The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People (42 page)

At 25 Wells married his first cousin Isabel Wells, a dark-haired virginal beauty with a slim, graceful body. Except for one unfulfilling experience with an “unimaginative” prostitute when he was about 22, Wells was also a sexual novice. His physical craving for Isabel was almost unbearable as he prepared for their wedding night and “flame meeting flame.” Unfortunately, the flames were quickly doused by Isabel’s tears as she found herself incapable of responding to H.G.’s ardor. The embittered husband embarked upon a string of minor romances before the couple ended their four-year marriage in 1895. In his autobiography Wells concludes that Isabel was not only naive but book-shy and unable to stimulate him intellectually (another requisite of Venus Urania).

However, for many years after the divorce Wells could not shake Isabel from his mind. Her second marriage, in 1904, threw Wells into fits of jealousy. He tore up all of her letters and photographs and refused to speak her name. Years later they once again became friends.

Amy Catherine Robbins was one of H.G.’s students at the University Tutorial College in London in 1892. He was immediately attracted to her fair hair, brown eyes, and delicate features. They married as soon as Wells was divorced.

Wells, for no apparent reason, decided to call his second wife Jane.

H.G. and Jane remained married until her death in 1927. The 32-year marriage, which produced two sons, was an unusual one. Once again Wells had paired up with a woman “innocent and ignorant” of the physical necessities of life. The dissatisfied husband and the sympathetic wife reached a mutual understanding in which she agreed to give him all of the sexual freedom he desired. From then on, Wells was quite open about his relationships, even keeping pictures of his lovers in his room.

Jane was the most stabilizing factor in H.G.’s turbulent life. She reviewed and typed his books, invested his money, prepared his tax returns, and kept their home in perfect order. In 1908, 42-year-old Wells became involved with 22-year-old Amber Reeves, daughter of one of London’s most prominent families. Jane’s friends were stunned and appalled when Amber became pregnant.

However, Jane—the sensible, all-enduring wife—went out and bought clothes for the new baby.

In 1912 Wells finally met the Venus Urania of his dreams. Her name was Rebecca West and she was to become one of England’s foremost journalists and novelists. Writing in a small feminist magazine, West reviewed—and panned—

H.G.’s book
Marriage
. Wells, usually thin-skinned about bad reviews, was intrigued by her humor and style. A year later Wells, then 46, and West, 20, began an affair that was to last for 10 years.

Wells had found the perfect mate. In addition to her beauty and sensuality, she was his equal in wit, imagination, and intelligence. He said, “She was the only woman who ever made me stop and wonder when she said ‘Look.”’ He wrote her many fervent love letters, professing his endless desire for her. On many of the
The Pen Is Prominent
/ letters Wells sketched a “picshua” of a panther and a jaguar (Rebecca was the panther, Wells the jaguar). They shared intense happiness and had one son, Anthony.

The break with Rebecca came after an incident involving Wells and another of his lovers, Austrian journalist Hedwig Verena Gatternigg. Following a row with Wells, the Austrian woman tried to kill herself in H.G.’s London flat.

Wells wasn’t there at the time, but Jane, who often visited her husband’s home-away-from-home, discovered the woman and had her taken to a hospital.

Rebecca’s name appeared in the ensuing publicity. Although the episode was ultimately covered up, scandal had come too close to Rebecca’s doorstep. But that wasn’t her only reason for ending the affair. She had become increasingly intolerant of H.G.’s disregard for her career (“He never read more than a page or two of any of my books”) and his restless, irritable moods. His continuing
passades
(which included birth-control advocate Margaret Sanger) and Rebecca’s social isolation were also precipitating factors. Finally, there seemed to be no boundaries to H.G.’s self-centeredness. At one time he moved his ailing first wife, Isabel, into his home so that his second wife, Jane, could care for her, while he continued to see Rebecca.

After Rebecca, Wells sought comfort in the arms of Odette Keun, a Dutch woman then living in France. A former nun turned writer, Odette had sent Wells a copy of her book
Sous Lenin
(“Under Lenin”), which he favorably reviewed. They exchanged letters and finally met in Geneva in 1924. Their rendezvous took place in her hotel room. She shut off the lights before her Prince Charming arrived and then led him right into bed. Odette later recalled, “I did not know whether he was a giant or a gnome.” The lovers built a house in the south of France, where they spent all of their time together—a situation which made Jane’s life less complicated. H.G. remained a part of Odette’s life for the next nine years.

In 1934 the 68-year-old writer began a full-time relationship with an old acquaintance, Moura Budberg, former secretary to Maxim Gorky. She refused to marry Wells and they kept separate homes in London, but they remained friends and confidants until his death in 1946.

Throughout his adult life Wells was rarely without a woman. Despite his poor health (tuberculosis, diabetes, and kidney afflictions), he was sexually active almost to his death at age 79. According to Somerset Maugham: “H.G. had strong sexual instincts and he said to me more than once that the need to satisfy these instincts had nothing to do with love. It was a purely physiological matter.”

HIS THOUGHTS:
Once, when depressed over problems with Rebecca, Wells wrote a letter to her in which he poured out his feelings: “I can’t—in my present state anyhow—bank on religion. God has no thighs and no life. When one calls to him in the silence of the night he doesn’t turn over and say, ‘What is the trouble, Dear?”’

—C.O.

The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name

OSCAR WILDE (Oct. 16, 1854–Nov. 30, 1900)

HIS FAME:
Wilde was the best-known

homosexual of the Western world, one

of the most written-about authors in

history, and one of the greatest wits of all

time. He was the author of several plays,

including
The Importance of Being

Earnest
; a novel,
The Picture of Dorian

Gray
; and poetry, essays, stories, and

fairy tales.

HIS PERSON:
Wilde was born in

Dublin, Ireland, to eccentric parents. His

mother badly wanted a daughter, so

when a second son, Oscar Fingal O’Fla—

hertie Wills Wilde, was born, she dressed

Wilde with Bosie (Lord Alfred Douglas)

the child like a girl. As a youth Oscar was

tall, almost overgrown, yet somehow graceful and, in any case, always striking in appearance and dress. Leaving Dublin to attend Oxford, he began to develop the unique style of manners, garb, and wit which was later characteristic of members of the “aesthetic movement.” His theory of “art for art’s sake” developed further after he left Oxford, and soon he was the rage of London society as people strove to imitate his sensual velvet costumes and sparkling aphorisms.

Oscar was the ultimate party entertainment, and he was in great demand. Wrote a contemporary, “He was, without exception, the most brilliant talker I have ever come across…. Nobody could pretend to outshine him, or even to shine at all in his company.”

Wilde supported himself by writing art criticism and book reviews for ladies’ magazines and other journals and by lecturing in England and America. He eventually moved on to plays, becoming England’s foremost comedic playwright. He was extravagant, generous, outrageous, and, above all, happy.

The story of his ruin sounds incredible today, but it remains one of the great modern tragedies.

SEX LIFE:
As a young man Wilde was decidedly heterosexual, despite his affectations. In fact, he was mildly shocked at the idea of homosexuality. His earliest love was Florrie Balcombe, whom he met when he was 21. Wilde suffered his first heartbreak over her, when she decided to marry Bram Stoker, who went on to write
Dracula
. Some years later Wilde unsuccessfully courted society beauty and actress Lillie Langtry, who was married. He eventually
The Pen Is Prominent
/ became her good friend, and also became friends with the French actress Sarah Bernhardt.

In addition to a few youthful affairs, Wilde occasionally used prostitutes.

One evening he announced to his friend Robert Sherard that “Priapus was calling” and went out and picked up a high-class whore. Meeting Sherard the next morning, Wilde said, “What animals we are, Robert.” Sherard expressed his concern that Wilde might have been robbed, to which Wilde replied, “One gives them all in one’s pockets.”

In 1881 Oscar met Constance Lloyd, a sweet, pretty girl whom he courted with passionate, poetic letters. Madly in love, the two were blissfully married in 1884. They honeymooned in Paris, and the morning after the wedding night, while Wilde strolled with Sherard, he described so vividly the joys of the previous evening that Sherard was terribly embarrassed. Indeed, for the first few years Oscar and Constance were deeply in love. They had two sons, Cyril and Vyvyan. Though Oscar adored his children, he was not much suited for a life of domesticity.

The story of how Wilde drifted from heterosexuality to homosexuality is open to some debate. It is probable that while at Oxford he had contracted syphilis from a prostitute. The treatment at that time was mercury. (This caused severe discoloration of the teeth, which Oscar certainly suffered from.) Before proposing to Constance, he consulted a doctor, who assured him that he had been cured of his venereal disease. Two years later he discovered that the dormant spirochetes had broken out again, so he gave up sex with Constance and began to indulge his interest in boys.

Robert Ross, a lively, cultivated young man who remained Oscar’s lifelong devotee, boasted that he was Oscar’s “first boy,” when he was 17 and Wilde was 32. However, it was not until 1891 that Wilde met the great love of his life, in the person of 21-year-old Lord Alfred Douglas, called “Bosie” by his friends and family. The attraction was immediate. Bosie was young (16 years Oscar’s junior), a poet, from a prominent family, extraordinarily good-looking, passionate, impulsive, and proud—in short, everything that Wilde admired. And for Bosie’s part, it was an incredible thrill to be admired by London’s premiere playwright and wit. They both adored luxury and began their whirlwind friendship by dining daily at the best restaurants in England, completely inseparable. Even Constance liked Bosie.

According to Bosie’s confessions later in life, he kept his sexual relations with Wilde to a minimum. He did not respond to Oscar’s overtures for six months, and when he did, the extent of their activity was probably oral sex.

Bosie insisted that no sodomy took place, that “Wilde treated me as an older boy treats a young man at school.” (Bosie had had relations with both men and women before meeting Oscar.) Bosie’s reticence was probably due to the fact that he too preferred boys. This is well illustrated in the story of their adventures on a trip to Algiers. By sheer coincidence, their hotel in the small town of Blida was occupied by an acquaintance of Wilde’s, the younger writer André Gide. Gide had been struggling against his homosexuality for five years, and when he realized that Oscar and Bosie were guests at the hotel, he almost left. Preparing for an evening out, Bosie took Gide by the arm and said, “I hope you are like me. I have a horror of women. I only like boys. As you are coming with us this evening, I think it’s better if you say so at once.” A nervous Gide accompanied them on a tour of the Casbah, finally winding up in a homosexual brothel and bathhouse, where men danced together to the sounds of exotic music. There Wilde gleefully pronounced the sentence that sealed Gide’s fate: “Dear, do you want the little musician?” And Gide’s downfall was complete. As the vacation neared its end, Bosie was making arrangements to run off with an Arab youth he had purchased from the boy’s family, but the lad left him for a woman.

In London, Wilde and Douglas were introduced to Alfred Taylor, a gracious gentleman and semiprofessional procurer, who enjoyed wearing ladies’

clothing and burning incense in his dimly lit apartment. He acquired for Wilde a number of young boys—out-of-work clerks, grooms, and newsboys who were willing to sell their favors, and who in addition unexpectedly found themselves dining in the best restaurants in London with Wilde, drinking champagne, and receiving expensive gifts.

Although there was gossip surrounding Wilde and Bosie, all would probably have gone on happily had it not been for Bosie’s father. The 8th Marquis of Queensberry was a short, coarse, nearly insane sportsman—he laid down the Queensberry Rules for boxing—who had been on a slow burn for years about his son’s questionable friendship with Wilde. His rage vented itself in abusive letters to his son and finally culminated when he delivered a card to Wilde’s club, which read, “For Oscar Wilde posing as a somdomite [
sic
].”