The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People (105 page)

Maria was too brilliant and independent to be the unwitting victim of a casual affair. She championed a “new woman” who would “marry and have children out of choice, not because matrimony and maternity are imposed on her.” The moral revivals of the future, she believed, would revolve around

“the struggle against the sexual sins” of a society in which women were the slaves, the men the “lords, in a barbaric sense, of sexual life.”

In spite of her progressive beliefs, Maria Montessori was still a woman of her time. She would say, “Excuse me if I show you this,” when she used an anatomical drawing to illustrate a lecture. She could be excessively modest; for example, she insisted that her students precede her up stairways so that they wouldn’t catch a glimpse of her legs under the long skirts she always wore.

HER ADVICE:
“I wish that I could make all women fall in love with scientific reasoning. It doesn’t suffocate the voice of the heart but augments it and supports it.”

—D.M.L.

Lady With A Hatchet

CARRY NATION (Nov. 25, 1846–June 9, 1911)

HER FAME:
Among the most famous

of all temperance reformers, Carry

Nation was a crusader whose enthusiasm

in the war against vice has scarcely been

rivaled anywhere. She raged against alcohol, tobacco, sex, politics, government,

the Masonic Lodge, lawyers, foreign

foods, and Theodore Roosevelt, to name

only a few of her pet peeves. She was and

is best known for her “hatchetations”—

during which she destroyed bars and

other dens of iniquity single-handedly

with a hatchet.

HER PERSON:
Born Carry Moore in

Garrard County, Ky., she had a father who was a prosperous slaveowning stock dealer and a mother who suffered from the fixed delusion that she was Queen Victoria, complete with royal carriage and scepter. There were a great number of eccentrics in Carry’s family, most notably one aunt who, at the time of the full moon, made repeated attempts to climb onto the roof and transform herself into a weather vane. Carry’s odd relatives and her own early religious visions probably served to influence her development toward fanaticism.

Although erratically educated, Carry was certified to be a teacher. She became interested in temperance in 1890. At that time she was a resident of Kansas, which was a dry state. When a new U.S. Supreme Court ruling permitted wet states to export liquor in “original packages” to dry states, Carry felt that the law of Kansas was being undermined and she began her crusade. With a handful of female followers she marched on saloons. While her followers sang hymns outside, Carry stormed into the saloons and wielded her hatchet. She was in and out of jails more than 30 times, paying her fines by lecturing and selling souvenir hatchets. In her heyday she was a forbidding figure; nearly 6 ft. tall and weighing 176 lb., she wore stark black-and-white clothing, with a hatchet brooch pinned to her expansive bosom. She died at age 64 in Leavenworth, Kans. Her legacy was the 1919 Prohibition Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

LOVE LIFE:
Carry’s mother and numerous aunts trained her to look upon every man as a potential seducer. Therefore, when she received gentlemen callers, there was no hand holding or hay riding. Instead, they discussed literature or the Bible. She said of herself: “Oh, I was a great lover,” and in her

autobiography she wrote: “There are pages in my life that have had much to do with bringing me in sympathy with the fallen tempted natures. These I cannot write, but let no erring, sinful man or woman think that Carry Nation would not understand, for Carry Nation is a sinner saved by grace.” However, her concept of sin was so exaggerated that she was probably referring to her fantasies.

In 1865 Charles Gloyd, a handsome young doctor from Ohio, became a boarder at the Moore household. Although Mrs. Moore forbade the two young people to be alone in the same room together, Gloyd managed to woo Carry nonetheless. One day he caught her in his arms and kissed her on the mouth.

She covered her face with her hands and cried, “I’m ruined! I’m ruined!” Their courtship lasted two years. Things took a turn for the worse on their wedding day, when Gloyd showed up drunk for the ceremony. Carry wrote of the days that followed: “I did not find Dr. Gloyd the lover I expected. He was kind but he seemed to want to be away from me; used to sit and read, when I was hungry for his caresses and love.” After a few months she left him, at her parents’

urging, when she was pregnant and on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Six months later Gloyd died as a result of his heavy drinking.

Several years later, living with her daughter and motherin-law, Carry was in financial difficulty. She turned to the Lord, saying, “Lord, you see the situation.

I cannot take care of Mother and Charlien. I want you to help me. If it is best for me to marry, I will do so. I have no one picked out, but I want you to select the one you think best.” Within six months she was married to David Nation, an extremely ugly widower 19 years her senior, who was a minister and a lawyer.

Their marriage was rocky, and Carry was bitter that she had not found true love.

Her new husband resented her overzealous Christianity and religious visions, and although she wept at his lack of affection, she found sex repugnant.

After 24 miserable years together, Nation divorced Carry on grounds of desertion. In her final analysis, men were “nicotine-soaked, beer-besmeared, whiskey-greased, red-eyed devils” and “two-legged animated whiskey flasks.” In addition to fighting her war on fermented grains, Carry was something of a feminist; she preached against corsets and advocated a matriarchal society.

QUIRKS:
The product of a deeply repressed sexuality, Carry’s hatred of all things sexual and her battle tactics in fighting them became increasingly warped.

She began her career of interference by attacking necking couples and lecturing them on the evils of buggy riding and “spooning,” all the while brandishing a ferocious-looking umbrella with a sharpened tip. (She had not yet picked up the hatchet.) She also stopped women on the street to alert them against seduction, describing it in graphic anatomical detail. She established a “Home for the Wives of Drunkards” and started a newspaper called
The Hatchet
. In it she ran a column entitled “Private Talks to Boys and Girls.” Its main theme was the evils of self-abuse, and its language was so explicit that one reader called it “a blueprint for masturbation.”

Claiming that God had told her to use a hatchet, she began to wreak real havoc. To protect themselves, bar owners went so far as to hire bodyguards,

equip their bars with trapdoors, or keep cages of rats to let loose on unwelcome visitors. One saloon keeper even designed a portable bar with the strength of a tank, which he planned to take on tour through the dry states in open defiance of Carry and her hatcheteers. One of her most celebrated smashings occurred in Wichita, Kans., at the beautifully ornate bar of the Hotel Carey. Famed for its lovely interior decoration, the bar proudly sported a life-size painting of a nude Cleopatra bathing, along with scantily clothed attendants. When Carry saw it, she hit the ceiling. The place deserved “hatchetation.” She proceeded to completely destroy the bar single-handedly, throwing rocks and axing away wildly.

She caused thousands of dollars’ worth of damage. She told the bartender, “It’s disgraceful! You’re insulting your mother by having her form stripped naked and hung up in a place where it is not decent for a woman to be when she has her clothes on!” Not wishing to risk similar treatment, a hotel owner in New York City abjectly draped with cheesecloth the naked statue of Diana decorating his lobby. Mrs. Nation had told him, “Look here, my man, you cover up that nasty thing or there’ll be a little hatchetation around here!”

—A.W.

The Rites Of Spring

WASLAW NIJINSKY (Mar. 12, 1890–Apr. 8, 1950)

HIS FAME:
During his brief but glorious

career as the premier danseur of the Imperial Russian Ballet at St. Petersburg’s

Maryinsky Theater and of Sergei Diaghilev’s

Ballets Russes, Nijinsky performed the

leading male roles in such works as
Le

Spectre de la Rose
(“The Specter of the

Rose”),
Petrouchka
, and his masterpiece,
Le
Sacre du Printemps
(“The Rite of Spring”).

Rejecting the conventional forms of classical

ballet, he perfected leaps in which he

appeared to hang in midair. His daringly

original choreography and dramatic acting

spurred the art of ballet to great heights and

earned him a reputation as a genius.

HIS PERSON:
The son of two professional dancers, Nijinsky was born in Kiev in the Ukraine. “A delicate child, awkward, temperamentally backward and slow-thinking,” he began dancing early, and by the age of three was touring with his parents’ troupe. As a student

he demonstrated unparalleled ability and once performed 10 entrechats—crossing and uncrossing the legs—in a single jump.

When Nijinsky was nine, his father deserted the family in favor of a pregnant mistress. His mother urged him all the harder to excel in dance, since a ballet career would insure money and prestige. He graduated from St. Petersburg’s Imperial School of Ballet in the spring of 1907 and joined the Imperial Russian Ballet as a soloist.

In 1909 he met dance impresario Sergei Diaghilev and began collaborating with him as a dancer and later as a choreographer. When he danced in Paris with the Ballets Russes, he created a sensation. In 1911 Nijinsky was dismissed from the Imperial Ballet for appearing onstage without his full costume. He was promptly offered a place in the Ballets Russes. There he choreographed and danced his most legendary roles.
L’Après-midi d’un Faune
(“The Afternoon of a Faun”) created a minor scandal in 1912; in the final scene Nijinsky simulated masturbation. The police warned him to rewrite the scene or risk having the show closed. He refused to change the passage, but no performances were actually raided.

In 1913 Nijinsky married Countess Romola de Pulszky. The marriage offended Diaghilev so much that he dismissed his star performer. Nijinsky then formed his own dance troupe, which toured for about a year, appearing in London and in the U.S. But his talents did not extend to running the business aspects of a dance company, and it failed.

During WWI Nijinsky was imprisoned in Austria-Hungary on charges of spying for Russia. He was not permitted to perform, and not until he was freed in 1916 was he able to return to his career. He again toured, but in 1919, at 29, he suffered a nervous breakdown. He stopped dancing, was plagued by insomnia, headaches, persecution mania, schizophrenia, and depression. Until his death from kidney disease in 1950, he lived most of his last 30 years in a Swiss insane asylum.

LOVE LIFE:
Nijinsky’s tumultuous love life contributed significantly to his insanity. He had a passive nature in love, perhaps because he reserved his full vitality for performing on stage. A naive and beautiful young man, Nijinsky began an intimate relationship with 30-year-old Prince Pavel Dmitrievich Lvov in 1908. Tall, blue-eyed, and handsome, Lvov was instantly attracted to the muscular Nijinsky. The prince initiated his friend into the intoxicating delights of nightclub life and provided him with his first homosexual experience. However, Lvov was disappointed with the dancer’s small penis; as one biographer described him, “Nijinsky was small in a part where size is usually admired.” The prince was not possessive; he even arranged Nijinsky’s first sexual experience with a woman—a prostitute. Nijinsky was frightened and repelled by the encounter.

Lvov, who was generous with gifts, won the heart of his lover. But after a few months the prince withdrew, having grown bored with the dancer he considered just “another of his toys.” Before they parted, however, Lvov introduced Nijinsky to Sergei Diaghilev, the cultivated ballet producer who had founded the Ballets Russes. Twenty years older than Nijinsky, Diaghilev was an unabashed homosexual. His first—and last—experience with a woman (his 18-year-old cousin) had been marred by a subsequent venereal infection. The two men became lovers. Nijinsky had grown accustomed to being passed around, but his initial lovemaking with Diaghilev disturbed him. “I trembled like a leaf,”