The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People (30 page)

HIS THOUGHTS:
From a 1925 letter to his mother: “After having observed Americans in Europe I believe more than ever that sex with us has become a national disease. The way we get it into our politics and religion, where it does not belong any more than digestion belongs there. All our paintings, our novels, our music, is concerned with it, sort of leering and winking and rubbing hands on it.

But Latin people keep it where it belongs, in a secondary place. Their painting and music and literature has nothing to do with sex. Far more healthy than our way.”

From a letter to Joan Williams: “One of the nicest conveniences a woman can have, is someone she can pick up when she needs or wants him; then when she doesn’t, she can drop him and know that he will still be right there when she does need or want him again. Only she should remember this. Sometimes when she drops him, he might break. Sometimes, when she reaches down for him, he might not be there.”

—C.H.S.

Paradise Lost

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD (Sept. 24, 1896–Dec. 21, 1940)

HIS FAME:
As the young author who christened the 1920s “the Jazz Age,” Fitzgerald

enjoyed early success as spokesman for a rebellious generation. However, his popularity had

waned by the end of the decade, and when he

died at age 44, not one of his books was in

print. Ironically, his novels
The Great Gatsby

and
Tender Is the Night
are today regarded as classics of American literature.

HIS PERSON:
While still a boy in St. Paul,

Minn., Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was more

comfortable in the company of girls than with

his own sex. He made a sincere effort to play

football in school, but he preferred Mr. Van

Arnum’s dancing class, where a gentleman

danced with a handkerchief in his right hand so he would not soil the back of the girls’ dresses. Scott’s father, who was by no means coarse, once said he would give $5 just to hear his son swear.

In contrast to his contemporary Ernest Hemingway, Scott was put off by blood, sweat, grime, and the seamy side of life. His stories and novels dealt mainly with the very rich, whose intrigues and decadence fascinated the middle-class, Irish Catholic Fitzgerald. He once remarked to Hemingway, “The very rich are different from you and me.” To which Papa replied, “Yes, they have more money.” Scott’s first novel,
This Side of Paradise
, was about flaming youth at Princeton University, a hotbed of liquor and indiscriminate kissing. The book was quite scandalous for 1920, and as a result it sold well. At the age of 23

Fitzgerald was a bestselling author with all the money, fame, and opportunities that go with that distinction. He married Zelda Sayre, the daughter of an Alabama Supreme Court justice, and with her began a party that would last 10 years
The Pen Is Prominent
/ and span two continents. Scott never again duplicated his initial literary success.

Although his subsequent novels were well received by critics, they did not sell.

Gatsby
earned him about $1,200, a third of what
The Saturday Evening Post
paid him for hack-written short stories. So Scott stayed busy writing short stories, at first to support his and Zelda’s extravagant lifestyle, and later on to pay for Zelda’s care after her nervous breakdowns. In 1937, deeply in debt to hospitals and friends, Scott went to Hollywood to write screenplays for MGM. The pay was substantial, but Fitzgerald often found himself at odds with the Hollywood establishment and eventually lost his contract with the studio. He was at work on a novel about the film industry,
The Last Tycoon
, when he died of a heart attack at age 44. Eight years later Zelda burned to death in an asylum fire.

SEX PARTNERS:
As an army lieutenant stationed in the South, Scott met Zelda Sayre at a Montgomery Country Club dance. The strikingly beautiful blond 17-year-old was surrounded by a pack of hopeful young men, but Scott would not be outdone. “I was immediately smitten and cut in on her. She was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen in my life. And from the first moment I simply had to have her.” Scott later said Zelda had been “sexually reckless” during their courtship. He had wanted to postpone sex until their wedding night, but Zelda delighted in flouting conventions, and they became lovers a year before their marriage. Scott’s Catholic upbringing made him reluctant to use any form of birth control, yet he never appeared to share Zelda’s guilt about the three abortions she had during their marriage. Their union produced only one child, a girl they called Scottie.

Both Scott and Zelda were extremely jealous, and one rarely went anywhere without the other. Once Isadora Duncan flirted openly with Scott, and Zelda flung herself down a flight of stairs in protest. When Zelda found herself attracted to a handsome French aviator named Édouard Jozan, Scott went so far as to lock her in their villa for a month to keep her away from his rival. The affair was probably quite innocent, and it is doubtful whether Zelda and Jozan ever slept together. Still, Scott was tormented for years by the episode.

Scott contended that he was unfaithful to Zelda only after she had been committed. In the summer of 1935, while Zelda was hospitalized, Scott lived at a resort hotel in Asheville, N.C. There he blatantly carried on with a married woman named Rosemary, who was vacationing in the South with her sister. It was also in Asheville that he met the prostitute Lottie, who recalled an evening when Scott made the mistake of spouting white-supremacist rhetoric in her presence. “I asked if he’d ever gone to bed with a colored girl. He gave me the damnedest look, like I’d accused him of sleeping with his sister. Before he could answer, I told him that he had. Yes, not once or twice, but a dozen times….

When he got over that shock, he walked away like I had leprosy and told me to put on my clothes.”

Scott’s companion for the last three years of his life was Sheilah Graham, a young, attractive, English-born columnist living in Hollywood. She shocked Scott at the outset of their affair by admitting she had had eight lovers before

him. As Graham described it in her book,
The Real F. Scott Fitzgerald
, it was probably Scott’s first healthy, uncomplicated relationship. “In all our time together, I don’t remember seeing him naked. But I was just as shy about my own body. However, this modesty did not prevent us from having a good time sexually. We satisfied each other and could lie in each other’s arms for a long time afterwards, delighting in our proximity. It was not exhausting, frenzied lovemaking but gentle and tender, an absolutely happy state.” The rumor persists that Fitzgerald suffered his fatal heart attack while in bed with Sheilah Graham.

However, according to her he felt a pain while sitting in an easy chair reading the
Princeton Alumni Weekly
, tried to rise, and collapsed on the floor, dead.

QUIRKS:
Sex was one of Scott’s warm-up preparations for writing, and he often made love as though he had a deadline to meet. After spending a night with him, Lottie commented to a mutual friend, “He was nervous and I thought maybe that was why he was so quick about it. I asked him if that was his usual way and he said yes, so I didn’t take it personally, like he wanted to get it over with.” Lottie then gave Scott a few pointers, for which he was grateful.

A few of Fitzgerald’s biographers have speculated that the author was a latent homosexual. A picture of Fitzgerald in drag for a college review prompted a burlesque house to offer him a job as a female impersonator. He once donned a gown and attended a University of Minnesota dance with a friend, Gus Schurmeier, but he did it as a prank. His transvestite experiences were apparently confined to his college years. Furthermore, a transvestite, whether prankster or princess, is not necessarily a homosexual.

Fitzgerald did have a fetish for which there exists more solid evidence. He was greatly excited by women’s feet. His view of feet as sex objects, a self-described “Freudean [
sic
] complex,” compelled Scott to keep his own bare feet modestly hidden. At the beach, he would bury them in the sand rather than expose them to public view.

Scott was likewise ashamed of another part of his body—his penis. Zelda once told him that he could never satisfy her or any other woman, saying his problem was “a matter of measurements.” His ego shattered, he consulted Hemingway, who suggested that they compare organs and afterward declared that Scott’s was normal-sized. Fitzgerald was unconvinced, so Hemingway took him to look at statues in the Louvre. But even this failed to restore Fitzgerald’s self-esteem. Years later, he asked an experienced prostitute named Lottie how his penis compared to others, and she assured him that it was technique that mattered to women, not size. This opinion was later echoed by Sheilah Graham, who wrote a rather backhanded defense of Scott’s dimensions. “Personally,”

she said, “given the choice between a donkey and a chipmunk, I might choose the latter.”

HIS THOUGHTS:
“This is a man’s world. All wise women conform to the man’s lead.”

—M.J.T.

Scandalous Moralist

ANDRÉ GIDE (Nov. 22, 1869–Feb. 19, 1951)

HIS FAME:
A towering figure in French

literature, this Nobel Prize-winning

writer is best known for his semiautobi—

ographical novels (among them
The

Immoralist
and
The Counterfeiters
), which deal with homosexuals and the

duty of each individual to shape his own

moral code. A champion of homosexuality, Gide gave literary respectability to

this hitherto taboo subject.

HIS PERSON:
Paris-born to both

wealth and position, Gide lost his

father, a law professor of Huguenot

stock, when he was 11. His overprotec—

tive, puritanical mother dominated her

only child. A sickly dunce in school, he was once expelled for masturbating in class. Weeping, his mother took him to a doctor who threatened to castrate him to make him desist. Neurotic and anxiety-ridden, at 13 Gide fell in love with his 15-year-old cousin, Madeleine Rondeaux, whom he called his “mystic lodestone” and worshiped all his life. At 20 he received his baccalaureate and thenceforth devoted his time to music, writing, travel, and social causes.

At 25 he openly declared he was a pederast: a man whose object of desire is a male child or adolescent. Nonetheless, after the death of his mother, he married his cousin Madeleine. (The marriage was never consummated.) For the rest of his life he was torn apart by the polarization of the sensual and spiritual aspects of his nature. His writing was an attempt to reconcile the conflict.

Gide’s frankness, expressed in his works, shocked the public and deeply hurt his wife. Although he was a major literary influence of his time, the Catholic Church banned his works. Honors were withheld until 1947, when—at age 78—he received both a doctorate from Oxford University and the Nobel Prize for literature.

LOVE LIFE:
Gide suffered from “angelism,” an aberration which precluded intercourse with a beloved or idealized object; in his case the angel was his wife. Cultured, intelligent, almost saintly, she never complained about their platonic relationship, content with his spiritual half as long as she could believe it was all hers. But at 47 Gide fell in love with Marc Allégret, the 16-year-old son of the best man at the Gides’ wedding. More than a casual affair, their liaison developed into an enduring relationship. Gide records that he experienced the torments of jealousy for the first time when Marc returned home late one night after visiting artist-writer Jean Cocteau. In retaliation for Gide’s “spiritual infidelity,” Madeleine burned all his letters to her. Throughout his life Gide maintained that he had loved her alone. She died, still devoted to him, in 1938.

SEX LIFE:
His family’s brutal attempt to repress his sexuality tended to link sensuality with guilt in his mind. Because of his mother’s attitudes, he thought