The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People (80 page)

times in the chest at the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan; three men were charged and convicted.

SEX LIFE:
Malcolm’s iconic autobiography was written as object lesson of how he learned from hard life lessons; how he overcame a lowly street life consorting with pimps, living with prostitutes, selling drugs and numbers and other mob rackets. After having a lengthy affair with a married white woman, Malcolm came to believe it was the result of self-hatred of his own black skin, and transformed himself into an advocate of Islam as a result.

Malcolm married Betty Sanders (who subsequently took his last name of X) in Lansing, Michigan, in 1958. The marriage produced six daughters, including twins who were born after Malcolm’s death. According to a biography published in 1991, Bruce Perry’s
Malcolm: The Life of a Man Who Changed
Black America
, Malcolm worked as a male prostitute from the age of 20, and at one point was employed as a butler for William Paul Lennon, a rich bachelor in Boston, who he was also paid to sprinkle with talcum powder and then service, giving him hand relief until orgasm. Friends have related many stories of Malcolm’s youthful sexual encounters, including with a local boy he discovered masturbating and then ordered to give him a handjob before performing oral sex on him, as well as a transvestite named Willie Mae with whom he had an affair in Flint, Michigan. Biographer Bruce Perry surmises that his homosexual activities may have functioned as a release valve, without the risk of becoming overly entangled with women, which the young man may have viewed as making him that much less effective. It is this discomfort with his desires which would find its apotheosis in radical Islam and black nationalism; his religious conversion in particular may have been motivated to some extent by a need to burn out and purify his natural inclinations. Malcolm spoke of his shame at his criminal background in his autobiography and the pride he felt at his conversion; his urge to “become a man” on all levels speaks to some modicum of sexual self-suppression. Whether by inclination or design, apparently his homosexual liaisons, if not impulses, ceased after he joined the Nation of Islam. The Qu’ran itself is somewhat confused on the subject of homosexuality—Mohammed prohibits sodomy in practice (“If two men among you are guilty of lewdness, punish them both”—Qu’ran 4:16) but then goes on to say that Muslims will be able to enjoy it in paradise (“Round about them will serve boys of perpetual freshness”—Qu’ran 56:17). However, the Nation of Islam is hardly so conflicted, expressly forbidding homosexuality as the work of Satan (and, at times, the Jewish people).

—J.L.

XII

Getting Down

to Business

Contradictory Car-Maker

HENRY FORD (July 30, 1863–Apr. 7, 1947)

HIS FAME:
A pioneer in automotive

design and mass-production methods,

Ford revolutionized industry and transformed the world. He epitomized a

traditional American hero—the self—

made man. Born on a farm near

Dearborn, Mich., he left school at 16 and

died a billionaire at 83. His life abounds

in contradiction. An enlightened

employer who doubled the minimum

wage and shortened the workday, he

devised the five-day week to speed up

production, hired informers to spy on

workers, and fought unions with terror

tactics. Inherently magnanimous, he

Henry and Clara Ford

often treated people with contempt and

alienated his friends. A philanthropist, he published virulent anti-Semitic articles and in 1938 was awarded a medal by Adolf Hitler.

SEX LIFE:
Contradiction extends to Ford’s love life. He was a straitlaced guardian of sexual morals, yet evidence suggests the possibility that he fathered a son whose mother was another man’s wife.

Ford’s marriage seemed ideal. It had been love at first sight when he met pretty Clara Jane Bryant, a farmer’s daughter, at a village ball. They wed when he was 24 and she 22. One child, Edsel, was born after four years. Smart, even-tempered, unselfish, Clara would go along with her husband’s enthusiasms even if it meant letting him run a gasoline motor in her sink or serving meals composed mainly of soybean products. He called her “the Believer” because of her complete faith in him. (However, in domestic matters her word was law.) When in one rare instance she “interfered” in his business affairs, begging him to end his resistance to unions and avert bloodshed, he followed her advice.

Spending millions in charitable undertakings, Clara detested waste. She mended her petticoats and underdrawers and continued to darn Ford’s socks after he was a millionaire. The Fords enjoyed simple pleasures together: family gatherings, picnics, bird-watching, dancing, or just listening to the radio.

Clara died in 1950, three years after Ford.

A different picture emerges from John Dahlinger’s
The Secret Life of
Henry Ford
(1978). Dahlinger asserts that he is Ford’s son, born in 1923.

John Dahlinger (center) with Ray Dahlinger and the man he claims was his real father, Henry Ford
According to Dahlinger, his mother, beautiful Evangeline Côté (a cousin of Tyrone Power), caught Ford’s eye when, still in her teens, she began working in an office at his plant. Clara’s polar opposite, Evangeline charmed Ford, 30

years her senior, with her headstrong and vivacious ways. (She later became a licensed pilot and harness-racing champion.) Ford arranged her marriage to one of his executives, Ray Dahlinger. He built the Dahlingers a magnificent home adjoining his, with a secret stairway leading to Evangeline’s bedroom.

Ford shocked nurses by visiting her new baby at the hospital. Little Dahlinger was showered with gifts and attentions by Ford and encouraged to play with Ford’s grandchildren. Once when an artist needed a model for the tycoon as a boy, Ford asked young Dahlinger, not one of his own grandsons, to pose for the portrait.

Both Evangeline and her husband held important positions with the Ford company until Mrs. Ford’s death. The new regime headed by grandson Henry Ford II, Dahlinger says, aware of gossip concerning the Dahlingers, tried to suppress all traces of Ford’s association with them.

—M.B.T.

The Sugar Daddy And The Show girl

WILLIAM RANDOLPH HEARST (Apr. 29, 1863–Aug. 14, 1951)
HIS FAME:
Hearst was a publishing

titan whose empire at its peak included a

chain of 28 newspapers, 13 magazines, 8

radio stations, and 2 movie companies.

He pioneered a brusque, sensationalized

form of journalism stressing concise

writing, bold headlines, lurid sex and

crime stories, and constant public-service

crusades. One of America’s most powerful

and controversial men, he served in the

U.S. House of Representatives (1903–

1907) and at his death left behind a

combined personal and publishing estate

of $220 million.

HIS PERSON:
An only child, Hearst

Hearst with his good friend Marion Davies

was breast-fed by a wet nurse until he

was 14 months old. Although a shy, spoiled youngster, he concocted some original and mischievous antics. In his junior year, he was expelled from Harvard after presenting his professors with a bedpan adorned with each instructor’s name and photograph.

In 1887 Hearst persuaded his father, Sen. George Hearst (a man who amassed his fortune from gold, silver, and copper mines), to put him in charge of the faltering San Francisco
Examiner
. Within two years young Hearst had raised the paper’s circulation and turned it into a profit maker.

He fashioned a newspaper style known as “yellow journalism,” a lurid editorial stance aimed at boosting circulation. Most Hearst city rooms carried placards bearing the motto “Make ‘Em Say, ‘Gee Whiz.”’ Hearst reportedly goaded President McKinley into entering the Spanish-American War by running a series of front-page articles (not all of them accurate) in the New York
Journal
describing atrocities committed by the reigning Spanish government on the citizens of Cuba, and by exploiting the battleship
Maine
disaster in his papers. Likewise, Hearst was blamed for the 1901 assassination of President McKinley because of his anti-McKinley cartoons, articles, and editorials—particularly one editorial published five months before the shooting, approving political assassination under extreme circumstances.

As powerful as his news empire made him, Hearst did not always get what he wanted. He had been disappointed at age 10 when his mother would not buy the Louvre in Paris for him. And his disappointments continued; he lost

several political races, including the Democratic presidential nomination in 1904. Still, Hearst had other dreams. He wanted to be a movie mogul and build castles. He succeeded at the first; during the early years of filmmaking, he was one of the most powerful men in the industry. He started producing newsreels in 1913, and later used his Cosmopolitan Pictures company (and favorable publicity in his newspapers) to promote his mistress, actress Marion Davies. His other dream was never completed; in fact, he believed that if he ever finished building his 146-room castle at San Simeon, Calif., he would die.

And so for 30 years architect Julia Morgan redesigned his “living museum” and redecorated it with ancient tapestries, rare objets d’art, and even ceilings taken from centuries-old monasteries. But Hearst couldn’t buy immortality; his 88-year-old heart gave out in 1951.

LOVE LIFE:
He was extremely devoted to his mother, who called him

“Sonny” or “Billy Buster.” Phoebe Hearst even became involved in her son’s romances. In 1884, when Hearst announced his engagement to aspiring actress Eleanor Calhoun, Phoebe first convinced the couple not to marry and then supposedly paid for the girl to study drama—in Europe. It might also have been Phoebe’s money that influenced her son to terminate a relationship of several years’ duration with Tessie Powers, a Cambridge waitress Hearst had met while at Harvard. He flaunted the affair, taking Tessie with him to Europe and Egypt and buying her a house in New York. But at a crucial point in his career in the 1890s, when he was entering politics and trying to borrow millions from his mother for his enterprises, he stopped seeing Tessie.

In spite of his political career, Hearst could not stay away from show girls. In 1897 he began courting
two
—sisters Millicent and Anita Willson, who were dancers in a current Broadway musical. Theatergoers were amazed to see 34-year-old Hearst escorting the young ladies, one of whom (Millicent) was only 16. This time Phoebe didn’t get involved in her son’s love life. On April 28, 1903, the day before his 40th birthday, Hearst married 22-year-old Millicent Willson.

The stocky, 6-ft. 2-in. Hearst fathered five children but grew bored with his wife, who had put her fun-loving past behind her for the sake of her social position. Though the marriage officially lasted their lifetimes, Hearst saw little of Millicent during his final 30 years. Instead, he returned to dating show girls (who called him “the Wolf ”) and became involved with a number of them.