The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People (43 page)

Enraged himself, and fed up with the marquis’ harassment, Wilde took a reckless action. With Bosie’s encouragement, he pressed charges against Queensberry for criminal libel, having assured his lawyer that there was no basis whatsoever for the marquis’ accusation. But to the prosecution’s immense surprise, Queensberry had prepared his case well. Hiring a team of private detectives and paid informers, he had bought the testimony of many of the young boys Wilde had met through Taylor. When it was clear that the boys would be produced, the prosecution withdrew and the marquis was acquitted.

Oscar’s friends begged him to leave the country while he still could—even his wife hoped he would flee—but he refused. Within a month he was arrested, charged by Queensberry with committing acts of gross indecency with various boys. The procurer Taylor had also been arrested, having refused to turn state’s evidence against Wilde.

During the second trial, one of the most sensational in English history, Wilde handled himself with great poise and wit, but they were not enough to save him. One by one the boys testified. “I was asked by Wilde to imagine that I was a woman and that he was my lover…. I used to sit on his knees and he used to play with my privates as a man might amuse himself with a girl…. He suggested two or three times that I would permit him to insert ‘it’ in my mouth, but I never allowed that,” and so on. Hotel chambermaids even testi-The Pen Is Prominent / fied that they had found curious stains on the hotel sheets, though that evidence proved dubious. From these proceedings it emerged that the preferred form of lovemaking was mutual masturbation, or fellatio, with Wilde as the active agent. (He told a friend it gave him inspiration.) Sodomy was seldom, if ever, performed.

Wilde was also forced to defend his published writings, such as
Dorian
Gray
, and his personal letters, which were accused of having homosexual overtones. It was in this context that he gave his now famous speech on the “Love that dare not speak its name” (a line from one of Bosie’s poems), which was so moving that it brought spontaneous applause from the gallery. In the end the jury could not reach a decision, and a third trial was called. Between trials, Wilde again refused to attempt an escape. The outcome of the third trial was grim: Wilde and Taylor each received the maximum sentence—two years of hard labor.

Prison conditions in England at that time were extremely cruel, and the horror of the experience drove Wilde slightly mad. He wrote a long, scathing denunciation of Bosie, now published as
De Profundis
, accusing Bosie of having led him to his ruin. But despite all, Bosie remained completely loyal, unlike most of Wilde’s other friends, and wrote, “Though he is in prison he is still the court the jury the judge of my life.” In later years, Bosie turned the tables, writing several books whitewashing himself while viciously denouncing Wilde.

After Wilde’s release he lived, broken and exiled, using the name Sebastian Melmoth, in France and Italy. Constance Wilde, Bosie’s family, and numerous friends plotted to keep the two men apart, but their friendship and love prevailed. The last three years of Wilde’s life were spent on and off with Bosie, both having returned to consorting with young boys.

While living in France, Oscar succumbed to an attempt to reform him.

The poet Ernest Dowson took him to a brothel, hoping he might acquire “a more wholesome taste.” When Wilde emerged, he remarked, “The first these ten years—and it will be the last. It was like cold mutton.” But he asked Dowson to “tell it in England, for it will entirely restore my character.”

THOUGHTS:
Trying to explain in court the “Love that dare not speak its name,” Wilde said, “It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection.

There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, where the elder has intellect and the younger man has all the joy, hope, and glamour of the life before him. That it should be so, the world does not understand. The world mocks at it and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.”

—A.W.

The Giant And The Jew

THOMAS WOLFE (Oct. 3, 1900–Sept. 15, 1938)

HIS FAME:
Wolfe was an American

writer who established his literary reputation at home and abroad with four

highly autobiographical novels.
Look

Homeward, Angel
(1929) and
Of Time

and the River
(1935) were published

during his lifetime.
The Web and the

Rock
(1939) and
You Can’t Go Home

Again
(1940) were issued posthumously.

HIS PERSON:
The youngest of eight

children, Wolfe could talk well at age

one and do simple reading at age two.

His father was a stonecutter, and his

mother kept a boardinghouse in

Asheville, N.C., where Wolfe was born

and raised. Mama nursed him until he was three and a half, and they slept together until he was nine, at which time he was allowed to cut off his curly, shoulder-length hair. Wolfe took a lot of ribbing about his hair. Once, when two older boys began calling him a girl, Wolfe protested vigorously, then whipped out his penis to dispel all doubts.

He entered the University of North Carolina at 15, became editor of the school paper and magazine, and wrote several one-act plays. After graduation he enrolled at Harvard, with the intention of becoming a playwright, but he often said, “I’d rather be a poet than anything else in the world.” In 1923, armed with an M.A., he went to New York, where he taught English at Washington Square College. In 1930, when royalties from
Look Homeward, Angel
started rolling in and a Guggenheim Fellowship came through, Wolfe quit teaching and from then on devoted himself to writing. While he made seven trips to Europe and also traveled in the U.S., he lived primarily in New York for the rest of his life.

Wolfe, whose powerful body stood at 6 ft. 5 in., had a mop of unruly black hair and dark, penetrating eyes. His giant appetite for food, sex, and alcohol was well known. He drank especially heavily when his writing was not going well. Normally, he would write for days on end, supported by nothing more than coffee, canned beans, and endless cigarettes. Wolfe died in Baltimore after surgery revealed tubercular lesions on his brain.

LOVE LIFE:
With a combination of boyish good looks, masculinity, and fame, Wolfe appealed to a wide variety of women. Some were publicity seekers, some
The Pen Is Prominent
/ were literary groupies, and some primarily wanted to mother him. Said one of the women: “He was intolerable and wonderful and talked like an angel and was a real son of a bitch.” Wolfe “loved women and was somewhat oversexed,” wrote Elizabeth Nowell, his agent and one of his biographers. At a party, for example, Wolfe would take a receptive girl into another room and make love to her. Later that night, when someone pointed to the girl, he would shoot back, “Who’s she?”

Wolfe lost his virginity and first experienced “the coarse appeasement of the brothel,” as he put it, at age 16. With two fellow students from the university, Wolfe went to a Durham, N.C., whorehouse, where a prostitute named Mamie Smith took him to bed. She ignited “all the passion and fire,” Wolfe said afterward. He soon made another visit to Mamie and was a steady customer for the next four years. During Christmas vacation back in Asheville that first year, he slipped away from a family gathering to be with a “red-haired woman” at a cheap hotel.

In the summer of 1917 Wolfe fell in love. “A nice young boy, here, the son of my landlady, has a crush on me,” wrote 21-year-old Clara Paul to her sister.

Since she was engaged, nothing came of it, but Wolfe recalled: “Clara—moon-light and the holding of a hand. How her firm little breasts seem to spring forward, filled with life….” Writing to a friend years later, he confessed that he had forgotten what the girl looked like but insisted that he had never quite got over the love affair.

On Wolfe’s 25th birthday, Aline Bernstein, then 44, became his mistress. A highly successful theatrical designer, she was attractive and tiny, with streaks of gray in her hair. They had met one month before on a liner returning from Europe; both fell madly in love. That Aline was married and the mother of two grown children did not seem to matter. Their often stormy relationship continued for six years without protest from her worshipful husband, Theo, who remained devoted and compassionate throughout her turbulent affair with Wolfe. At first the pair would meet in Wolfe’s New York apartment; then she rented a loft for them to share at 13 East 8th Street. They made love often, and Wolfe referred to her as his “plumskinned wench,” his “dear Jew,” and his “gray-haired, wide-hipped timeless mother.” Aline would write, “He called me a lecherous old woman and cursed me that he could not get me out of his soul.”

He was insanely jealous of her. Sometimes he would call her at two in the morning to see if she was out on some “bawdy mission.” Wolfe’s compulsive whoring and his mother’s anti-Semitic hostility toward Aline eventually diminished his sexual desire for her. Aline knew he was bringing girls into their loft. “You’ve gone with dirty, rotten women all your life,” she would say, “and that’s the only kind you understand!” At one point Wolfe asked her to marry him, but she refused. Before one of his European trips, Aline made him promise not to fool around. “By God, I kept the faith,” he noted in his diary. At another time, however, both were in Paris. As soon as she left for New York, Wolfe headed for the nearest brothel. Aline mothered him and fostered his career, and when, at the urging of his editor, Maxwell Perkins, Wolfe finally broke away in 1931, she attempted suicide with sleeping pills. To console her, Wolfe wrote: “I shall love you all the days of my life, and when I die, if they cut me open, they will find one name written on my brain and in my heart. It will be yours.” When she was 70, Aline suffered the first of a series of small strokes that eventually resulted in widespread paralysis. She was 75 when she died. Loyal Theo, aged and ailing, was with her till the end.

Besides Aline and countless one-night stands, there were at least three other women who briefly came into Wolfe’s life. One was the actress Jean Harlow, whom he met on a Hollywood set one day in 1935. That evening both left in Jean’s limousine, and they returned to the studio together the next morning.

What happened in between is not recorded. Another woman was Thea Voelcker, a 30-year-old German artist, whom Wolfe met just before the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. He persuaded the tall, shapely divorcée to accompany him to the Austrian Alps, where they enjoyed themselves briefly. She was deeply in love with Wolfe and wrote affectionate letters to him after his return to New York. Wolfe, however, would have nothing more to do with her. While in Germany Wolfe was also in the company of Martha Dodd, the American ambassador’s daughter. He was a bit in love with her, but there is no indication that sex was involved.

HIS THOUGHTS:
Although Wolfe was a sexual athlete, he longed for family life and would often ask friends if they knew a nice girl he could marry. “I believe in love, and in its power to redeem and save our lives. I believe in the loved one, the redeemer and savior,” he wrote when his love for Aline was at zenith. “I can always find plenty of women to sleep with, but the kind of woman that is really hard for me to find is a typist who can read my writing,” he once said. To Wolfe, the ability to cook well indicated a sensual personality. He would often surprise women he was interested in by asking, “Are you a good cook?”

Wolfe kept a list of women he had not yet slept with but intended to. He did not plan to marry until he was around 35, “after possessing hundreds of women all over the globe.” In the end, still unmarried, his last thoughts were of Aline, his greatest love. Just before he died, Wolfe whispered, “Where’s Aline? … I want Aline … I want my Jew.”

—R.J.R.

The Chaste Pornographer

ÉMILE ZOLA (Apr. 2, 1840–Sept. 28, 1902)

HIS FAME:
A writer and critic, Zola authored the famous open letter titled

“
J’accuse
” (“I accuse”) that defended Capt. Alfred Dreyfus, a French Jew falsely accused of treason. Zola’s novels, like
Nana
, shocked France with their scatology and descriptions of sex, and this realism influenced the course of Western literature.

HIS PERSON:
Zola’s father, an Italian