The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People (74 page)

principality of Porbandar in western

India and the minister’s fourth wife. Soli-

Gandhi and Kasturbai, both age 45

tary, shy, and sweet-tempered, homely

with his big nose and jug ears, he enjoyed a close relationship with both his parents, particularly with his deeply religious mother.

The turning points of his childhood were his marriage at the age of 13, in the Hindu tradition, and the death of his father three years later, at the very moment Gandhi was sexually importuning his pregnant child bride. This left him with a lifelong sense of sexual guilt that would eventually be sublimated in political activism.

At 18, after taking a vow not to touch wine, women, or meat, he went alone to study law in England for three years, a formative period for the young Indian.

He had great difficulty satisfying his hearty appetite with British vegetarian cui-sine. But despite temptation, particularly at the hands of middle-aged landladies eager to assuage his needs, he succumbed to nothing more than a temporary case of fashion-consciousness.

Gandhi came into his own during 21 years spent in South Africa, arriving in 1893 as attorney for a Muslim firm and becoming a leader of the Indian community there through his protests against racial discrimination. He began to experiment with “nature cures” and communal living. And at the age of 37

he took the Hindu vow of
brahmacharya
, or celibacy, to free himself for a lifetime of political and religious leadership.

Gandhi called his political philosophy
satyagraha
, a combination of truth and force, which has been variously translated as passive resistance or militant nonviolence. By means of civil-disobedience campaigns and symbolic protest demonstrations—and later by dramatic public fasts—he would counter might

with right and return good for evil, compelling the strong to acknowledge the force of the weak.

In 1915 Gandhi returned to India to take on the question of colonialism.

Rejecting all Western influences, he established a simple, austere lifestyle in his ashrams, or communal retreats. He adopted the spinning wheel as a symbol of traditional self-sufficiency, making homespun cloth to replace imported fabric.

And he devised a series of symbolic confrontations with the British which culminated in 1947 in Indian independence. Soon afterward, while working to bring peace between Hindus and Muslims, he was assassinated by a Hindu fanatic.

With his small, frail body—naked except for a loincloth and metal-rimmed spectacles—Gandhi confronted the key issues of his time: tradition and mod-ernization, colonialism and nationalism, identity and faith. The one question he was never able to resolve, and which would continue to plague him into old age, was sex.

CHILD MARRIAGE:
Marriage at the age of 13, Gandhi recalled, meant at first only the acquisition of a “strange girl to play with.” It also meant that, assuming the traditional authority of the Hindu husband, he might dictate when and where his bride might play. But Kasturbai Makanji, also 13, was stubborn and strong-willed; she spent nearly half of her first two years of marriage at home with her parents. She was submissive only when it came to sex.

For Gandhi, who had been coached by his brother’s wife, marriage launched a period of lascivious sexual self-indulgence. He was constantly preoccupied with erotic urges, and his schoolwork suffered. Kasturbai remained illiterate (“lustful love left no time for learning”) and Gandhi would henceforth seek intellectual companionship elsewhere.

Sex was always a source of guilt and conflict for Gandhi, as epitomized by the circumstances of his father’s death. He shared the Hindu concern with digestion and excretion, and the worship of semen as the vital life force, loss of which is debilitating to body and mind. Celibacy, in fact, is not uncommon among older Hindu males. But for Gandhi, who was highly sexed and in his mid-30s when he adopted it, it involved a great struggle.

A combination of factors motivated Gandhi’s final resolve to forswear sex.

Abstinence is the only morally acceptable form of birth control, he believed, and after five sons (one died in infancy) he wanted no more children. He wished to conserve all his energy for a life of service. Also, as psychohistorian Erik Erikson points out, racial repression in colonial South Africa may have reminded him of the sexual chauvinism in his marriage.

In Gandhi’s thinking, there was a parallel between sexual and political exploitation. His philosophy of passive resistance, he wrote, was inspired by the indomitable Kasturbai. “Her determined resistance to my will … made me ashamed of myself and cured me of my stupidity in thinking I was born to rule over her.” Celibacy was simply a form of nonviolence between the sexes. But until her death in 1944, while she and Gandhi were serving time in prison for civil disobedience, Kasturbai reserved a peasant distrust of the women who surrounded her husband. For although the traditional Hindu vow required a celibate to avoid the opposite sex altogether, Gandhi spent the rest of his life tempting fate.

GANDHI’S WOMEN:
He was a great flirt who adored women, William Shirer wrote. Moreover, they were useful to his movement. Beginning in South Africa with 17-year-old Sonja Schlesin, he had a long line of secretary-nurses who served him with great devotion and slavish obedience. Over the years, in addition to taking dictation, these women assumed the duties of massaging him, bathing him, and even sleeping with him.

Some of Gandhi’s women were famous in their own right, for example, Sarojini Naidu, “the Nightingale of India,” a poet from a wealthy, cosmopolitan Brahmanic family. She became one of Gandhi’s most devoted converts, enjoying a relationship of great personal affection with the Mahatma, or “Great Soul,”

whom she called “our Mickey Mouse.” (“You will never know how much it costs us to keep that saint, that wonderful old man, in poverty,” she joked.) Such was Gandhi’s appeal that women came from far and wide. Madeleine Slade, a 33-year-old Englishwoman, daughter of an admiral, and a former devotee of Beethoven, arrived in 1925 to prostrate herself at Gandhi’s feet. “You shall be my daughter,” he welcomed her. But Mirabehn, as she was renamed, was in love and wanted more; Gandhi simply advised her to sublimate her love in service instead of “squandering” it on him. There remained a special empathy between the two, William Shirer observed, while biographer Louis Fischer described their relationship as “one of the remarkable platonic associations of our age.” Not all of Gandhi’s relations with the opposite sex, however, were entirely platonic.

GANDHI’S GIRLS:
The struggle to remain sexually pure, he wrote, was “like walking on the sword’s edge.” He continued to be tormented by nocturnal emissions, which he confessed publicly as a form of atonement, into his late 60s.

Then there was the scandal of the naked young girls he slept with, to keep him warm and “test his resolve.”

He had been experiencing “shivering fits” in the night, so he asked young women in his inner circle—all virgins or young brides—to warm him with their bodies. Sushila Nayar, who first arrived at the ashram at 15 and went on to become Gandhi’s physician, masseuse, secretary, and bedmate, thought no more of it than of sleeping with her mother. But for some of the others it was an ambivalent experience. Abha Gandhi, the wife of a grandnephew who began sleeping with the Mahatma when she was 16, eventually was asked to remove all her garments. Her husband was so upset that he offered to keep the old man warm himself. Gandhi refused his offer, saying he wanted Abha for the
brahmacharya
experiment as well as for the warmth.

Some of Gandhi’s girls were motivated by jealousy of one another and their fear of losing favor. Manu Gandhi was a distant cousin, raised from childhood by Kasturbai, who bathed and shaved the Mahatma and from the age of 19 slept

with him. He would lean on her and Abha, his “walking sticks,” when he went out; and during his fasts Manu would monitor his vital signs and administer enemas. “She rejoiced in her servitude and was proud of her special place in his affections,” Gandhi biographer Robert Payne wrote of Manu.

“The, more they tried to restrain themselves and repress their sexual impulses,”

Raihana Tyabji, one of Gandhi’s disciples, said about the women in his entourage, “the more oversexed and conscious they became.” Ironically, Gandhi once scolded Raihana, also a celibate and a healer, for sleeping naked with one of her patients. In fact, in matters of sex as well as politics, the Mahatma simply wrote his own rules.

—C.D.

Mysterious Bed Partner

ADOLF HITLER (Apr. 20, 1889–Apr. 30, 1945)

HIS FAME:
One of the most powerful

leaders of the 20th century, Adolf Hitler

was also the titular head of the National

Socialist German Workers’ Party, or

Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeit—

erpartei. (The shortened name “Nazi” is

derived from the syllables
Nat
and
zi
.) His infamous dictatorship, lasting for only 13

years, created a permanent shift in world

politics and was directly responsible for

the deaths of over 30 million people.

HIS PERSON:
Born at Braunau am Inn

(Austria-Hungary), Hitler originally

dreamed of becoming an artist, but twice

(1907, 1908) flunked the entrance

examinations for Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts. The future dictator of Nazi Germany moved frequently around the Austrian capital to evade military service, while he supported himself by painting postcards and posters. When WWI began, he enlisted in a Bavarian infantry regiment and survived four years of front-line combat, serving with distinction (wounded, gassed, twice awarded the Iron Cross). In 1920 Hitler joined the German Workers’ party and turned the tiny, ineffective group into a formidable, paramilitary organization. At Munich on Nov. 8, 1923, he tried to force the Bavarian government into a full-scale revolution against the Weimar Republic, but his beer hall putsch failed and Hitler was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for high treason. Released nine months later, he emerged with a rambling manuscript outlining his plan for Germany’s domination of the world. Titled
Mein Kampf
(“My Struggle”), it became the Nazi party bible.

Aided by Germany’s internal chaos and worsening economic condition, Hitler schemed his way into authority and in 1933 was named chancellor. His hypnotic oratory won him the enthusiastic support and adoration of the masses. Political opponents were either brutally murdered or permanently jailed. He purged potential threats to his leadership from within his private army of 100,000 men—the brown-shirted Sturmabteilung (“Storm Troopers”)—by ordering the bloody massacre (June 30, 1934) called the “Night of the Long Knives.” His policy of Aryan supremacy sent over 6 million European Jews, Gypsies, and political dissidents to the gas chambers and crematoriums. Hitler rearmed Germany, reoccupied the Rhineland, took over Austria, and seized Czechoslovakia’s Sude-tenland as preliminary steps toward conquering first Europe, then the world.

On Sept. 1, 1939, his armored columns rolled across the Polish border, triggering WWII.
Der Führer
(“the Leader”) personally directed overall military strategy, often rejecting the advice given by his experienced top commanders. When battlefield casualties numbering in the millions provoked an unsuccessful assassination plot on his life in 1944, he sadistically condemned the men responsible to a slow—and deliberately prolonged—death by piano-wire strangulation while hung on meat hooks. As they were about to expire, they were cut down, revived, and then rehung—repeatedly. (The gruesome spectacle was filmed in graphic detail for Hitler’s later enjoyment.) In 1945, with his armies facing total collapse on both the eastern and western fronts, Hitler fled to a concrete bunker beneath the Berlin Chancellery. There on April 30 he committed suicide, ending a reign he had boasted would last for a thousand years.

SEX LIFE:
Dr. Leonard L. Heston, professor of psychiatry at the University of Minnesota, investigated Hitler and came to one conclusion.

Sexual deviations of several kinds have been suggested, but the fact remains that very little is known about Hitler’s sex life. Ignorance has fostered blatant speculation. The evidence is: He was regarded as sexually normal by his physicians and by those who knew him through the war.

Eva Braun, his mistress, was thought by all to be a thoroughly normal young woman. Hitler was an emotional person who certainly grieved deeply and appropriately following the death by suicide of an earlier mistress, Geli Raubal. Eva Braun voluntarily came to Berlin during the last days, elected to marry Hitler, and then to die with him. Hitler was certainly capable of sustaining for a lengthy period a relationship involving profound affectional ties. Saying more would be sheer speculation.

Gossip that Hitler might be homosexual was scoffed at by his colleague Albert Speer. “Such accusations have no truth in them. Hitler’s worries and long hours often made his sex drive taper off and he would request drugs … to help, but as