The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People (38 page)

Early in 1777, news arrived from Paris that Sade’s mother was dying.

Although he had never cared for her, he set off at once. Since friends had warned him of
Mme.
de Montreuil’s intentions, it seems likely that, in his heart of hearts, he wanted to get caught, and he was. In prison Sade discovered two enduring sources of sexual satisfaction: masturbation and literature. His imaginary orgies were so successful that he never attempted real ones again. Renée-Pélagie, loyal throughout his imprisonment, divorced him on his release. He soon formed a lasting relationship with the young actress Marie-Constance Renelle; he lived with her for a while in a hayloft at Versailles, baby-sitting her little son and earning a few sous as a stagehand. She followed him to Charenton asylum, and seems not to have minded when this fat, rheumatic, partially blind old man enlivened his last two years there with a pretty young woman from the asylum’s laundry.

SEX PARTNERS:
By the end of young Sade’s military service as a cavalry officer, he was hiring one woman a day. His down-at-the-heels father was delighted when the bourgeois but wealthy family of Renée-Pélagie de Montreuil suggested her as a suitable bride; marriage would steady the boy, he thought.

Meanwhile Sade had actually fallen in love with a count’s daughter, Laure de Lauris. She left him with a beautiful memory and a venereal infection.

Renée-Pélagie was pious and frigid, but Sade favorably impressed her charming young mother and her blond and sexy younger sister (the story is told that he asked to marry the sister instead). His first arrest threw the entire family into shock. Almost with relief
Mme.
de Montreuil noted that, after his release, he followed the approved fashion and began keeping mistresses. There was
Mlle.

Colet, a popular actress at the Comédie Italienne; then another actress, the buxom
Mlle.
Beauvoisin, whom he took south and allowed to pass as his wife; then a
poule de luxe
(“fancy lady”),
Mlle.
Dorville; then several ballet dancers, one of them an expert flagellator. Renée-Pélagie knew nothing of these affairs, but
Mme.
de Montreuil did. What she did not know was that Sade had an isolated suburban fun house outside Paris where he regularly staged bisexual orgies; one of them, at which he had flogged four women and then served them dinner, was the talk of the sexual underworld. It was to this house that he took Rose Keller—for a job, according to her testimony, for a debauch, according to his.

We know little of the Marseilles victims except their names and ages: Mariette Borelly (23), Marianette Laugier (20), Rose Coste (20), and Marianne Laverne (18), of the morning orgy; and Marguerite Costa (25), of the one attempted in the evening. Marguerite brought the first complaint, followed by the other four together. Of Latour, Sade’s partner in the affair, it is said that he was a nobleman’s son; Sade would switch roles with him socially as well as sexually, addressing him as “monsieur le marquis.” Latour and Anne-Prospère, who had stayed on at La Coste, accompanied Sade when he fled over the border to Italy. Renée-Pélagie, a woman of such saintly character that Sade must have worked hard indeed to corrupt her, was in the uncomfortable position of being her sister’s rival. When
The Pen Is Prominent
/
Sade was finally jailed, she became in good conscience what she had always tried to be to him: the perfect wife. The affair of the 15-year-old girls was so effectively hushed up that we cannot even be certain of their names. One of their successors was Catherine Trillet, known as Justine; promoted from the kitchen to Sade’s orgies, she would not leave him even when her father turned up brandishing a pistol. Her predecessor as household favorite was Gothon, Renée-Pélagie’s personal maid, who remained fond of him and sent him fruit and jam in prison.

During his early prison years Sade enjoyed, by letter, a platonic relationship with Marie-Dorothée de Rousse, his former housekeeper; he had always tended to separate sex from friendship. For a few months after his release he lived with a widow of 40, la Présidente de Fleurieu, but left her for the more sympathetic Marie-Constance Renelle, of whom he wrote, “This woman is an angel sent to me by heaven.” In the asylum, with the director’s connivance, she passed as Sade’s daughter. Of his last mistress, Madeleine Leclerc, we know that she was only 12 when Sade’s eye first lighted on her and 15 when she became his mistress (he was 72), that her mother hoped the marquis would launch her as an actress, and that she shaved her pubic hair.

MEDICAL REPORT:
Sade claimed that the extreme thickness of his sperm made ejaculation painful for him. The diagnosis is unlikely, but the symptom may explain his algolagnia (i.e., pleasure in both receiving and inflicting pain).

—J.M.B.E.

The NonViolent Sadist

WILLIAM SEABROOK (Feb. 22, 1886–Sept. 20, 1945)

HIS FAME:
In the 1920s and 1930s

Seabrook thrilled readers in Europe and

America with books about his travels to

exotic places. In
The Magic Island

(1929) he described his participation in

voodoo rites in Haiti
, and in
Jungle Ways
(1931) he told of eating human flesh in

Liberia. His most lasting contribution

was the 1935 bestseller
Asylum
, a frank

description of the seven months he

spent in a mental hospital, attempting to

cure his alcoholism.

HIS PERSON:
Born on Washington’s

Birthday in Westminster, Md., “Willie”

Seabrook was the oldest son of a lawyer turned Lutheran minister. After working as a newspaper reporter, city editor, and advertising executive, Seabrook enlisted in the French army and was gassed at the Battle of Verdun. Returning to the U.S., he became a reporter for
The New York Times
and then a feature writer for King Features Syndicate. In 1924 he and his first wife traveled to the Middle East. His account of this journey,
Adventures in Arabia
, was an instant success and launched him on a career of writing travel books. Seabrook enjoyed his celebrity and was excited by getting to know famous people. He maintained friendships with Aleister Crowley, Isadora Duncan, Gertrude Stein, Man Ray, Aldous Huxley, Emma Goldman, Jean Cocteau, and Thomas Mann.

Actually, he did not engage in a cannibal feast in Africa as he claimed. He recognized the meat served to him by a tribal chief as that of an ape and left Liberia frustrated because he had failed in his mission to taste a cooked human. Back in Paris, with the help of friends he acquired pieces of the remains of a young worker who had died in an accident. Seabrook had different parts roasted, broiled, and prepared as a ragout. He ate it all and then described the meal in
Jungle Ways
as if it had taken place in West Africa. After the book was published, word spread from Liberia that ape meat had been substituted for human flesh in the meal he had eaten there and Seabrook was forced to choose between being considered a sucker or a liar. He accepted the image of sucker until the publication of his autobiography in 1942 in which he confessed his role in the hoax.

HIS WIVES:
There were three. The first was Katie Edmondson, the daughter of a Coca-Cola executive. They were married for 22 years, although for most of those years they were more friends than a couple. She operated a famous coffee shop on Waverly Place in New York City’s Greenwich Village. And later she married the first husband of Seabrook’s second wife.

Seabrook was introduced to novelist Marjorie Worthington at a bridge game in 1929. They lived together for five years before they married, and were married six years before they divorced. She was very jealous of his interest in other women and felt most at peace when they were both at work at their typewriters.

A few days after Seabrook met Constance Kuhr, she convinced him to plunge his elbows into boiling water so that he would be unable to lift a glass of liquor to his lips. They were married the following year and she gave birth to Seabrook’s only child, William.

SEX LIFE:
As Marjorie Worthington described it in her biography,
The Strange
World of Willie Seabrook
, “Lovemaking, for Willie, was a complicated process, all mixed up with his complexes, fetishes, and compulsions.” In fact, this hardcore Republican, Rotarian son of a preacher practiced a major sexual aberration, and a highly unusual one at that. He liked to tie up naked women and chain them to pillars or dangle them from the ceiling. He never hurt them and he paid them well, and he never made love to them. Seabrook claimed that a childhood in which he was pampered by five doting aunts had caused him to desire to torture
The Pen Is Prominent
/ women in a relatively benign manner. As a child he found no shortage of pictures of women in chains in books of mythology and history. When he was nine years old, a neighbor girl let him tie her hands behind her back with the ribbon from her hair. However, his special brand of soft sadism remained in the realm of imagination until he returned to New York after WWI. Then he met Deborah Luris, a Greenwich Village puppeteer, who was willing, indeed eager, to fit into his fantasy. “When people uncork parallel or complementary chimeric wish-fantasies,” Seabrook wrote, “sparks generally fly. And so they did—for a week.”

Wife Katie was completely tolerant and even encouraged him. Once he brought Deborah to a costume party dressed as a prisoner, with her hands chained behind her back. When Seabrook fell in love with Marjorie Worthington, it was not Katie who became jealous, but Deborah Luris.

But it was Marjorie who had to endure Willie’s greatest indulgences, as he lapsed into extended periods of avoiding writing by drinking a quart and a half of liquor a day and transforming his fantasies into reality with a succession of willing young hired houseguests. Once, in Paris, Seabrook invited a group of distinguished French businessmen to his studio for cocktails. Marjorie served aperitifs while Mimi, a Montparnasse call girl, wearing only a leather skirt, hung by her wrists, suspended from the balcony on a chain. None of the Frenchmen spoke a single word to or about Mimi.

Another time Seabrook asked Man Ray and his date to stay in his studio for four hours and watch over a girl he had chained to the newel of the staircase, while he and Marjorie went out to a dinner in the Seabrooks’ honor. As soon as the Seabrooks left, Ray unchained the girl and invited her to join them at the dinner table. During the meal she explained that Seabrook liked to sit and drink whiskey and look at her for hours. When he went to bed, he chained her to the bedpost and she slept on the floor like a dog. She thought that Willie was impotent and she couldn’t understand why Marjorie humored him.

When Willie became interested in witchcraft and the occult, he set up a

“research laboratory” in the barn on his farm in Rhinebeck, N.Y. Willie stocked the barn with a cage and a witch’s cradle and entertained a series of young women whom he called “research workers” and “apprentice witches.” Marjorie, fretting and suffering in the main house, called them “Lizzies in chains.” Some of the Lizzies stayed naked under voluntary domination in the barn for weeks, and Seabrook wrote of observing them experience mystical ecstasies like those of St. Theresa of Avila.

Eventually they emerged unharmed and the people of Rhinebeck excused the strange comings and goings at the barn by saying that Seabrook was writing a book about whatever was going on inside. They were right. But the book,
Witchcraft
, upset Seabrook, and despite his studies he was unable to exorcise the demons within him. At the age of 59 William Seabrook committed suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping pills.

—D.W.

The Chameleon

STENDHAL (Jan. 23, 1783–Mar. 23, 1842)

HIS FAME:
“Literary fame is a lottery. I

am taking out a ticket whose winning

number is 1935,” wrote Stendhal in his

autobiographical work
The Life of Henri