The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People (33 page)

CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD (Aug. 26, 1904 –Jan. 4, 1986)

HIS FAME:
British-born Christopher

Isherwood, novelist, screenwriter, playwright, and essayist, is probably best

known for his quasi-autobiographical

“Berlin novels,” one of which,
Goodbye

to Berlin
, introduced the character Sally

Bowles and was the basis for the hit

musical
Cabaret
. The slender, 5-ft. 7-in.

Isherwood spent time in pre-Hitler

Germany and chronicled much of the

decadence of that society in his fiction.

With his good friend W. H. Auden,

with whom he collaborated on several

plays, Isherwood left Europe in 1939

and immigrated to the U.S. He settled

in California and began working on

Isherwood, 48, with 18-year-old Don Bachardy

films, including
The Loved One
. An

American citizen since 1946, Isherwood is a student of Vedanta and has written extensively on the various aspects of Hindu philosophy. He is also an active supporter of gay liberation, having openly admitted to his homosexuality in his book
Kathleen and Frank
.

LOVE LIFE:
Asked when he first came to the realization of his own homosexuality, Isherwood replied, “Quite early—by the time I was 10 or so, in the sense of being physically attracted to boys at school. I managed to have orgasms with them while we were wrestling and I guess some of them had orgasms, too, but we never admitted to it. I fell in love a lot during my teens, but never did anything about it. I was very late in getting into an actual physical affair. That happened while I was in college.”

It was his partner’s idea. When Isherwood protested, the other young man locked the door and sat on his lap.

“Other experiences followed, all of them enjoyable but none entirely satisfying,” according to Isherwood. This was because he was suffering from an inhibition common to upper-class homosexuals of the time; he couldn’t relax with his British peers. He needed “a working-class foreigner.”

Isherwood found his answer in Berlin when he visited Auden in 1929. The fact that the Germans were “simple and natural about homosexuality” was a welcome change. In one of Berlin’s homosexual bars he found the type of blue-eyed blond boy who represented for him “the whole mystery-magic of foreignness.”

After returning to England, he was hired as a tutor for a young boy in a remote village on the coast. Isherwood’s autobiography, written in the third person, recounts the scene.

“While Christopher was there, he had his first—and last—complete sexual experience with a woman…. They were both drunk…. She liked sex but wasn’t the least desperate to get it. He started kissing her without bothering about what it might lead to. When she responded, he was surprised and amused to find how easily he could relate his usual holds and movements to this unusual partner…. He also felt a lust which was largely narcissistic; she had told him how attractive he was and now he was excited by himself making love to her…. Next day, she said, “I could tell that you’ve had a lot of women through your hands.”… He asked himself: “Do I now want to go to bed with more women and girls? Of course not, as long as I can have boys. Why do I prefer boys?

Because of their shape and their voices and their smell and the way they move. And boys can be romantic. I can put them into my myth and fall in love with them. From my point of view, girls can be absolutely beautiful but never romantic. In fact, their utter lack of romance is what I find most likeable about them. They’re so sensible.”

Back in Germany in 1930, Isherwood met the boy whom he was to call Otto Nowak in
Goodbye to Berlin
. Otto was a bisexual with a highly dramatic nature and “a face like a very ripe peach.” By 1932 the affair had cooled and Otto was replaced by 17-year-old Heinz. After Hitler came into power, Heinz and Isherwood wandered around Europe from country to country, living like a “happily married heterosexual couple” until 1937, when Heinz risked a visit to Nazi Germany, where he was arrested and imprisoned for draft evasion and homosexuality. Heartbroken, Isherwood returned to London and allowed himself to be comforted by a variety of young men.

He also had the companionship of Auden. About his relationship with Auden, Isherwood has written:

Their friendship was rooted in schoolboy memories and the mood of its sexuality was adolescent. They had been going to bed together, unro-mantically but with much pleasure, for the past 10 years, whenever the opportunity offered itself…. They couldn’t think of themselves as lovers, yet sex had given friendship an extra dimension.

When Isherwood went to Hollywood in 1939, he met Aldous Huxley and Swami Prabhavananda. For a while he stayed at the swami’s monastery, where he and the other devotees pledged themselves to celibacy. But Isherwood did not completely forswear his love life. His boyfriends during the 1940s included William Caskey, a young photographer from Kentucky with whom he lived for several years.

In 1953 Isherwood met 18-year-old Don Bachardy, who collaborated with Isherwood on a play and some film scripts, and lived with him in Santa Monica for the rest of his life.

Isherwood has always maintained that he is very happy with his sexual preference. Although Auden once baited him by calling him a “repressed heterosexual,” Isherwood offers his own definition of what it means to be a homosexual. “It seems to me that the real clue to your sex-orientation lies in your romantic feelings rather than in your sexual feelings. If you are really gay, you are able to fall in love with a man, not just enjoy having sex with him.”

—C.H.S.

Ireland’s Lost Sheep

JAMES JOYCE (Feb. 2, 1882–Jan. 13, 1941)

HIS FAME:
Irish novelist and poet James

Joyce was one of the most important innovators in modern literature, owing to his

use of interior monologue, or “stream of

consciousness.” Among his greatest works

are
Ulysses
,
Finnegan’s Wake
,
Dubliners
, and
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
.

HIS PERSON:
When the elder Joyce, a

Dublin tax collector, sank into alcoholism and eventually lost his job, young

James was withdrawn from an exclusive

Jesuit-run boarding school, and for two

years the brilliant boy educated himself.

At age 17 he entered another Jesuit institution, University College in Dublin,

Joyce in Zurich

and briefly considered becoming a priest,

but rejected the idea because it required a vow of celibacy.

Joyce fell in love with a semieducated Dublin chambermaid, Nora Barnacle, on June 16, 1904, the date to which he assigned all the happenings in his novel
Ulysses
. Refusing to be married by “a clerk with a pen behind his ear or a priest in a nightshirt,” Joyce took Nora as his common-law wife, and they left for the Continent in October, 1904. They eventually married in 1931, at the urging of their daughter, Lucia.

Joyce earned a precarious living by teaching conversational English and writing reviews in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris. Until 1912 he made rare visits to Dublin, which he considered stifling to artists like himself. After years of

drudgery—and a series of 25 painful operations for iritis, glaucoma, and cataracts, which left him at times nearly blind—he finally began to enjoy a comfortable income from his writing. Lanky, bespectacled, and shy, Joyce never permitted himself an off-color remark in the presence of a lady. Yet he became famous for his unbuttoned prose, and in December of 1920
Ulysses
was banned for its obscenity in the U.S. and England.

SEX LIFE:
In his student days Joyce haunted Dublin’s seedy “Nighttown” red-light district, where he lost his virginity at age 14. In his early 20s he gave up prostitutes, saying he longed to “copulate with a soul.” The soul mate he chose, Nora Barnacle, remained his lifelong companion. He saw himself as a weak child in need of Nora’s motherly discipline and once wrote to her: “I would be delighted to feel my flesh tingling under your hand…. I wish you would smack me or flog me even. Not in play, dear, in earnest and on my naked flesh. I wish you were strong,
strong
, dear, and had a big full proud bosom and big fat thighs.

I would love to be whipped by you, Nora love!”

The small-breasted, boyishly built Nora adapted well to the role of domi-natrix, addressing Joyce as “simpleminded Jim” and describing him to others as

“a weakling.” While Joyce’s work earned him worldwide praise, Nora made no secret of her disdain for his writing. Despite the fact that
Ulysses
became famous for its psychological penetration of the female mind, Nora asserted that Joyce knew “nothing at all about women.” Still, Nora was faithful to him throughout their long relationship, even though she confided to friends that Joyce wanted her to go to bed with other men “so he’ll have something to write about.”

Joyce was never at a loss for words in his letters to Nora. In 1909, when he was away from Ireland on business, he wrote her lusty letters packed with scatological endearments and praises for her soiled underwear: “The smallest things give me a great cockstand—a whorish movement of your mouth, a little brown stain on the seat of your white drawers … to feel your hot lecherous lips sucking away at me, to fuck between your two rosy-tipped bubbies.” When he didn’t hear from her, he wrote again with words of apology: “Are you offended, dear, at what I said about your drawers? That is all nonsense, darling. I know they are as spotless as your heart.” Nora’s drawers, and what was in them, kept Joyce’s pen quite busy. He was a dyed-in-the-wool underwear fetishist and even carried a pair of doll’s panties in his pocket. Fortified by liquor, he would sometimes slip the tiny underpants over his fingers and cakewalk them across a café table, to the bewilderment of onlookers.

The author spent much of his time in cafés and bars, chatting with other writers and artists. It is believed that Joyce was less interested in exchanging ideas with his intellectual peers than in avoiding intercourse with Nora; drinking himself flaccid provided an effective means of birth control.

While teaching English in Paris, Joyce fell passionately in love with one of his students, Amalia Popper, the daughter of a wealthy Jewish businessman. It was an unrequited love affair that was thwarted by Amalia’s father, who gently warned the author not to take advantage of his position of authority. The experience kindled in Joyce a nagging desire for a dark, Semitic woman.

In early 1919 Joyce found his ideal in a Zurich woman named Marthe Fleischmann. He described to a friend the circumstances under which he first saw Marthe: “She was in a small but well-lit room in the act of pulling a chain.”

Through this unabashed first encounter, Marthe had unwittingly endeared herself to the coprophilic Joyce, who later that night explored “the coldest and hottest parts of a woman’s body.”

MEDICAL REPORT:
During Joyce’s early forays into Nighttown he contracted syphilis, which he treated himself by cauterizing the chancre. The treatment eliminated the symptom but not the disease, and it is believed that the author’s chronic eye trouble stemmed from it. However, he died in Zurich as the result of complications that followed surgery for a duodenal ulcer.

HIS THOUGHTS:
“Love is a cursed nuisance when coupled with lust also.”

—M.J.T.

“Public Lover Number One”

GEORGE S. KAUFMAN (Nov. 16, 1889 –June 2, 1961)

HIS FAME:
Unquestionably the most

prolific and successful playwright of the

American theater from the mid-1920s to

the late 1940s, Kaufman had at least one

play in performance on Broadway every

year for over 20 years. Most noted for his

satire, he was both a director and a writer,

coauthoring two Pulitzer Prize-winning