The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People (7 page)

Escaping into an imaginary world filled with Saturday matinee images, Norma Jean fantasized about a father who looked like Clark Gable and about glamorous seduction scenes involving tropical islands, yachts, palaces. She also had a recurring dream in which she took her clothes off in church and the shocked congregation silently admired her naked splendor.

Marriage to Jim Dougherty, a blue-collar savior, protective and possessive, soon proved disappointing. Contradicting the lurid tales she would later tell of having been raped and sexually abused, even impregnated as a foster child, Dougherty would report that his Norma Jean was a virgin. In any case, she became bored with playing house and was relieved when her husband went overseas in 1944. While working in a war plant, she was discovered by a photographer. Norma Jean loved to pose, and the camera (her only true lover, some would say) revealed a beautiful young woman, eager to please and be noticed, voluptuous yet vulnerable, a combination of allure and innocence.

Obsessed by the dream of stardom, she divorced her husband, became a popular model (photographer André de Dienes fell in love with her and

proposed), and in 1946 presented herself at 20th Century-Fox. She demonstrated remarkable “flesh impact” in a silent screen test, on the basis of which the studio signed her, lightened her hair, and changed her name to Marilyn Monroe.

SEX ON THE CASTING COUCH:
Marilyn emanated a strong sexual aura, by all accounts. She thought about sex all the time, considering it with every man she met, but would describe herself as selectively promiscuous, submitting only to men she liked, the main requirement being that they be “nice.”

Her preference was usually for older men, kindly, warm father figures.

Hollywood in the late 1940s was an “overcrowded brothel,” in Marilyn’s words, and she needed all the help she could get to move up from third-string blonde at Fox. Her first patron was veteran producer Joe Schenck, then nearly 70. Schenck wined and dined the starlet and invited her regularly to his home and office, where he would fondle her breasts and talk about the old days while she performed fellatio.

Schenck introduced Marilyn to Harry Cohn, the tyrant of Columbia Pictures, but she was fired after her first film, allegedly for rejecting Cohn’s imperious sexual demands. Comedian Milton Berle, who succeeded where Cohn failed, claimed, “She wasn’t out to please me because I might be able to help her … [but] because she liked me.” At the time, she was also in love with Fred Karger, her vocal coach, who enjoyed her sexual favors but did not reciprocate her feelings.

An intimate glimpse of Marilyn’s sexuality in this period is afforded by Anton LaVey, then an 18-year-old accompanist at a strip joint where the 22-year-old actress worked briefly after being fired from Columbia. LaVey, who had a two-week affair with Marilyn in motels (or, when they were broke, in her car), describes her as sexually passive, a tease who enjoyed the ogling admiration of men but not their more pressing attentions.

Marilyn’s biographers are inclined to agree. Fred Guiles wrote that she was

“too self-absorbed to respond to men most of the time,” while Norman Mailer concluded that she was “pleasant in bed, but receptive rather than innovative.”

And Marilyn was still pathetically insecure. “I don’t know if I do it right,”

she murmured after making it with actor Marlon Brando. Or she would jump into bed, nude, pleading, “Don’t do anything but just hold me.”

Succeeding Schenck as Marilyn’s patron was Johnny Hyde, a top Hollywood agent. Hyde was short, well barbered, and at 53 suffered from a serious heart ailment. He was infatuated with Marilyn and wanted to marry her, but she refused. He gave her a sense of security and a new wardrobe and paid for plastic surgery on her nose and chin. Most important, Hyde used his influence to line up Marilyn’s best early roles, both as kept women, in
Asphalt Jungle
(1950) and
All About Eve
(1950). Marilyn didn’t enjoy sex with Hyde but would fake ecstasy in order not to offend him.

When Marilyn signed her first big contract, she is said to have exclaimed,

“That’s the last cock I’ll have to suck.” In fact, she was already setting her

sights higher. Kidding around with onetime roommate Shelley Winters, she made a list of the men she’d like to sleep with. The names included an eminent man Marilyn would marry, another she would seduce, and Albert Einstein. Shelley Winters would later come across a photo of the genius inscribed to Marilyn, “With respect and love and thanks.”

LOVERS AS HUSBANDS:
Joe DiMaggio was Marilyn’s first real-life hero-lover, a Galahad of an all-time great baseball star. Just retired at 37, he was in prime physical shape, a fitting complement to the blond bombshell who would become a superstar with the release of
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
and
How to Marry a Millionaire
in 1953. Unfortunately, however, DiMaggio didn’t want his wife to be a superstar after their 1954 marriage. The strong, silent type, proud, possessive, and old-fashioned, and detested Hollywood. He disliked Marilyn’s drama coach and mentor, Natasha Lytess, who retaliated by suggesting that Marilyn got along better with women. In a desperate effort to save their marriage, DiMaggio conspired with his friend Frank Sinatra to catch Marilyn with “the other woman”—presumably to force her into dropping her divorce suit. But Lytess’ allegation was never proved.

Trying to break away from her studio-imposed stereotype of the sexy blond, Marilyn left Hollywood for the East Coast, where she thought she had finally found a man interested in more than her body. Playwright Arthur Miller, whom she had first met in 1950 (“He sat and held my toe and we just looked into each other’s eyes”), was as respected in radical intellectual circles as DiMaggio was in baseball circles. They were married in 1956.

Lena Pepitone, her maid, described Marilyn’s daily life in New York between acting classes and sessions with a psychiatrist. While Miller worked in his study, the actress would lie alone in her bedroom, sipping champagne and talking for long hours on the telephone, or listening to “Frankie” records and admiring her naked image in the mirrors. (She also preened before a full-length picture of DiMaggio in the closet.) Totally uninhibited, Marilyn belched and farted constantly. She rarely bathed, although she did take the trouble to bleach her pubic hair (“I want to feel blond all over”) which gave her infections, and she owned no underwear. She ate in bed, wiping her hands on the sheets, which had to be changed frequently, particularly when she had her period.

At first the Millers embarrassed friends with their physical possessiveness.

After one night of lovemaking, Marilyn would not let her maid change the sheets, saying, “I want to lie on these all day.” Then Marilyn suffered two miscarriages, despite corrective surgery, followed by increasing depression. Her later films were completed under great strain (and mounting cost to the producers, for Marilyn, was chronically late or absent). Unable to sleep, she became a heavy barbiturate user, narcotizing herself into oblivion. More than once Miller rescued her from accidental overdosing. After collaborating on
The Misfits
(1960), the Millers were divorced—prophetically, on the day that John F. Kennedy became president.

LOVERS AND OTHER STRANGERS:
Now approaching 35, alone and desperately worried about aging, Marilyn was hungry for reassurance. She had engaged in a highly publicized affair with Yves Montand, her co-star in
Let’s
Make Love
(1960), who disappointed her terribly by ending the affair, not wanting to leave his wife, Simone Signoret. There were meetings in seedy hotels with Danish journalist Hans Jørgen Lembourn, whose hands made her sleep, she said. She went bar-hopping, according to her maid, entertained her handsome chauffeur, and became intimate friends with her masseur, Ralph Roberts. DiMaggio occasionally stayed overnight, but they still disagreed about Marilyn’s career. Another old friend and sometime lover was Frank Sinatra, whose sexual demands and protective dominance so excited and pleased her that she indulged in fantasies of marriage. Then Sinatra introduced her to the Kennedys.

She was enjoying secret assignations with the President at his brother-in-law Peter Lawford’s Santa Monica beach house, at the Beverly Hills Hotel in California, and on the presidential jet. She bought a house and moved back to Los Angeles, she told friends, because “it sure beats hanging around [hotel rooms] for God Himself Jack Kennedy to show up.” Kennedy’s performance was “very democratic” and “very penetrating,” she giggled. “I think I make his back feel better,” she joked to her masseur.

John Kennedy liked to pat and squeeze her, Marilyn said, but was embarrassed on putting his hand up her dress under the table at a dinner party to discover she wore no underwear. He also began to be annoyed by her lateness and her constant telephone calls, and he was fearful of publicity. Marilyn was becoming too hot to handle by the time JFK’s 45th-birthday fund-raiser was held at Madison Square Garden that May. Marilyn stole the show singing “Happy Birthday.”

By June, cushioning the blow of rejection, the President had handed her over to his brother Bobby. Bobby and Marilyn consummated their relationship in a car outside Lawford’s house, it was rumored, and Marilyn began fantasizing marriage again. When her trust proved to be devastatingly misplaced, and RFK changed his phone number to escape her calls, she talked idly about calling a press conference to blow the whistle on him.

Suicide? Or murder? Marilyn’s moods during that last summer of 1962

swung from gaiety to despair, the latter relieved by pills and daily psychiatric sessions. She had been fired from her last picture for absenteeism and was despondent over her inability to hold a man—“to fulfill anyone’s total needs,”

she wrote in a letter, never mailed, to DiMaggio. Her life had been so disordered, with so many rehearsals for death, that it came as a shock but not a total surprise when she was found dead of an overdose early one Sunday morning.

The love goddess died for lack of love.

—C.D.

“Toujours Prêt”

PORFIRIO RUBIROSA (1909–July 6, 1965)

HIS FAME:
Ostensibly he was a diplomat in the service of the Dominican

Republic, representing his country with

no recorded distinction in Germany,

Argentina, France, Belgium, and Cuba.

In actuality he was the last and greatest

of that exhausted breed, the quintessential international playboy-lover.

LOVE LIFE:
They called him “
Toujours

Prêt
” (“Always Ready”), and throughout

his amorous career, which embraced five

headline-making marriages and countless scandalous affairs, no woman ever

disputed the whispered nickname; nor

has anyone ever stepped forward with a

better explanation for the romantic triumphs of Porfirio Rubirosa. As he once announced, “I consider a day in which I make love only once as virtually wasted.” He came from a middle-class family in the Dominican Republic, had a brief education in Paris where his father worked in the Dominican legation, and returned to his homeland to join the army. In manhood, he was short, dark, flat-nosed, and bow-legged from riding polo horses. He was shrewd rather than bright, aggressively attentive to women, and he spoke English with a French accent.

His first wife was 17-year-old Flor de Oro (“Flower of Gold”) Trujillo, daughter of the notorious dictator Generalissimo Rafael Trujillo. Although the generalissimo felt little enthusiasm for his 22-year-old son-in-law, he declared a bank holiday on his daughter’s wedding day. He then dispatched the young couple to his legation in Berlin, thus launching “
Toujours Prêt
” on his unremarkable career of diplomacy and his remarkable career of lovemaking. Five years later, when Flor and Rubi were living in Paris, Flor announced that she was tired of her husband and wanted her freedom. Rubi stepped aside gracefully, by then a wealthier man than he’d been as a bridegroom. The divorce did not disturb his fatherin-law, who soon promoted Rubirosa within the Dominican legation, declaring: “He is an excellent diplomat because women like him and because he is a liar.” Rubirosa played the field until he and the lovely French actress Danielle Darrieux fell in love. When the Germans took over Paris, Rubirosa was arrested and interned. Compromising her future, Darrieux agreed to entertain the Nazis in exchange for Rubirosa’s release. In 1942 Rubirosa and Darrieux were married, vowing they would remain together only as long as their mutual passion survived. When Danielle’s mother moved in with them, Rubi’s passion subsided and the union sputtered and died.

In 1947 Rubirosa hit his stride. He became the husband of tobacco heiress Doris Duke, then the richest woman in the world. Doris provided the wedding ring and Rubi provided the cigarettes which he smoked throughout the ceremony. Thirteen months later the marriage ended and Rubi walked away from the wreckage praising Doris for her “extremely generous” settlement. An even greater coup awaited him. In 1953 he married the second-richest woman in the world, dime-store heiress Barbara Hutton, veteran of four previous mismatings (one to Cary Grant, who did not want or take any of her money). News photos show the bride looking slightly spacey. It was Rubirosa who kept his head. Sev-enty-three days later, when love had fled, Rubi and Barbara called the whole thing off. Rubirosa is thought to have emerged from the Hutton fling with a settlement of between $1 million and $5 million. Weaving throughout his marital diversions were several affairs and two divorce suits in which irate husbands named Rubirosa as corespondent.