5 People Who Died During Sex: And 100 Other Terribly Tasteless Lists Paperback (7 page)

The excitement of enjoying normal marital relations for the first time fourteen years later was too much for them and they both suffered fatal heart attacks.

10

According to Princess Diana’s biographer Andrew Morton, as a special honeymoon treat, Prince Charles read her passages from the works of Carl Jung and Laurens van der Post.

59

In Delica

5

to Flagranto Morto
:

Five People Who Died

During Sex

1

FELIX FAURÉ (1841–99), SIXTH PRESIDENT OF

THE FRENCH THIRD REPUBLIC On February 16, 1899 in the middle of the infamous Dreyfus crisis, Fauré slipped away for a rendezvous with his mistress, Madame Steinhal, wife of the artist Adolphe Steinhal. Legend has it that Fauré’s bodyguards heard a scream and broke down the door to find him seated dead on a sofa with his beautiful mistress kneeling in front of him
à la
Lewinsky. According to some reports, she was in a state of trauma-induced lockjaw and his member had to be removed surgically. Madame Steinhal was thereafter known as “the kiss of death.”

2

LORD PALMERSTON, BRITISH PRIME

MINISTER (1855–58, 1859–65) “Old Pam,” Britain’s horniest prime minister, died in his eighty-second year, officially from pneumonia after catching a chill while riding in his carriage; it was rumored, however, that he had in fact died of a heart attack while engaged in a sex act with a young parlor maid on his billiard table.

3

CARDINAL JEAN DANIELOU (1915–74) The

French have a phrase for orgasm—
le petite mort
(the little death); in 1974, France woke to the news that one of their most respected senior churchmen, a world-leading Catholic theologian, the head of the theological faculty at Paris University and the author of fourteen books on sexual morality and church discipline had experienced
le grand mort
when he dropped dead on the stairs of a brothel in Clichy, the red-light district of Paris. The French police explained that the seventy-year-60

[Five People Who Died During Sex]

old Cardinal was on his way to “comfort” a twenty-four-year-old blond prostitute in an official capacity only.

4

NELSON ALDRICH ROCKEFELLER (1908–79)

A multimillionaire grandson of the oil magnate John D.

Rockefeller, the forty-first vice president (to Gerald Ford) and the governor of New York, Rockefeller died in the saddle at the age of seventy-one while working on a late-Saturday-night “project” with his twenty-seven-year-old female research assistant. The unlucky researcher was pinned under her hefty boss’s naked body for several minutes until she eventually phoned the paramedics. The
New York Times
noted that the larger-than-life septuagenarian Rockefeller “died the way he’d lived, with an enthusiasm for life in all its public and private passions.”

5

POPE JOHN XII (C. 955–64) Known as John “the Bad,” the pope was bludgeoned to death with a hammer by an irate husband who caught His Holiness in bed with his wife. When news of the death reached Rome, it was noted that Pope John was lucky to have died in bed, even if it wasn’t his own.

61

10

The Grim Rapper:

Ten Most Dangerous Bands

in Popular Music

1

THE BYRDS Five members deceased: Gram Parsons (drug overdose, 1973), Clarence White (killed by drunk driver, 1973), Gene Clark (cardiac arrest, 1991), Michael Clarke (liver disease, 1993), John Guerin (cardiac arrest, 2004).

2

THE TEMPTATIONS Of their original five-man line-up of 1964–67, only one member, Otis Williams, survives. The others were Paul Williams (suicide shooting, 1973), David Ruffin (drug overdose, 1992), Eddie Kendricks (lung cancer, 1992), and Melvin Franklin (brain seizure, 1995).

3

THE GRATEFUL DEAD Four members deceased:

leader Jerry Garcia (heart attack, 1995), Ron “Pigpen”

McKernan (liver disease, 1973), Keith Godchaux (car accident, 1980), and Brent Mydland (overdose, 1990).

4

THE NEW YORK DOLLS Four members deceased: Bill Murcia (overdose, 1972), Johnny Thunders (overdose, 1991), Jerry Nolan (stroke, 1992), and Arthur Kane (leukemia, 2004).

5

T REX Four members deceased: Marc Bolan (car crash, 1977), Steve Currie (car crash, 1981), Steve Peregrine Took (cocktail cherry, 1990), and Mickey Finn (natural causes, 2003).

6

LYNYRD SKYNYRD Four members deceased: Ronnie Van Zant and Steve Gaines (air crash, 1977), Allen Collins (respiratory failure, 1990), and Leon Wilkeson (liver failure, 2001).

65

[Ten Most Dangerous Bands in Popular Music]

7

THE PLATTERS Four members deceased: David Lynch (cancer, 1981), Nate Nelson (heart disease, 1984), Paul Robi (cancer, 1989), and Tony Williams (emphysema, 1992).

8

ALLMAN BROTHERS BAND Three members

deceased: Duane Allman (motorcycle accident, 1971), Berry Oakley (motorcycle accident, 1972), and Lamar Williams (cancer, 1983).

9

THE BEATLES Three members deceased: Stuart Sutcliffe (brain hemorrhage, 1962), John Lennon (murdered, 1980), and George Harrison (cancer, 2001).

10

THE RAMONES Three members deceased: Joey

Ramone (lymphatic cancer, 2001), Dee Dee Ramone (heroin overdose, 2002), and Johnny Ramone (prostate cancer, 2004).

66

10

Last Curtain Calls:

Ten Showbiz Exits

1

1673: Overwhelmed by an unscripted coughing fit, the French playwright and actor Molière collapses during the fourth performance of his newly written
Le Malade
Imaginaire
and is carried to his home in the Rue de Richelieu, Paris, where he dies. The play is about a hypochondriac.

2

1870: The traveling James Robinson & Co. Circus and Animal Show spices up its advance publicity for the inhabitants of Middletown, Missouri, by having their band perform on the roof of a cage full of Numidian lions as the circus parades through the streets. Ignoring repeated warnings that the cage roof is insecure and the trick is highly dangerous, the show’s managers order the band to sit on it anyway. Sure enough, the roof gives way and the musicians are thrown into the cage of hungry lions below. Crowds look on as the lions tear legs and arms from sockets, and half-devoured, dismembered parts of the band are strewn across the cage floor. Of the ten band members, three are killed outright and four more are fatally mutilated.

3

1882: U.S. stage actress Annie von Behren stars in the Coliseum Theatre, Cincinnati, in the drama
Si Slocum
, in which her real-life fiancé Frank Frayne is required to shoot an apple from her head with his back to her by pointing the rifle over his shoulder. An audience of 2,300

watches as the bullet hits her neatly in the forehead. She dies fifteen minutes later as the audience files out of the theater.

67

[Ten Showbiz Exits]

4

1937: Publicity-seeking Norfolk vicar Reverend Harold

“Jumbo” Davidson appears at Skegness Zoo, reading the Bible from a cage he shares with a large but normally docile lion called Freddie. The dramatic stunt goes awry when the lion turns on the vicar and mauls him. The audience, thinking it is a comic interlude, roars with laughter. As Davidson lies fatally wounded in the hospital, the show promoter erects banners inviting people to witness “the lion that injured the rector.”

5

1943: During a regular live radio debate with four others about Adolf Hitler, Alexander Woollcott, author, critic, and radio personality, suffers a fatal cardiac arrest.

Unaware that anything is wrong, hundreds of listeners phone in to complain that Woollcott, usually known for his stinging wit, has less to say for himself than usual.

6

1951: Ronald Reagan’s finest moments on the silver screen, in
Bedtime for Bonzo
, are marred by the accidental death of his costar chimpanzee the day before the film’s premiere.

7

1980: The Indian religious mystic Khadeshwari Baba attempts to demonstrate his powers of meditation by remaining buried alive in a ten-foot-deep pit for ten days.

In a carnival-like atmosphere, a crowd of more than one thousand people, including several officials from the town of Gorakhpur, watch as Baba is ceremoniously lowered into the pit and the hole is filled in behind him.

Ten days later, the pit is reopened. From the
68

[Ten Showbiz Exits]

accompanying stench it was estimated that Khadeshwari had been dead for at least a week.

8

1994: The Mexican entertainer Ramon Barrero, player of

“the world’s smallest harmonica,” inhales and accidentally chokes to death on his mouth organ in mid-performance.

9

1996: Richard Versalle, a tenor performing at the New York Metropolitan Opera House, suffers a heart attack and falls ten feet from a ladder to the stage after singing the line “You can only live so long” from the opening scene of
The Makropulos Case
. It is a Czech opera about an elixir that confers eternal youth.

10

2004: Al Dvorin, the longtime announcer at Elvis Presley concerts, who coined the phrase “Elvis has left the building,” dies in a car crash in California. He was on his way home from a convention of Elvis impersonators.

69

Fifteen

15

Artistic Eccentricities

1

Friedrich von Schiller, the eighteenth-century German poet and dramatist, worked with his feet on a block of ice while inhaling the fumes of rotting apples.

2

The French poet Gérard de Nerval kept a pet lobster, which he took for walks around Paris on the end of a length of ribbon. He said the lobster was “quiet and serious, knew the secrets of the sea, and did not bark.”

3

Jonathan Swift, after completing
Gulliver’s Travels
, wrote a treatise on excrement in 1733 titled
Human Ordure
under the pen name Dr. Shit.

4

The Belgian-French pulp-fiction writer Georges Simenon, creator of the pipe-smoking detective Inspector Maigret, was the world’s hardest-working author. Typing at a rate of eighty pages each day, Simenon wrote well over 400 novels. He said he found the strain of writing so extreme that it frequently caused him to vomit and made it essential for him to sleep with one or more women as soon as each book was done. Alfred Hitchcock phoned one day, to be told by Simenon’s secretary that he couldn’t be disturbed because he had just begun a new novel. Hitchcock, knowing that Simenon was capable of writing three novels a month, replied, “That’s all right, I’ll wait.”

5

James Whistler, American-born painter and graphic artist, once dyed a rice pudding green so that it wouldn’t clash with the walls of his dining room.

6

The opera composer Giacomo Mayerbeer, who lived in constant fear of premature burial, arranged to have bells
70

[Fifteen Artistic Eccentricities]

tied to his extremities so that any movement in his coffin would make a noise. So far, Mayerbeer has continued to decompose quietly without any sign of life.

7

Robert Louis Stevenson, the Scottish author of classic adventure yarns including
Treasure Island
and
Kidnapped
, spent his early years reading parts of the Bible aloud to sheep.

8

The German composer Robert Schumann had two imaginary friends called Florestan and Eusebius who gave him ideas for his scores. Schumann died in an insane asylum.

9

In 1863, the author Louisa May Alcott got sick and described in her journal how she suffered from terrible hallucinations in which she was repeatedly molested by a big Spaniard with soft hands. She recovered and went on to write
Little Women
.

10

The prolific nineteenth-century French writer Honoré de Balzac believed that sex was a drain on his creativity.

After several months of abstinence, he was once tempted into a Paris brothel; he lamented afterward, “I lost a novel this morning.”

11

Samuel Johnson wrote
Rasselas
in seven days flat to pay for his mother’s funeral.

12

Arnold Bennett’s novels were renowned for their stunning attention to detail. Bennett was complimented on his description of the death of Darius Clayhanger in the Clayhanger series, a death scene acclaimed as the
71

[Fifteen Artistic Eccentricities]

most realistic of its kind in the history of English literature. He explained his secret: While his father was dying he was at the bedside busy taking notes.

13

The eighteenth-century artist Benjamin West had an executed criminal exhumed and crucified to see how he hung.

14

Gustav Mahler, famous for his funeral marches, suffered from depression, hemorrhoids, and a morbid fixation on death: He wrote his first funeral march when he was six.

Noticing that many other great composers, including Beethoven and Schubert, lived only long enough to compose nine symphonies, Mahler thought it was unlucky to write any more. He thought he could cheat death by calling his ninth great symphonic work a “Song Cycle” rather than a symphony. As soon as he had sketched out the first draft, however, he died suddenly of a streptococcal throat infection.