The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People (35 page)

“Men must go ahead … women must follow, as it were, unquestioningly.”) He even counseled beating recalcitrant wives. But Frieda, who was more than her husband’s equal physically, refused to submit to such treatment. Sexually, also, there was evidence of incompatibility. They were never able to achieve simultaneous orgasm, complained Lawrence, who accused his wife, and
all
women, of having “sex on the brain”—a curious complaint for a man who was himself obsessed by the subject. But the Lawrences seem to have met one another’s deepest-seated emotional needs. Frieda, who wore the long full skirts, aprons, and closely fitted bodices of his beloved mother, functioned as the writer’s earth mother, a source of warmth and succor. “And I hope to spend eternity,”

Lawrence wrote in a poem, “with my face down-buried beneath her breasts.”

Frieda was known to indulge in harmless dalliances with Italian peasants and Prussian officers, while Lawrence, the working-class guru of sex, was occupied with his rich benefactresses. These included the eccentric Lady Ottoline Morrell, who was supposed to reign over Lawrence’s utopian colony of Ranan-im (founded on “the complete fulfillment in the flesh of all strong desire”) but instead ended up as the sinister Hermione in
Women in Love
; Cynthia Asquith, an unattainable patrician beauty whom Lawrence is said to have made love to through his writings and paintings; and Mabel Dodge Luhan, an American heiress and writer who gave Lawrence a 166-acre ranch in New Mexico but failed in her attempt to “seduce his spirit.” (“The womb in me roused to reach out and take him,” wrote Mrs. Luhan, who was not physically attracted to Lawrence but sought physical union with him because the “surest way to the soul is through the flesh.”) In fact, Lawrence was something of a puritanical prude. He was offended by lewd tales and considered sexual intercourse indecent anytime except in the dark of night. He probably also suffered from impotence, which would have been aggravated by his exhausting bursts of creative energy and by his worsening tubercular condition. Dorothy Brett, one of his most devoted followers, has described how Lawrence climbed into her bed one night but was unable to consummate the relationship. Lawrence’s “sexual potentialities,” according to another friend, were “exclusively cerebral.”

“Even if we can’t act sexually to our complete satisfaction,” Lawrence wrote apropos of
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
, “let us at least think sexually, complete and clear…. This is the real point of this work. I want men and women to be able to think sex, fully, completely, honestly and cleanly.”

HOMOSEXUALITY:
Lawrence professed to be shocked by the effete homosexuality of the British intelligentsia, but would say, “I believe the nearest I have come to perfect love was with a young coal miner when I was about 16.”

Occasionally frustrated in his relations with women, he exalted a sort of mystical communion of men, a “blood brotherhood.” He was also fascinated by the male physique, which he celebrated in the nude wrestling scene in
Women
The Pen Is Prominent
/
in Love
. In fact, Lawrence seems to have had more of his mother in him than his father; women may have worshiped him, but men considered him effeminate and joked about his domestic virtues. The messiah of sex was happiest when he was peeling potatoes or scrubbing floors, as the writer Norman Douglas once pointed out, not without malice. Lawrence’s friend and biographer Richard Aldington said, “I should say DHL was about 85 percent hetero and 15 percent homo.”

HIS THOUGHTS:
“You mustn’t think I advocate perpetual sex. Far from it.

Nothing nauseates me more than promiscuous sex in and out of season.”

—C.D.

The Call Of The Wild

JACK LONDON (Jan. 12, 1876–Nov. 22, 1916)

HIS FAME:
Owing to such works as

The Call of the Wild
, Jack London was

the most successful writer to emerge at

the onset of the 20th century in America. He remains one of the most widely

translated American authors, especially

in the Soviet Union, where his socialist

philosophy has had wide appeal.

HIS PERSON:
Survival was taking

shape as the theme of his life while he

was still in the womb. “A Discarded

Wife: Why Mrs. Chaney Twice

Attempted Suicide,” ran the
San Francisco Chronicle
headline seven months

London with Charmian Kittredge

before Jack’s birth. “Driven from House

for Refusing to Destroy her Unborn Infant—A Chapter of Heartlessness and Domestic Misery,” it continued. The unborn baby was Jack. The abandoned mother-to-be was Flora Wellman and she was
not
Mr. Chaney’s wife. Flora and W. H. Chaney, two beyond-the-fringe occultists of San Francisco, had been cohabiting during Flora’s conception period, but Chaney claimed he was impotent at the time and furthermore did not want this out-of-wedlock child.

Despite the publicity and the turmoil, Flora had a successful delivery, and Jack was raised on the tough waterfront by his stepfather, John London. An independent youth, he set out at 14—using his stepfather’s surname—to see the world. He rode the rails as a hobo (and once spent a month in jail because of

it), explored the Klondike for gold, and hunted seal in Siberia. Though he made California his home, the lure of travel and adventure never stopped calling him. He visited the slums of London, sailed the South Pacific, and was a war correspondent during the Russo-Japanese War. Refusing his doctor’s orders to change his drinking habits and his lifestyle, he died from an overdose of morphine and atropine at the age of 40.

LOVE LIFE:
“Prince of the Oyster Pirates,” they called him when he sailed San Francisco Bay. It was with the “Queen of the Oyster Pirates,” a girl named Mamie who came with the boat he bought at age 15, that he enjoyed his first sexual encounter.

Latently homosexual was how Joan London described her father’s relationship with his best friend, George Sterling. But there was nothing latent about his heterosexual relations. His friends called him “the Stallion,” and one biographer characterized him as “a sexual anarchist.” The essence of man-woman sex for London was embodied in a story he told of meeting a woman on a train and romping in bed with her for three days while the train chugged east and a maid baby-sat the woman’s child. When the train stopped, London bade the woman a final farewell, having got all he wanted.

London desired two things from a wife: a son and tolerance for his infidelities. The first great love of his life, the pale and delicate Mabel Applegarth, would also have given him a dictatorial motherin-law. Mabel was one of the first “nice” girls London met in Oakland in the 1890s. She was from what he called the “parlor floor of society,” as opposed to the “cellar,” and he worked hard to raise himself to her social status. It was never high enough for her mother, though, and after London had courted Mabel unsuccessfully for several years, his ardor cooled.

The woman he married in 1900 gave him two daughters and a divorce.

Bess Maddern, who was a good friend of Mabel’s, could not tolerate his stray-ing. (He believed that resisting the temptations of the flesh was a waste of willpower.) Bess named Anna Strunsky, Jack’s longtime friend in the Socialist movement and his co-writer on
The Kempton-Wace Letters
, as the other woman, and the couple separated in 1903. Bess never suspected that the other woman was in fact Charmian Kittredge, who acted as Bess’ confidante during the separation.

Jack married Charmian in Chicago in 1905, as soon as he had been granted a divorce in California. Illinois, which did not recognize divorce until a year after such decrees were granted, declared the marriage to Charmian invalid. In the uproar that ensued, the lecture tour Jack was on at the time was canceled, his books were banned in various parts of the country, and an organization called the Averill Women’s Club passed a resolution condemning both college football and Jack London.

To London, Charmian was worth the tempest. She could box and fence like a man, enjoyed travel, and earned one of the highest appellations Jack could pin on a female—“Mate-Woman.” But they did not live happily ever
The Pen Is Prominent
/ after. In 1911, when Charmian gave birth to a sickly daughter who lived only three days, a bitterly disappointed London became “one wild maelstrom,”

embarking on nightly debauches to assuage his grief at not being able to father a son. Charmian was aware of a world filled with “slim-ankled potential rivals”

and began playing a game friends called “breaking it up,” wherein she would not allow him to be alone with another woman for more than two minutes. But women continued to fling themselves at “God’s own mad lover,” as the blue-eyed, curly-haired, muscular writer referred to himself. The Londons’ marriage deteriorated to a state of bitter coexistence. It was during his last few years, when his kidneys began to fail, that they journeyed to Hawaii, where Jack, depressed and ill though he was, met the last love of his life. He fell hard but never revealed a single detail about the woman. (George Sterling later told Joan London of the existence of that affair—but nothing else.) London couldn’t bring himself to demand a separation from Charmian, having more or less given up on life. The Londons spent their final years sleeping in separate wings of their home in Glen Ellen, Calif., with Jack vowing that he would take to his bed any woman who might give him the son that he had always wanted. When he died, Charmian, who had suffered chronic insomnia through her fear of losing him to another woman, slept for a day and a half.

ADVICE:
“A man should love women, and lots of them.”

—D.R.

A Double Life

W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM (Jan. 25, 1874–Dec. 16, 1965)

HIS FAME:
The most widely read British author since Charles Dickens, Maugham gained world renown for his novels, especially
Of Human Bondage
,
The Moon and Sixpence
,
Cakes and Ale
, and
The Razor’s Edge
. He was also celebrated for numerous short stories, notably “Miss Thompson,” upon which the play
Rain
was based, and for his plays.

HIS PERSON:
Because his father was English solicitor to the British embassy in Paris, Maugham was born in France and French was his first language. When he was eight years old, his mother died of tuberculosis, and two years later his father died of stomach cancer. The loss of his mother scarred him forever. The orphaned boy was sent to England and placed in the care of his father’s brother, a clergyman in the small town of Whitstable. The atmosphere seemed alien, bleak, and loveless, and Maugham suffered. Attending the strict King’s School in Canterbury, he developed a stammer. Because of ill health, he was sent to Germany, where he enrolled in Heidelberg Univer-180 /
Intimate Sex Lives
W. Somerset Maugham (l) Gerald Haxton

sity. There his interest in literature grew, and he secretly began to write. At 18 he returned to England and was pressured by his uncle to take up medicine. Maugham reluctantly entered the medical school of St. Thomas’

Hospital in London.

After five years, he was a doctor and on his own. Now he turned full-time to writing. He wrote and published short stories, and at 23 had already published his first novel,
Liza of Lambeth
. In the decades that followed he turned to playwriting, and when he was 34 he had four hit plays running in London at once. At 41 he returned to the novel and brought out his autobiographical
Of Human Bondage
, a modern classic.

He traveled constantly—to the South Seas, China, India, Italy, North Africa, Mexico. During WWI he served as a British espionage agent in Switzerland and Russia. In 1928 he bought a Moorish residence on the French Riviera, the Villa Mauresque at St.-Jean Cap Ferrat, his home for the rest of his life. Here he entertained his equals, greats of the world like Winston Churchill, H. G.