The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People (6 page)

She was arrested by the French in February, 1917. Some say she greeted the arresting officers naked on a couch in her hotel room. This is no more true than the rumor that she took milk baths while Parisian children starved or that she danced nude in her cell at Saint-Lazare Prison.

The file on her was 6 in. thick, but the evidence was inconclusive. A tube of “secret ink” in her possession turned out to be oxycyanide of mercury, which she injected into herself after making love as a birth-control method.

Her aged lover Maître Clunet defended her at her trial, and another lover, Jules Cambon of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, testified in her behalf. A third lover, old and amiable General Messimy, sent a letter written by his wife which asked that the general be excused from testifying since he didn’t know the defendant. At that, Mata Hari laughed, “Ah! He never knew me! Oh, well.

He has a nerve!” The jury laughed with her, but humor did not save her from her awful sentence—death by a firing squad.

The nun who came to fetch her on the day of her execution chastised her for showing too much leg while putting on her stockings in front of the prison doctor. She was dressed to the teeth. On the way out of prison, she was asked whether she was pregnant (according to French law, a pregnant woman could not be executed). This question arose, some say, from a last-ditch attempt by Clunet to save her by claiming to be the father of her unborn child.

She was shot at the polygon of Vincennes, at her own request without a blindfold. It is not true that she pulled open her coat to reveal her naked body, so astounding the firing squad that not one man could squeeze a trigger. Nor did a playboy aviator boyfriend strafe the field. Nor did another lover—

inspired by the plot of the opera
Tosca
—bribe the firing squad to use blanks, put her in a ventilated coffin, and bury her in a shallow grave so that he could spirit her away. The truth? No one claimed her body, so it was contributed to a medical school for dissection. Was she guilty? That’s still a question.

LOVE AND SEX LIFE:
Though she accepted money for sex, she was so infatuated by “the uniform” that she often slept with soldiers for nothing. She may have hated most men, in spite of the fact that she exploited their sexual urges in order to support herself.

Judging by her letters signed “your loving little wife,” she was intimate with MacLeod before their marriage. Her long string of later lovers included innumerable military men of several nationalities; the crown prince of Germany; the head of a dirigible company; the president of the Dutch council; and two boys, 17 and 18 respectively, when she was close to 40. Her price, when sex was a business deal, was $7,500 a night, or so she claimed. Upon occasion Mata Hari turned a candidate down—an American munitions salesman with bad table manners, for example.

Her first important lover was Lt. Alfred Kiepert, a rich, married landowner in the German Hussars, who set her up in an apartment in 1906.

About a year later they parted, and she returned to Paris with the story she had been on a hunting trip in Egypt and India. In 1914 they were back

together again. A newspaper snidely reported: “When Mata Hari, the beautiful dancer, said good-bye to the rich estate owner Kiepert, who lives just outside Berlin, she took along a few hundred thousand as a farewell present.

Whether the shine of the money has worn off or whether it is love that brought her back to her former friend, during the last few days they could be seen, apparently happy and closely intimate, in a private dining room of a fashionable restaurant in town.”

In 1910 she lived in the French region of Touraine as the mistress of Xavier Rousseau, a stockbroker. He spent weekends with her at their hideaway, the Château de la Dorée, where once she rode a horse up and down the outer staircase. After they split up, he became a champagne salesman. His wife claimed that Mata Hari had ruined him.

After Rousseau came Édouard Willen van der Capellen—rich, married, and a colonel in the Dutch Hussars. But her passion reached full flower with her Russian captain, Vadime de Massloff, whom she visited in 1916 in Vittel, a French resort in the military zone. He was recuperating from a wound; she may have been spying. When she was arrested, several photographs of De Massloff were found in her hotel room. Written on the back of one was: “Vittel, 1916. In memory of some of the most beautiful days of my life, spent with my Vadime, whom I love above everything.” When jailed, she wrote a pathetic letter to an interrogator begging for news of De Massloff. Yet De Massloff claimed their relationship had been a minor affair.

HER THOUGHTS:
“I never could dance well. People came to see me because I was the first who dared to show myself naked to the public.” To an interrogator, while she was jailed: “I love officers. I have loved them all my life.

I prefer to be the mistress of a poor officer than a rich banker. It is my greatest pleasure to sleep with them without having to think of money. And moreover I like to make comparisons between the various nationalities…. I have said yes to them with all my heart. They left thoroughly satisfied, without ever having mentioned the war, and neither did I ask them anything that was indiscreet.

I’ve only kept on seeing De Massloff because I adore him.”

—A.E.

The Prince of Playboys

PRINCE ALY KHAN (June 13, 1911–May 12, 1960)

HIS FAME:
Aly Khan was once heir apparent to Aga Khan III of India, but his international pursuit of fast cars, horses, and beautiful women cost him the post of imam—spiritual leader to over 20 million Muslims of the Ismaili sect—

which had been held by his father.

HIS PERSON:
Born in Italy and

reared in Europe, Prince Aly Suleiman

Khan inherited a fortune and learned

early how to enjoy it. In 1929, after the

death of his mother, Aly threw himself

into high-society London, where he

had been sent to study law. The short

and swarthy teenager stood out among

the pale gentry, and his exotic looks,

boundless energy, and skill at racing

cars and horses won him fame and the

adoration of that year’s debutantes. He

went on to compete in European auto

races and hunt on African safaris, all

Aly Khan with Rita Hayworth

the while managing his horse-breeding

farms and villas in Ireland, France, Switzerland, and Venezuela. The Allies found his daring and his fluency in English, French, and Arabic invaluable during WWII, awarding him the Croix de Guerre and the U.S. Bronze Star for his work in intelligence. Though some consider his most outstanding conquest to be Rita Hayworth, whom he married in 1949, he earned great respect as Pakistan’s delegate to the U.N., where he served from 1958 until his death in a car accident two years later.

LOVE LIFE:
Two skills from race-car driving and army service stood him well in his career as a lover: speed and logistics. With houses all over the world, he had only to capture a woman’s attention and he could woo her wherever he wished. His blitzkrieg involved the “eyes-across-the-crowded-room” approach: staring intently at the chosen prey until he had her attention. Then he wangled an introduction, following it up with dozens of roses, constant phone calls, and attention to his victim’s every whim and desire. The international celebrity hostess Elsa Maxwell wrote that Aly made a woman “feel no other person exists for him. He talks to her with breathless excitement…. He dances with her slowly and rapturously, as though it is the last time he will ever hold her in his arms…. When he tells a woman he loves her, he sincerely means it at the moment. The trouble is that a moment passes so quickly.” Even a married woman could carry on an affair rather discreetly with the prince, who always traveled with a crowd of people and kept everyone guessing who, among the current crew, was the chosen one. A bewildered member of Parliament, Mr. Loel Guinness, told a divorce court in 1936 that he had left a happily married woman, his beautiful blond wife, Joan, with such a retinue, and returned from a business trip to find she wanted a divorce to marry Aly Khan. Joan was Aly’s first wife and she gave him two sons, Karim (who became the fourth imam when Aly’s father died in 1957) and Amyn.

Though Aly continued to stalk other women, he didn’t bother to ask Joan for a divorce until he met Rita Hayworth in 1948. The sultry actress was

vacationing on the Riviera. As competition Aly had Hollywood’s leading men as well as the shah of Iran, also vacationing there and planning seductions of his own. Aly won, gallantly helping Rita forget her inattentive husband, Orson Welles, by whisking her off to Paris, London, and Madrid. For Rita, seeking privacy and respite from a grueling Hollywood schedule, marriage to Aly was a bitter disappointment. He felt alone with anything less than a mob, she said. She took their daughter, Yasmin, back to America with her, becoming the first woman to walk out on Aly Khan. They divorced in 1953 and Aly renewed old interests, shuttling between countries on visits, so involved he often did not leave his hotel suite. His father once became incensed when a delegation of Ismailis, in London on a visit from India, were kept waiting in the lobby for over an hour while Aly entertained a young woman upstairs.

Aly’s reputation had grown to such an extent that one friend claimed: “You were déclassé, démodé, nothing, you hardly counted, if you’d not been to bed with Aly.”

Though Aly changed women as often as he changed cars and horses, his romances were so intense that few women complained. Juliette Greco admired his perfect timing. Kim Novak found other people seemed only

“half-alive” compared to Aly. Even actress Gene Tierney—at first so unim-pressed she thought to herself on meeting him, “That’s all I need, some Oriental superstud”—became smitten and hoped at one time he would marry her. But none of his romances had quite such historical import as his dalliance with Lady Thelma Furness, who was the Prince of Wales’ loving companion until she fell for Aly. Angered, Edward VIII turned to the American divorcée Wallis Simpson, for whom he eventually gave up the throne of England.

QUIRKS:
Aly’s claim that “I think only of a woman’s pleasure when I’m in love” came out of a unique education given him by an Arab doctor in Cairo, where his father sent him as a boy for instruction in the sex technique called
Imsák
. A woman described it this way: “No matter how many women Aly went with, he seldom reached climax himself. He could make love by the hour, but he went the whole way himself not oftener than twice a week. He liked the effect it had on women. He liked to get them out of control while he stayed in control—the master of the situation.”

HIS THOUGHTS:
“They called me a bloody nigger and I paid them out by winning all their women.”

—B.B.

Marilyn

MARILYN MONROE (June 1, 1926–Aug. 5, 1962)

HER FAME:
She was the reigning sex

symbol of the staid 1950s, the all—

American dumb blond with a campy,

exaggerated come-on. Fragile and insecure in her personal life, she sought

security in sex, trading up from Hollywood producers to an illfated president

of the U.S.

HER PERSON:
She began life as

Norma Jean Mortenson, the daughter

of Gladys Monroe Baker Mortenson, a

hardworking but emotionally unstable

Hollywood film cutter, and Gladys’

second husband, Edward Mortenson, a

man of Norwegian extraction and

In 1949, Marilyn posed for this famous calendar shot
uncertain employment, who disappeared shortly before she was born.

Norma Jean had a deprived, Depression-poor childhood. She boarded with one family until she was seven, joined her mother until Gladys was institutionalized for paranoid schizophrenia, and spent the next three years in an orphanage and foster homes. Grace Goddard, her mother’s best friend, took care of her from the age of 11 until her marriage at 16.