The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People (31 page)

“good” women had no sexual feelings, and feared prostitutes as much as “vitriol throwers.” Homosexual copulation he once described as being like “a huge vampire feeding upon a corpse.” Because most forms of homosexual activity were repellent to him, when he discovered he was a pederast the solitary masturbation of his childhood was replaced by reciprocal masturbation with young partners.

After his mother died, Gide had agonized over his sexual identity and suit-ability for marriage. Sexual attempts with women continued to fail, whereas encounters with young boys had been consistently satisfying. He consulted a doctor about his tastes and confessed to what he thought was a hopeless perversion. The doctor examined him, listened to Gide’s account of feeling sexually “normal” only in the arms of boys, and then gave him some optimistic advice: “Get married. Get married without fear. And you’ll quickly realize that all the rest exists only in your imagination.”

SEX PARTNERS:
Gide’s first sexual experience at 23 was with a 14-year-old Arab who loafed around his hotel in Tunisia. Ali offered himself in the sand dunes, and after a feigned hesitation, Gide submitted joyfully. Later he tried to “normalize” himself by having intercourse with Meriem, a 16-year-old female prostitute who resembled a child. While he was with her, he wrote, he had pretended she was her little brother, a young lad “black and slim as a demon.” Meriem’s “treatments” were terminated when Gide’s mother came to Africa to nurse him through tuberculosis.

The following year, in Algiers, Gide met Oscar Wilde and his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. One night Wilde procured a young musician, Mohammed, for Gide—an episode which ever after Gide regarded as the high point of his sexual experience. “After Mohammed had left me, I spent a long time in a state of quivering jubilation, and although I had already achieved pleasure five times with him, I revived my ecstasy over and over again, and back in my hotel room, prolonged the echoes of it until morning.”

In Algeria Gide formed a strong attachment to his beautiful 15-year-old servant boy, Athman, whom he called a “black pearl.” When he wrote his mother about bringing Athman back to Paris, to “help in the house,”
Mme.

Gide wouldn’t hear of it. For a month they fought, exchanging increasingly exasperated letters. At his mother’s ultimatum that
her
servant would leave if a “Negro” were brought into the house, Gide relented. He was miserable at
The Pen Is Prominent
/
having to leave the boy, but four years later he returned to Algeria, found Athman, and took him back to Paris.

At 46 Gide began a heterosexual affair with Elizabeth van Rysselberghe, the daughter of a lifelong friend. He passed her a note saying he would like to give her a child, a wish fulfilled in 1923 when their daughter Catherine was born. He publicly acknowledged this child and lived to be a grandfather.

QUIRKS:
As a boy Gide found that his sexual excitement was stimulated “by a profusion of colors or unusually shrill sweet sounds,” and also by the “idea of destruction.” He noted arousal when he spoiled a favorite toy or heard a story about crockery being smashed to pieces. Later he was attracted to crippled, deformed, or monstrous children, in whom he recognized some aspect of himself.

HIS THOUGHTS:
“Rousseau says that he wrote his
Confessions
because he believed he was unique. I am writing mine for exactly the opposite reason, and because I know that a great many will recognize themselves in them.—But to what purpose?—I believe that everything that is true can be instructive.”

“It is better to be hated for what one is than loved for what one is not.”

—M.B.T.

Herr Nicefoot

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

(Aug. 28, 1749–Mar. 22, 1832)

HIS FAME:
Most renowned for his verse

drama
Faust
, the “German Shakespeare”

also wrote 14 volumes of scientific prose,

was a statesman in the Weimar court,

and managed a theater. Yet in his 82

years of life he found time to fall in love

over and over again, nearly always with

Olympian passion.

HIS PERSON:
The firstborn child and

only son of a highly cultured Frankfurt

family, Goethe was accomplished in

music, art, and six languages when he left

home for law school in 1765. An attractive

young man with a beaky nose and large,

dark eyes, he affected a bohemian

Goethe, 26, with silhouette of Charlotte von Stein

appearance and manner in his student days at the University of Leipzig. This may have been what prompted one of his professors to remark: “It was the well-nigh universal opinion that he had a slate loose in the upper story.” This “universal opinion” was, of course, dead wrong. Goethe functioned superbly throughout his life.

His ability to revel in the empyrean realms of the imagination was balanced by his intense interest in the nuts and bolts of existence. Example: As bullets whined past him during a battle, he took his pulse to check his heart’s performance under stress.

His short novel
The Sorrows of Young Werther
, written during the
Sturm und
Drang
(“storm and stress”) period, made suicide for love fashionable among the young in Europe and also established him as a popular novelist. Frankfurt society took him to its bosom, and the Duke of Saxe-Weimar invited him to join his court in 1775. After a few months of debauching with the 18-year-old duke (throwing plates from palace windows and perhaps engaging in orgies), Goethe settled down to serious work as chief minister of state (inspecting mines and issuing military uniforms) and an austere way of life (he gave up coffee and stopped wearing a wig). For the rest of his life, except for two journeys to Italy, Goethe lived at Weimar, where he wrote masterpieces, managed the theater, and studied science (he founded morphology and his work on plants foreshadowed Darwin’s).

LOVE AND SEX LIFE:
Goethe’s emotional and literary lives were in constant embrace, and he wrote volumes about the state of his romantic feelings. The tension between polarities that helped to create greatness in his writing also existed in his love affairs; he was often involved in bizarre triangles with two different women (one innocent, one experienced, for example), and the course of his romances rarely ran smooth.

Freudian biographer K. R. Eissler postulates that Goethe may have had problems with premature ejaculation as a young man and did not have actual intercourse until he was 39. This has been neither proved nor disproved. Goethe did indeed have a free-flowing, intense personality and was deeply affected by the merest physical contact. A kiss could throw him into ecstasies.

The women Goethe loved were often unattainable; several were engaged or married to his friends. Charlotte Buff, who inspired
The Sorrows of Young
Werther
, was engaged to Goethe’s friend Johann Christian Kestner.

Though Goethe had relationships with aristocratic intellectuals, he had a predilection for competent, pretty, earthy women below him in social station.

Round-faced Käthchen Schönkopf, an innkeeper’s daughter and perhaps his first real love, was typical, as was the hot-and-cold course of their love affair. One moment he was indifferent to her, the next writing to a friend: “But I love her.

I believe I would take poison from her hand…. We are our own devils, we drive ourselves out of our own Edens.”

His passion for Friederike Brion, a parson’s daughter, was a “magic garden,”

yet he wrote, “One isn’t an atom happier when one gets what one wanted.”

Some biographers claim he left her not only brokenhearted but with child.

During his period as “Carnival Goethe” in Frankfurt society (toward which he had some uneasy contempt), he became engaged to Lilli Schönemann, a
The Pen Is Prominent
/ banker’s daughter. After several dramatic breaks and reconciliations, the engagement reached an end when Goethe left for Weimar in 1775. Did they have intercourse? Lilli’s later claim that she owed him her “moral existence” would indicate no, yet there is a puzzling entry in his autobiographical notes which reads: “Episode with Lilli. Prelude. Seduction. Offenbach.”

At Weimar, Goethe had a 10-year, probably platonic relationship with Charlotte von Stein, married and the mother of eight, an intellectual, seven years older than Goethe. He sent her more than 1,500 letters, writing little else during this period.

After his journey to Italy in 1786-1788 to discover the classical world and the sensuousness of the south, he met Christiane Vulpius, a worker in an artificial-flower factory. Stocky and black-eyed, she loved the theater, dancing, clothes, wine, and Goethe. He called her his “force of nature.” She moved in with him and stayed until the end of her life. They shared homely, simple things. When he was away on occasion, they wrote to each other. They alluded in their letters to an unborn child as
das Pfuiteufelchen
(“the little it’s-a-damned-shame”), and Christiane referred to Goethe’s penis as Herr Schönfuss (“Mr. Nicefoot”). When they had been together more than 15 years, he wrote asking for a pair of her “danced-out shoes” to “press against his heart.” He married Christiane in 1806, after the French invasion of Germany, during which she had saved him from being shot by two soldiers. His marriage seemed to arouse in him yearnings for other women, among them Minna Herzlieb, who inspired “sonnet fever,” and Marianne von Willemer, married to a friend, who shared his Arabic period.

Christiane died in 1816. When Goethe was 74, he proposed to his “daughter-ling,” Ulrike von Levetzow, then in her late teens. She turned him down.

HIS THOUGHTS:
“Great passions are mortal illnesses. What might cure them makes them but more dangerous than before.”

“So, lively brisk old fellow, / Don’t let age get you down.
White hairs or not
You can still be a lover.”

—A.E.

The 30-30 Shell

ERNEST HEMINGWAY (July 21, 1899–July 2, 1961)

HIS FAME:
In a career spanning four decades, Hemingway established himself as one of America’s greatest writers, and his macho approach to life is evident in both the style and substance of his work. His major novels,
The Sun Also Rises
,
A Farewell to Arms
,
For Whom the Bell Tolls
, and
The Old Man and the Sea
, often mirrored his adventurous life, recreating his physical sensations while hunting big game, bullfighting, and soldiering. At the same time, his aesthetic sensibility
drew wide critical acclaim and brought

him both a Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel

Prize for literature.

HIS PERSON:
Hemingway’s life has

been called a “never ended rebellion”

against his middle-class past. The son of

a doctor, Hemingway was raised in a

Chicago suburb in a family dominated

by its women, including his four sisters,

a nurse, and a cook. His mother made

him wear girls’ clothing for several years

and held his elder sister Marcelline back

a year so that the two could enter school

together, as twins. At 15 he ran away

from home but returned in order to finish high school. After WWI, during which he saw front-line action as an ambulance driver in Italy, he went to Paris as a journalist. There, under the guidance of writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein, Hemingway developed his crisp style and achieved initial fame and success as a novelist. He craved yet resented being in the limelight, carefully creating a virile public image of the withdrawn, macho man, seeking out adventure as a boxer, hunter, wartime correspondent, and soldier all over the world. In later years he enjoyed life at his beloved Cuban home, Finca Vigia (“Lookout Farm”). After Fidel Castro seized power in 1960, Hemingway moved to a house in Ketchum, Ida. There he became anxiety-ridden and depressed and was unable to write. He twice underwent electroshock therapy at the Mayo Clinic. Two days after returning to Ketchum from one of these sessions, he took his life with a shotgun.