The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People (103 page)

While working in Toronto on behalf of the Spanish anarchists then fighting Franco, Emma suffered a paralytic stroke and died in 1940 at the age of 70.

SEX PARTNERS:
When Emma was 15, a 20-year-old hotel clerk in St. Petersburg attempted to force himself on her sexually, but Emma saved herself by screaming. In February, 1887, feeling lonely and depressed in Rochester, Emma consented to marry Jacob Kershner, who worked beside her in a sweatshop.

Unfortunately, Kershner was impotent, and within a year she demanded a divorce. After working at a corset factory in New Haven, Conn., she returned to Rochester and agreed to remarry Kershner after he threatened to commit suicide. But his impotence continued and they grew apart intellectually as well.

At 20 Emma left her husband and moved to New York City.

There she met Alexander Berkman, a stern Jewish anarchist from Russia.

Called Sasha, he was extremely concerned with revolutionary ethics. His friend Fedya was an artist who, although an anarchist, was more committed to beauty than to politics. When Fedya bought bouquets of flowers for Emma, Sasha ranted that it was a waste of money which would be better spent on the Cause.

Emma felt love for both of them, but especially Sasha, with whom she lost her virginity. She called him “my boy” although he was only one and a half years younger than she. Emma lived together with Sasha, Fedya, and another woman, but she also spent time with the infamous Johann Most. Most was the model for the mad-bomber anarchist stereotype. Poor medical treatment resulting from a jaw infection had left him disfigured and ugly. He saw Emma as a protégée, and she saw him as an idol. “I yielded to Most’s trembling embrace,” she wrote of the night before her first speaking tour, “his kisses covering my mouth as of one famished with thirst. I let him drink.”

During this period Emma learned that she had an inverted womb and would have to undergo an operation if she ever wanted to bear children. She

refused the operation, vowing to find an outlet for her mother need “in the love of
all
children.”

In May of 1892 news came that striking workers of the Homestead, Pa., mills of the Carnegie Steel Company had been shot and killed by Pinkerton thugs hired by company chairman Henry Clay Frick. Sasha was so outraged that he decided to assassinate Frick. However, he didn’t own a gun and didn’t have enough money to buy one. Emma, ever resourceful, decided to raise the money by selling her body. On a Saturday evening she paraded up and down 14th Street in an attempt to attract customers, but hurried away nervously whenever one approached. Finally, a tall, well-dressed 61-year-old man picked her up and went with her to a saloon. Recognizing her amateur status, he told her: “You haven’t got it, that’s all there is to it.” He gave her a $10 bill and said, “Take this and go home.” Astounded, she accepted the money and sent it to Sasha, who was waiting in Pittsburgh. Alexander Berkman did shoot Frick on July 23, 1892.

He stabbed him, too, but he failed to kill him. Frick, although badly injured, was back to work in a week. Berkman was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

When Johann Most wrote an article critical of Berkman’s act, Emma was furious at his betrayal of her Sasha. Most had gone to jail in England for advocating tyrannicide, and he constantly spoke out in favor of acts of violence, yet he had no praise for the attack on Frick. Goldman attended Most’s next lecture and sat in the front row. As Most prepared to begin his speech, Emma rose up and demanded that he defend his statements against Alexander Berkman. Most mumbled that she was a “hysterical woman” but said nothing more. Pulling a horsewhip out of her cloak, Goldman flailed Most across the face and neck, broke the whip over her knee, and threw the pieces at him. An enraged crowd surrounded her, but she was rescued by Fedya and other friends.

In December of 1892 Emma met tall, blond 40-year-old Edward Brady, who had just arrived in America after spending 10 years in an Austrian prison for publishing anarchist literature. With Brady she experienced her first orgasm.

“In the arms of Ed I learned for the first time the meaning of the great life-giving force. I understood its full beauty, and I eagerly drank its intoxicating joy and bliss. It was an ecstatic song, profoundly soothing by its music and perfume.

My little flat … became a temple of love.”

Emma and Ed began living together, but he became jealous of the time she devoted to her lectures, meetings, and political activities. To please Brady, she turned down speaking engagements and spent more time at home. But Emma was bending herself unnaturally. Finally, after an argument in which Ed criticized the books she read, Emma gave him a tongue-lashing. “Under the pretext of a great love,” she cried, “you have done your utmost to chain me to you, to rob me of all that is more precious to me than life. You are not content with binding my body, you want also to bind my spirit! First the movement and my friends—now it’s the books I love…. You are not going to clip my wings, you shan’t stop my flight. I’ll free myself even if it means tearing you out of my heart!” Her “ecstatic song” had become “a cracked bell.” Reconciliations followed, but after Ed faked a suicide attempt “just to scare you a little and cure your mania for meetings,” Emma left him for good, seven years after they first met.

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

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.”