On May 18, 1906, Alexander Berkman was released from prison after 14 years of incarceration. Emma greeted him with motherly affection, which he resented. He suffered deep depression and didn’t fill up with life again until he fell in love with a 15-year-old girl and also agreed to take over editorship of Mother Earth. In 1908
Emma began a 10-year involvement with 30-year-old Dr. Ben L. Reitman, known in Chicago as the “King of Hoboes” because he had a following of transients. He called her his “blue-eyed mommy” and she treated him like an overgrown child—which he was. Goldman later described their first night together. “I was caught in the torrent of an elemental passion I had never dreamed any man could rouse in me. I responded shamelessly to its primitive call, its naked beauty, its ecstatic joy.”
Emma’s friends were shocked by her closeness with the frivolous and somewhat roguish Reitman, who became her manager. He had little, if any, ideological commitment. He was a dedicated fund raiser, although it later came out that he had pocketed some of the proceeds from Goldman’s lectures and sent the money to his mother. Once he had the bad taste to precede Emma’s lecture “The Failure of Christianity” with a plea to the atheistic crowd to join him in a prayer to God “to help the poor working people.” When Ben brought his mother to live with Emma and him, the relationship became particularly strained. Eventually Emma threw a chair at Ben and ordered him and his mother to leave the house. Reitman gained some respect in the movement in 1912 when a vigilante group kidnapped him in San Diego, tortured him, burned “IWW” on his buttocks with a cigar, covered him with tar and sagebrush (no feathers were available), and forced him to kiss the flag and sing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” In New York, Emma, citing the right to freedom of speech, convinced her anarchist comrades to allow Ben to teach Sunday school classes in the office of Mother Earth. Ironically, their final separation came when Ben, who wanted children, fell in love with and married one of his Sunday school students.
After her flight from Russia, the 53-year-old Goldman took on a new lover, 29-year-old Arthur Swenson, but their age difference took its toll after a few months. In 1926 Emma married James Colton, a Welsh miner, which allowed her to have a British passport. He did it as a favor. In her 993-page autobiography, Emma devoted one sentence to her marriage to Colton.
There remains one last incident in Emma Goldman’s sex life. In 1934 a 36-year-old blind comrade, Dr. Frank G. Heiner of Chicago, proposed that they share sexual intimacy. She turned down his “offer of sweet love,” but when Mrs. Heiner wrote a letter of support for the idea, Emma allowed him to visit her in Toronto. For two weeks they enjoyed a “world of beauty.” Years later Heiner recalled that the 65-year-old Goldman had “stimulated me as much mentally as physically.”
HER THOUGHTS: “How can such an all-compelling force [as love] be synonymous with that poor little State- and Church-begotten weed, marriage?”
—D.W.
Private Eyes
J. EDGAR HOOVER (Jan. 1, 1895-May 2, 1972)
HIS FAME: As director of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation from 1924 until his death 48 years later, John Edgar Hoover organized the FBI into a scientific law-enforcement agency which mercilessly prosecuted small-time gangsters and political dissidents and maintained files on thousands of Americans from all walks of life. Hoover dominated federal law enforcement for so long that in 1971 Martha Mitchell was able to remark accurately, “If you’ve seen one FBI director, you’ve seen them all.”
SEX LIFE: “I was in love once when I was young,” Hoover remarked, “but then I became attached to the Bureau.” In fact, there is no evidence that Hoover ever made love. He did date in high school, but never “went steady.” He became captain of the school cadets and his friends teased him that he was “going steady with Company A.” He was a champion debater, particularly when arguing against woman’s suffrage. His father died when he was 26 years old, and Hoover, a devoted son, chose to live alone with his mother for the remainder of her life, which was 17 years. He never married, expressing the belief that women are a hindrance to the development of a man’s career.
Hoover’s only intimate friend for the last 44 years of his life was Clyde Tolson, a tall native of Missouri, who served as confidential secretary to three U.S. secretaries of war before joining the FBI in 1928. Hoover and Tolson lunched together every day, and on Saturdays they went to the races. Tolson called Hoover “Eddie” and never seemed to take his eyes off him in public. People who knew them said they were so alike in their thinking that they became known as the “unipersonality.”
Periodically, rumors spread that J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson were homosexual lovers. Hoover took these charges very seriously, claiming that they were made by “public rats,” “guttersnipes,” and “degenerate pseudo [which he pronounced “swaydo”] intellectuals.” When Hoover died, Tolson received most of his $551,500 estate, as well as the flag that had draped his coffin.
Although Hoover and Tolson were definitely a tight couple, it is true that two men can remain close friends for decades without engaging in sex together. And Hoover was not without certain traditional attitudes of male sexuality. For example, he displayed a gallery of famous nudes in his home, including Marilyn Monroe’s celebrated calendar photo. He enjoyed cracking jokes about sex, and it was rumored that he kept pornographic magazines in his desk. If J. Edgar Hoover did enjoy sexy stories and pictures of naked women, he did not have to seek out commercial publications. He had his own private collection. The “OC” files (official and confidential) were kept in Hoover’s office under special lock and key. These files contained potentially embarrassing information, sexual and otherwise, about government officials and various public figures.
Sometimes when his agents turned up a particularly juicy item, Hoover would pass it on to the current president and to members of the Cabinet. However, the OC files were also said to contain stories about the extramarital affairs of Franklin D. Roosevelt and his wife Eleanor, as well as incidents from the lives of Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy.
Once, FBI agents raided the apartment of black radical Angela Davis and found some photographs taken while she and her boyfriend were making love. When Hoover learned of the existence of these photos, he was outraged that they hadn’t been brought to him immediately, and the agent who had held them back was denied his next promotion.
HIS OBSESSION: The FBI began tapping the phone of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1957, but it wasn’t until 1964 that Hoover became truly obsessed with ruining King’s reputation. To this end, he ordered his agents to spy on the black leader day and night, authorizing wiretaps in 15 different hotels while King was staying in them. Eventually Hoover obtained tapes that proved King had engaged in extramarital sexual activities, and Hoover made copies of these tapes available to members of the press, to the Congress, and to President Lyndon Johnson. Prior to King’s audience with the pope in August, 1964, Hoover had sent the pontiff derogatory information about King, but the pope ignored Hoover and went ahead with the meeting as scheduled.
While King was preparing to go to Stockholm to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, Hoover’s attacks on his character reached a peak. During one session with reporters, Hoover called King “the most notorious liar in the country.” Three days later Hoover and Tolson had excerpts of the hotel tapes sent to King’s wife, Coretta. Enclosed in the package was an unsigned note addressed to Dr. King which threatened release of the tapes and said, “Your end is approaching … you are finished … you are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.”
HIS THOUGHTS: “I regret to say that we of the FBI are powerless to act in cases of oral-genital intimacy, unless it has in some way obstructed interstate commerce.”
—D.W.
The Modern Bluebeard
HENRI DÉSIRÉ LANDRU (Apr. 12, 1869-Feb. 25, 1922)
HIS FAME: In France, between 1914 and 1919, 10 women and a boy mysteriously van
ished. Though their bodies were never found, Henri Landru was arrested, tried, and convicted of their murder. In addition to being adjudged guilty of mass murder, Landru was accused of having had relations with—and then swindling—at least 283 women of modest means, mostly middle-aged.
HIS PERSON: Paris-born Henri Landru was short, frail, bespectacled, red-bearded, and bald and had large, luminous, hypnotic, black eyes—an unlikely-looking
Landru and Fernande Segret, who survived
sort to have seduced as many women in five years as Don Juan did in a lifetime. Landru’s father was a stoker in a foundry, his mother a part-time seamstress. He attended Catholic school and sang in the church choir. In his early years he worked as an architect’s draftsman, and later served in the French army. In 1900, while working unsuccessfully as a dealer in secondhand items, he forsook the straight and narrow and embarked upon a life of petty thievery and fraud. His first recorded crime was an attempt at defrauding a widow with a promise of marriage, and between 1900 and 1914 he did several prison terms for fraud. In 1914 he was sentenced in absentia to four years on Devil’s Island, and he thereafter eluded police by using various aliases. In 1919 he was captured by the police, who were looking into the disappearance of two women. An incriminating diary was produced, and 295 bone fragments believed to belong to two or three different corpses were found in his kitchen stove. He was charged with 11 murders, and following a widely publicized trial during which he calmly and coolly stonewalled all attempts to break him down (“the women went where their destiny called them”), he was sentenced to the guillotine. “Ah, well,” he said as he was led to his death. “It is not the first time an innocent man has been condemned…. I will be brave. I will be brave.”
SEX LIFE: Landru’s first recorded affair was with his young cousin, Marie Remy. He was 22, she 16. She became pregnant and subsequently they married and had four children. He remained a loving husband and father, although he did not live with his family in later years.
Landru met his victims in various ways. He placed lonely-hearts ads in Paris newspapers. He answered similar ads placed by single women. He dabbled in “matrimonial agencies.” He made casual pickups on the street. His victims, mostly plainlooking, ranged from a former prostitute to a 19-year-old servant girl (probably just an idle affair, for she had little money). When apprehended he was living with his young, attractive mistress, Fernande Segret, a self-described “lyric artist.” Her recollection of how they met is representative of his technique. Segret and a girl friend had just descended from a tram. “Scarcely had we gone a few yards … when a man accosted us, saluted us very respectfully, and addressing himself to me, asked if we would allow him to accompany us for a few minutes…. We refused … and quickened our pace to get away from him. But our follower would not be shaken…. He suggested that young girls in Paris go out all too often alone with the risk of being accosted by bad characters, and all sorts of annoyances from men. Such a statement made us laugh loudly; our follower took advantage of it to stay.” A few days later, at dinner with her family, she said, “He talked on abundantly with a most lively wit, and every subject he touched he seemed to be at home in. His courteous and agreeable manners impressed me. Without ever forgetting that he was in the presence of ladies he poured out jokes, witty retorts, and even juggled for us with the napkin rings … all the time garnishing his talk with the most wonderful puns.”
Landru’s victims
According to his records Landru enjoyed about 50 women a year, and sometimes met with as many as seven a day. At his trial, Segret, the only woman to live with Landru during that period and remain alive—in fact, she had four children by him—testified that she found him an extremely passionate but normal lover. “I have not a single reproach against him. I loved him very deeply. I was very, very happy with him.” Many of the women he seduced and abandoned were questioned, but not one testified against him. Some even called him kindly, considerate, and affectionate. His wife maintained, “My misfortune has been to love my husband too well.”
QUIRKS: Landru was a meticulous, parsimonious, abstemious, vain man who compulsively kept a diary of all his expenses, conquests, and daily movements. Next to his victims’ names he made copious notes like “Madame Jaume: 39, looks younger…. Very strong Catholic. Afraid of divorce.” And then there were the ominous notations: “1 single and 1 return ticket.” Other entries included the purchase of 7 saw blades, 7 dozen hacksaws, ax blades, and circular saws. For what possible use? In searching his villa police found a variety of women’s clothing, women’s false hair, dental plates, and trinkets as well as some male costumes of the 18th century. Landru’s courtroom behavior was eccentric, belying the seriousness of the charges. He was a master of deadpan humor. One day he informed the judge that he wished to make a statement. Landru bowed to the court and said that he had to confess to having committed adultery with hundreds of women and that in so doing he’d grievously wronged his wife. When asked, before the guillotining, why he’d trimmed his beard, he replied simply that he wanted to please the ladies.
The final irony was that Landru worked so hard for so little. His crimes netted him in all about $8,000.
AFTERMATH: In 1968, almost a half century after Landru had gone to his Maker, a French newspaper announced that this modern Bluebeard’s confession had been found. Scribbled in Landru’s hand on the back of a framed sketch he had presented to one of his lawyers before going to the guillotine was the following: “I did it. I burned their bodies in my kitchen oven.” And what had happened to Landru’s mistress, Fernande Segret? She was thought long dead when a French film, Landru, written by Françoise Sagan, was exhibited in movie theaters worldwide. Suddenly Segret reappeared, a governess working in Lebanon, quite alive. She sued the French filmmakers for 200,000 francs and settled for 10,000. With this tidy sum she retired comfortably to a senior citizens’ home in Normandy. But she was notorious again, and recognized. To rid herself of Landru forever she finally committed suicide by drowning.
—C.H.S.
A Woman Ahead Of Her Time
MARIA MONTESSORI (Aug. 31, 1870-May 6, 1952)
HER FAME: Maria Montessori pioneered preschool education, first by teaching the mentally retarded, later by devising methods still used in Montessori schools worldwide today. Her pedagogical revolution occurred so rapidly that she was known as an “educational wonder-worker” in the U.S. before WWI. The first Montessori-trained students included Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and the grandchildren of Alexander Graham Bell.
HER PERSON: Maria Montessori believed in action, not rhetoric, and pointed to her achievements as evidence of what women could accomplish through work. She started early, winning her astonished father’s permission to study engineering at the age of 13. She conquered the opposition of the medical authorities in Rome (by appealing to Pope Leo XIII for support), entered medical school, and finished with double honors and a standing ovation from her colleagues. A reporter sent to interview Italy’s first female doctor arrived expecting a stern, bony woman in men’s clothing. He was delighted to find Maria attractive and gracious, and noted the flowers, needlework, and musical scores scattered among the chemistry experiments and medical books in her apartment. “The delicacy of a talented young woman combined with the strength of a man—an ideal one doesn’t meet with every day,” was the reporter’s enthusiastic pronouncement. Maria soon became resentful of this sort of publicity and vowed, “My face will not appear in the newspapers anymore and no one will dare to sing of my so-called charms again. I shall do serious work!”
She brought a clinician’s eye to her specialty, children’s nervous disorders, and realized that retarded children were bright enough to invent games to overcome their boredom. Maria became one of the first to teach the retarded, and went on to open Casa dei Bambini (“Children’s House”) for neglected Roman slum children in 1907. The success of her methods was so spectacular (some of her retarded students were getting normal-level test scores) that she finally gave
up medicine to devote her full time to training teachers and writing and lecturing about her program. Called by the Times of London “the best type of woman a country could hope to produce,” Montessori continued working until her death at 81 of a cerebral hemorrhage.
SEX LIFE: In 1896, when she was 26, Maria was working in the psychiatric clinic of the University of Rome as a researcher. There she met Giuseppe Montesano, an assistant doctor. A year later Maria joined the clinic staff as an assistant doctor and subsequently worked alongside Dr. Montesano. In this period, Maria’s friendship with Montesano ripened, and the two became lovers. Soon Maria was pregnant. On Mar. 31, 1898, she gave birth to a child out of wedlock, a son she and Montesano named Mario.
Convinced by her mother that a scandal could destroy her career, Maria turned her son over to a wet nurse. Eventually a family in the country took the boy and raised him, keeping details of his birth a secret. Meanwhile Maria and Montesano had agreed not to marry each other and had pledged not to marry anyone else. But Maria’s lover broke his word and did marry another. By then Maria and Montesano were codirectors of the State Orthophrenic School of Rome (an institution for the mentally retarded). Dismayed by her partner’s action, Maria resigned as head of the school and broke off all ties with Montesano. Her one experience with love had been tragic, and Maria Montessori never again opened her heart to a man.
The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People Page 70