The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People (49 page)

—J.H.

Life Of The Party

FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN (Mar. 1, 1810–Oct. 17, 1849)

HIS FAME:
As a pianist, Chopin

amazed all who heard him; he was an

innovator who made the piano sing in

romantic style. He also gained lasting

fame as the composer of bittersweet,

deceptively simple, short pieces for the

piano—the first Polish music to be

played worldwide.

HIS PERSON:
A musical prodigy,

Chopin debuted with a concert at age

eight and became a local celebrity in his

early teens. Warsaw then was a musical

backwater, and Chopin’s father, a

French-born high school teacher, had

little money. In 1830 the young Chopin

Chopin in his last year

left Poland forever to seek his fortune as

a traveling virtuoso, though he lacked the physical strength to give public concerts. He settled in Paris, where he found a niche as piano teacher to rich men’s wives, composer of bestselling sheet music, and recitalist to the elite; a gifted mimic, he also became the life of fashionable parties. The social round wore him down and he contracted tuberculosis. In 1848 revolution drove his pupils out of Paris and forced him, despite his coughing up blood, to play for his supper in the stately homes of England and Scotland. He returned to Paris a total invalid and died there after months of suffering.

SEX LIFE:
Most women were as charmed by Chopin’s romantic good looks as by his music. Chopin, in turn, was drawn to women, but not sexually; their tender adoration reminded him of his mother and sisters. In his late teens he pestered a male friend, Tytus Woyciechowski, with girlish mash notes. He was obsessed with kissing the reluctant Tytus’ lips. “Give me your mouth,” Chopin wrote, and once, while waiting for lunch, he said, “In a while, the semolina!

But for now, your mouth!” With girls he showed no such aggressiveness. Imagining himself in love with a fellow music student named Constantia Gladkowska, he could not even bring himself to write her a letter. Constantia soon married someone else and was amazed to learn many years later what she had meant to Chopin.

The temptations of Paris did not appeal to Chopin, but he appears to have caught a mild dose of venereal disease from a woman named Teressa. Perhaps this confirmed his distaste for sex. Still, ever since his death, there have been rumors—possibly supported by a cache of erotic letters—of an affair between him and one of his first pupils, the musical and sexually liberated Countess Delfina Potocka. “I would like again to plop something down your little hole in D-flat major [a black key between two white keys],” he wrote in one of the alleged letters, of which only a photocopy remains. The document may well have been faked by its “discoverer,” one Pauline Czernicka, who committed suicide in 1949.

Chopin had always wanted a family life of his own. In 1836 he proposed to Maria Wodzinska, the pretty and musically accomplished daughter of a Polish count. Maria accepted him, but the countess, disturbed by his evident poor health, made them keep their engagement secret. Chopin ignored the countess’ pleas to take better care of himself, and soon Maria’s letters stopped.

Either unwilling or unable to protest this rejection, he abandoned all hopes of marriage.

In this frame of mind, he met the free-living novelist George Sand (née Amandine Aurore Dupin), who admired him and pursued him. Chopin was not immediately attracted to her, declaring to a friend, “What a repellent woman that Sand is. Is she really a woman? I am very much inclined to doubt it.” Eventually he did succumb to her advances, but she appears to have broken off sexual relations after the first year or two of their nine-year association despite Chopin’s complaints that abstinence would kill him. His bedroom performance, she let it be known, was corpselike, and contrary to his protests, he showed little interest in lovemaking. Preoccupied with raising her two children, she was prepared to make him the third. Chopin enjoyed his part-time family, especially little Solange, the daughter. As she grew up she took to flirting with him, calling him “no-sex Chopin.” When, in his absence, Sand married her off to a rascally sculptor known for his suggestive nudes, Chopin was aghast. In a violent quarrel between Sand and Solange’s husband, Chopin was tricked by Solange—a pathological liar—into siding against her mother, who then broke off with him. Chopin’s conscious feelings for Solange remained paternal.

The last woman who seriously tried to attract him was his wealthy pupil and financial savior Jane Stirling, of whom he remarked, “I would as soon marry death.” Chopin dreamed in his music of a love that life denied him.

Jane Stirling knew this when she said, “He had such a noble idea of what a woman should be!”

—J.M.B.E.

The Temperamental Diva

MARIA CALLAS (Dec. 3, 1923–Sept. 16, 1977)

HER FAME:
One of the foremost sopranos in 20th-century operatic history,

Maria Callas reigned as a leading diva for

more than a decade. She was particularly

renowned for her desire to try new roles

and the resultant variety of her repertoire.

HER PERSON:
She was born in Manhattan, the daughter of two recent Greek

immigrants, Georges and Evangelia

Kalogeropoulos. Her father changed the

family name to Callas when he opened a

drugstore in the borough. The Callases

already had a daughter—Jackie—when

Maria was born, and had hoped for a son

to replace one who had died earlier. Con-

Callas, 30 as Alceste

sequently, Maria never felt wanted.

It is quite possible she was
not
wanted. An overweight, myopic child, she was shy and unpopular. In 1929 her father lost his drugstore at the outset of the Depression, and her mother, realizing that both Jackie and Maria had musical ability, set out to find them fame. When Maria was 13, Evangelia took her daughters back to Greece.

The Callas women lived in Greece during WWII and became friendly with some Italian army officers stationed in the country. Maria would delight them by occasionally singing arias from Italian operas; in turn, the officers taught her how to converse in their native tongue. During the war she also acquired some formal musical training by studying with the well-known soprano Elvira de Hidalgo, but her career didn’t really get started until her triumphant performance in
La Gio-conda
at Verona, Italy, in 1947. Throughout the 1950s her success was constant.

Slimmed to 135 lb. by the time she was an international star, Maria Callas was relatively tall for a woman—5 ft. 7 in.—and prone to fragile health. Nevertheless, she had one of the most penetrating voices of modern opera.

LOVE LIFE:
Despite the publicity her private life received, Callas was involved with only two men in her adult life. While singing in Verona in 1947, she met Giovanni Battista Meneghini, an Italian industrialist and opera patron 30 years her senior, who was not put off by the fact that she weighed 230 lb. She later remarked, “I knew he was
it
five minutes after I first met him…. If Battista had wanted, I would have abandoned my career without regrets, because in a woman’s life love is more important than artistic triumph.” Their marriage plans were complicated by the fact that both families were opposed. Meneghini’s family feared that he would immerse himself in operatic matters and neglect the family business.

Maria’s mother was upset because of the age difference and because Meneghini was not a Greek. With no family members in attendance, the two were wed on Apr.

21, 1949, in Verona. Maria’s new husband immediately took over the guidance of her career. Under his tutelage the overweight bride quickly grew trim and learned to dress with style. Her debut at La Scala, the famous Milanese opera house, in 1950 was a triumph. Meneghini would not let his wife bear children because it might harm her career, but their marriage seemed to be on smooth ground until they took a fateful sea cruise in the summer of 1959.

That cruise was aboard the
Christina
, a yacht owned by Aristotle Onassis.

The Meneghinis boarded with Onassis, his wife Tina, and Sir Winston and Lady Churchill. Throughout the 2 1/2-week voyage Maria vented the full force of her hot temper on her husband. Meanwhile she and Onassis grew closer, often taking side trips to the Mediterranean ports, leaving the others behind. By the end of the cruise both the Meneghini marriage and the Onassis union were destroyed.

Maria and Meneghini separated a month later. He claimed, “I created Callas and she repaid my love by stabbing me in the back.” She alternated between such public statements as a shrill “To hell with him” and a more subdued “The breaking of my marriage is my greatest admission of failure.” Tina Onassis divorced Ari; however, it was not Callas who was named as corespondent, but Jeanne Rhinelander, a Riviera socialite with whom Ari had had an affair much earlier.

Callas had met Onassis before; he was the uncle of one of her classmates.

Although she claimed he was her “best friend,” their subsequent spats were legendary. He admired her talent but fell asleep when she sang. After Callas was freed from Meneghini in 1966, she and Ari discussed marriage, but two years later Onassis married Jacqueline Kennedy instead. Callas was stunned. She felt that Onassis had taken their nine-year affair for granted. In addition, she believed that the former First Lady was all wrong for Onassis. As Callas later explained to her accompanist Robert Sutherland: “The Gold Digger [Jacqueline Kennedy]

doesn’t understand him. She’s always away attending some American anniversary or other. He’s married a national monument! She was never right for him. She tried to change his whole way of life. It’s typical that she redecorates everything—

even the yacht. That’s a big mistake. It’s like taking away his past. I never did that—I wouldn’t have dared.” Eight days after Onassis married Kennedy, Callas said that the groom was “back at my door. But I wouldn’t let him in.”

Afterward her temper cooled, and she and Onassis resumed their relationship, creating quite a splash in the newspapers when they were photographed kissing under a beach umbrella. Looking back on her years with Onassis, Callas once commented, “We were doomed, but oh how rich we were.”

Callas’ last years were lonely. She had more or less abandoned her singing career, and she had also rejected Meneghini’s offer of a reconciliation after Onassis’ death in 1975. Callas died in September, 1977, still a legendary opera figure and an object of public interest.

—
A.L.G.

The Operatic Lover

ENRICO CARUSO (Feb. 25, 1873–Aug. 2, 1921)

HIS FAME:
Enrico Caruso was one of

the most popular opera singers the world

has ever known. A lyric tenor noted for

his strong, romantic voice, Caruso captivated audiences with his musical range

and depth of feeling. He is generally

credited with being the first singer to recognize the value of the phonograph as a

means of recording one’s voice for posterity and making a great deal of money

while doing it.

HIS PERSON:
Born in the slums of

Naples to a family with 21 children,

young Enrico escaped a life of poverty

on the strength of his voice. While

singing in the church choir, he realized his voice was golden because young suitors were willing to pay him to serenade their sweethearts. Tutored by the great singers of Italy, Caruso achieved an unequaled prominence in both England and America. Commanding large sums for his performances, the tenor enjoyed an opulent life and spent a fortune surrounding himself and his loved ones with luxury. A man of tremendous appetites, Caruso risked losing his voice by smoking two packs of Egyptian cigarettes a day (but sought to protect his throat by wearing fillets of anchovies around his neck). In later life he suffered from a variety of physical afflictions, but he continued to sing until he succumbed to pleurisy.