newton may have connived at an affair between Catherine and the increasingly influential Montague (later Lord Halifax) in order to gain a highly paid position as master of the mint. Later historians, putting the theories of Freud to work, have suggested that Newton enjoyed the affair between Montague and Catherine because he identified with Montague and saw Catherine as an embodiment of his own mother. He could thereby enjoy a vicarious sexual relationship with his mother, a woman whom, although she deserted him early in life, he loved deeply. Some have even suggested that he himself actually had an affair with Catherine. The most reasonable consensus, however, seems to be that Newton had no sexual interest in women.

  —R.W.S.

  PHILOSOPHERS

  The Bourgeois Communist

  KARL MARX (May 5, 1818-Mar. 14, 1883)

  HIS FAME: Revolutionary theorist Karl Marx was the source of some of the most powerful ideas of modern times, ideas that have inspired revolutions and that permeate governments in countries all over the world.

  HIS PERSON: Descended from a long line of rabbis, Karl was baptized at age six in the Evangelical Church in his hometown of Trier, Prussia, at the request of his father, who had repudiated the family faith. Later Karl himself rejected all religion (“Religion is the opium of the masses”) and has been accused, probably justly, of anti-Semitism.

  Marx in his early 30s

  At 16 he fell in love with aristocrat Jenny von Westphalen, whom he married eight years later, after completing his education. (He received his doctorate from the University of Jena, something of a diploma mill.) The inflammatory articles he wrote for literary and cultural magazines in several European cities were partly responsible for his expulsion from three of those cities—Paris, Cologne, and Brussels. He was also active in the underground Socialist movement. In Paris he met Friedrich Engels, son of a wealthy textile manufacturer, who became his lifelong collaborator. Among their joint works is the Communist Manifesto (1848), written for the Communist League.

  In 1849 Marx moved to London, “where the next dance [revolution] begins,” he said hopefully. Engels went, too, to work at his father’s textile firm in Manchester. Their hopes for revolution ended in disappointment when the stolid British showed little interest.

  Money was Marx’s bête noire. He refused to be a “money-making machine,” so he and his family lived on what he earned writing and on handouts from Engels and relatives. The Marx children were trained to say to bill collectors, “Mr. Marx ain’t upstairs.” (Later, family fortunes improved.) Only three of the seven children grew to maturity, and of those three, two committed suicide.

  Marx spent his days in the reading room of the British Museum doing research for his major work, Das Kapital, and for the articles and editorials he and Engels wrote for the New York Daily Tribune.

  His physical condition was poor. Run-down and nervous, he rarely took baths, and for the last 20 years of his life he was afflicted with boils all over his body. In addition, he suffered from liver and eye problems.

  A Victorian autocrat, Marx was not above faking a fit of temper and shouting, “I will annihilate you!” during arguments. He was prone to sarcasm and intolerant of others’ opinions. Nicknamed “the Moor” for his swarthiness, he grew a flowing beard to point up his resemblance to a statue of Zeus he kept in his study. His brown eyes were passionate and defiant, his laugh was infectious.

  LOVE LIFE: The only serious romantic love of Marx’s life was green-eyed, auburn-haired Jenny, four years his senior and daughter of a baron. Gentle and scholarly, she also had style and a streak of vanity. Named “Queen of the Ball” one year in Trier, she was pursued by suitors but chose Karl, whom she called pet names, like Schwärzwildchen (“little black wild one”). Both families were against their marriage. In her extravagant and well-written love letters to him, she talked of “all the bliss that was and will be,” though their passion for each other was not consummated until after their marriage. Once she spoke of how she would “lay down” her head for him, “sacrificing it to my naughty boy,” and she called him a “wicked rascal” for flirting with a certain Madame Hermann while on a steamer.

  On June 19, 1843, Karl and Jenny were married in a Protestant church. The couple honeymooned in Switzerland, a trip financed by Jenny’s mother. They carried their spending money in a two-handled strongbox, which they purposely left open in hotel rooms so that anyone could take from it.

  Their first child was born in Paris. Jenny took the baby girl home to show her off and wrote to Karl that she was afraid to return to Paris for fear that they would make more babies, which, of course, they did. Fear of pregnancy—and another mouth to feed—haunted their marriage.

  Marx was a family man. Though he referred to Jenny as “mercurial” and complained in letters of her “floods of tears,” he also said, to Engels, “When I see the sufferings of my wife and my own powerlessness, I could rush into the devil’s jaws.” They faced evictions for nonpayment of rent and even had to borrow the money to pay for a coffin when one-year-old Francizka died. In happier moments, on Sundays, the whole family went for picnics in London parks, and Marx told stories as they walked along. In a graphic account of the Marx ménage, a Prussian police spy once told of an oilcloth-covered table littered with sewing, manuscripts, toys, and chipped cups, and of how he was offered a chair from which “the children’s cooking [playthings]” was not removed.

  The only known scandal that touched the family was Karl’s affair with the family servant, Helene “Lenchen” Demuth, a delicately beautiful peasant girl who had joined the Von Westphalen family as a maid at age 11 or 12 and was “given” to Jenny in 1845 by her mother. Lenchen ruled the family with an iron hand and could beat Marx at chess. In 1851 she gave birth to a child, Henry Frederick, fathered by Marx. The child was raised by a foster family and never acknowledged by Marx—perhaps out of fear that it would destroy his marriage. Marx met the boy only once, in 1882. Lenchen worked for the Marx family until Karl’s death, in 1883, two years after Jenny died. Then she went to work for Engels.r />
  Marx had at least two minor flirtations—one with 33-year-old Frau Tenge, a cultured Italian married to a wealthy landowner, and another with his cousin, Antoinette Philips, 19 years younger than Marx, who in 1863 nursed him through a painful bout with boils. During his recovery, Marx wrote of Antoinette’s “dark eyes shining dangerously as she pampers me.”

  He was paternal, and the practice of wife-beating so enraged him that he would have flogged a wife-beater “to the point of death,” he claimed. Politically, he was against bourgeois marriage (though he had such a marriage himself ) because it kept women in a state of slavery. Ironically, he deeply disapproved of Engels’ mistress because she was of the lower classes.

  The reverse side of Marx shows a corresponding vulgarity. He was fond of erotic French poetry of the 16th century, used words like cock and toss-off, and enjoyed telling dirty jokes, though never in mixed company.

  HIS THOUGHTS: In 1856 Marx wrote to Jenny, “I have the living image of you in front of me, I hold you in my arms, kiss you from head to foot, fall before you on my knees and sigh, ‘Madam, I love you.’ … But love—… not of the proletariat, but love of one’s darling, namely you, makes a man into a man again. In fact there are many women in the world, and some of them are beautiful. But where can I find another face in which every trait, even every wrinkle, brings back the greatest and sweetest memories of my life?”

  —A.E.

  The Objectivist

  AYN RAND (Feb. 2, 1905-March 6, 1982)

  HER FAME: Philosopher and novelist, Ayn Rand was the founder of the individualist, a quasi-libertarian school of thought she dubbed “Objectivism.” She summed up her system thusly: “My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.” Rand is probably best remembered as the author of novels The Fountainhead (greatly popularized by the movie—with Rand’s script—starring Gary Cooper and Patricia O’Neal) and Atlas Shrugged.

  HER PERSON: Born Alisa Zinov’yevna Rosenbaum in Saint Petersburg to an agnostic Jewish family, Rand filled her young life with an early-developing love of literature, writing novels and screenplays from the age of seven and immersing herself in the works of Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas and other writers of the Romantic period. The 1917 Russian Revolution, which erupted when Rand was 12, financially crippled her family—they were forced to flee to Crimea—and left Rand with a permanent hatred for Communism. After returning to St. Petersburg to complete a university education, Rand gained an American visa to visit relatives at the age of 21. She never looked back, seeing in America the pinnacle of man’s moral development and the antithesis of everything she had despised about the Soviet system. Taking the name Ayn Rand after stepping off the boat to New York, she made her way to Los Angeles, and, after a chance meeting with Cecil B. DeMille, broke into Hollywood as a script reader and, subsequently, as head of RKO Studio’s costume department. There she met her future husband, actor Frank O’Connor, whose quiet dignity and exceptional good looks caused her to fall in love at first sight. After early successes with screenplays, Rand turned to writing novels—her early works, We the Living and Anthem, are still cherished by her fans if less known to the wider public. However, it was the 1943 publication of The Fountainhead, which champions the uncompromising character of its young architect hero, Howard Roark, who refuses to compromise his artistic vision despite having to languish in obscurity, and who ultimately destroys one of his own buildings, which made Rand’s name. The follow-up publication of her masterwork Atlas Shrugged (which depicts a worldwide strike by the industrialists and innovators of America), in 1957, cemented her reputation. Her novels were universally panned by the literati and remain virtually blackballed by the academic world, but she remains one of the most influential authors and thinkers in print, especially with the young. After a decade’s battle with lung cancer, Rand died of heart failure in March 1982 in her New York home. A dollar-shaped floral arrangement was placed by her coffin, because to Rand, the dollar sign represented the heroism of capitalism.

  LOVE AND SEX LIFE: Essential to Rand’s philosophy was the idea that sexuality is an expression of a human being’s highest values; she depicted characters who were attracted to those who embody their highest values (it is an idea similar to ones advanced in Plato’s Symposium). She summarized her views succinctly in a Playboy interview—“I say that sex is one of the most important aspects of man’s life and, therefore, must never be approached lightly or casually. A sexual relationship is proper only on the ground of the highest values one can find in a human being. Sex must not be anything other than a response to values. And that is why I consider promiscuity immoral. Not because sex is evil, but because sex is too good and too important.” Some of her views on sex, however, were more controversial—she believed that women’s attitude toward men should be one of hero worship; homosexuality she viewed as an aberration and moral failure. Yet, she defended the rights of the individual to practice as they saw fit. Meanwhile, Rand’s own marriage to Frank O’Connor was a largely unfulfilled one. An intensely focused and powerful woman, Rand found herself dominant in every aspect of the relationship, much in contrary to her ideal that men should be the subject of female worship; she also found O’Connor far from being her intellectual equal. Barbara Branden, one of her young students and, later, biographer, wrote of the split between Rand’s theory and practice: “[Rand’s theory of sex was] potentially a dangerous one, which already had had explosive effects on Ayn’s life. It had led her to wildly aggrandize the men who were her sexual choices... and it would continue to do so in the future; if the men to whom she was attracted were not heroes, then what would her choices say about her ?” Ironically, it would be Barbara Branden’s husband Nathaniel, a Rand obsessive since his teens and longterm acolyte—her junior by two and a half decades—who would become her next lover in early 1955.

  The affair was reluctantly “approved” by both Branden and Rand’s respective spouses, though in truth the rejected spouses were in agony. While Nathaniel wanted to have sex with Rand in a hotel, she insisted on her apartment. Thus husband and lover often passed politely in the elevator. Frank and Barbara took to sharing their troubles in bars, and Frank eventually developed a serious drinking problem. Barbara Branden later wrote that the affair was “agonizingly painful” for both her and O’Connor.

  Nathaniel Branden later recalled of his mistress, “What she wanted was a man whose esteem would take the form of reducing her to a sex object. This seemed so simple and natural to me.” Ayn favored having sex with Nathaniel on the mink coat her husband had bought her (with the money from her successes). Like the aggressive and violent nigh-on-rapes that Rand made of her hero and heroines’ sexual encounters in her novels, Ayn liked it rough and demeaning. Wrote Nathaniel Branden: “‘What’s happening to me?’ Ayn would say. ‘You’re turning me into an animal.’ And I would grin mockingly and answer, ‘Really? What were you before?’ ‘A mind,’ she would say. And I would reply, ‘Really? Do you have a mind? Who ever told you that?’” After the release of Atlas, Rand fell into deep post-partum depression.

  Her sexual affair with Branden ended histrionically. Brandon had fallen in love with a new woman, and hid the truth from Rand. Finally he revealed his secret, and confessed to Rand that he was no longer attracted to her because of her age. In front of a roomful of people, Rand furiously slapped Nathaniel and spat out a curse that he be impotent for the rest of his life. (Apparently the curse was ineffectual.) She stated that Branden had betrayed his highest value, Rand, and expunged him from her life, removing her dedication to him in Atlas Shrugged. They never spoke again. Branden then divorced Barbara and married the young actress Patrecia Gullison Scott. He remains a pariah in the Objectivist community but has gone on to a successful career as a writer of Objectivist self-help books on relationships.

  HER THOUGHTS: “Tell me what a man finds sex
ually attractive and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life. Show me the woman he sleeps with and I will tell you his valuation of himself.”

  —J.L.

  The Man Who Confessed Everything

  JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU (June 28, 1712-July 2, 1778)

  HIS FAME: The Swiss-born French philosopher, novelist, and political theorist authored such works as Julie, or The New Héloïse; Émile, or A Treatise on Education; The Social Contract; and his autobiographical Confessions. His writings on romance, education, government, and morality greatly influenced the leaders of the French Revolution and the Romantic movement. His philosophy is best epitomized in the concept that man is naturally good and that all contact with society is corrupting. So controversial and influential was Rousseau that George Sand called him “St. Rousseau,” Voltaire and David Hume called him “a monster,” and Tolstoi said that Rousseau and the gospel were the two greatest influences in his life.