The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People (84 page)

in Chicago. Belle worked in the classiest bordello in America, the Everleigh Club, run by two young Kentuckybred sisters, Aida and Minna Everleigh.

The club featured 30 exotic boudoirs furnished with marble-inlaid brass beds covered with white cashmere blankets, perfume sprays over the beds, and mirrored ceilings. The tubs in the bathrooms were gold. Among the club’s regulars were James J. Corbett, Ring Lardner, and John Barrymore. Belle Schreiber was one of the higher-paid prostitutes, receiving $50 a tumble.

Meeting Johnson, she offered to live with him, and he accepted. Soon Belle accompanied Johnson to San Francisco. There, at his hotel, he found Hattie had just arrived for a reconciliation. The women ran into each other and began some hair pulling, but Johnson parted them and promised to keep each one happy.

He would make love to Hattie, then to Belle, and to avoid the press he would use a rope outside Belle’s window to get down and back to his quarters. One night as he descended the rope, the hotel owner’s daughter pounced on him, grasping for his crotch. “She wanted the sight and feel of my privates,” Johnson said. “Like she thought I was built of leather down there. I’ve never seen a girl get so frantic.” To prevent her from screaming, Johnson had intercourse with her. When she wanted a repeat performance the next night, Johnson refused, insisting he could not satisfy three women. Furious, the girl told her father the champion had raped her. Her father confronted Johnson, accusing him of “ruining his poor little baby, with his gigantic, oversized thing.” Johnson paid off the hotel owner to suppress any bad publicity.

Shortly afterward, at the Coney Island racetrack, Johnson met a 28-year-old white woman, Etta Terry Duryea, a tall, slender blond who had recently divorced an eastern horse-racing tycoon. Johnson began living with her, truly loved her, gave her a $2,500 engagement ring, and finally married her in Pittsburgh in 1909. The press was in an uproar, coast to coast, about this marriage.

The pressure began to get to Etta, and she suffered long spells of depression.

Johnson wanted children by her. Etta refused. Fearful of pregnancy, she began to sleep in a separate bedroom. Johnson then became the first black regular at

the Everleigh Club. At heart he was devoted to his wife, yet on Sept. 11, 1912, Etta put a gun to her head and committed suicide. (When Johnson died, he was buried beside her in Chicago’s Graceland Cemetery.)

Three months after Etta’s death, a pretty 19-year-old white girl from Minneapolis, Lucille Cameron, applied to Johnson for a job as his secretary.

He hired her. They lived discreetly apart but slept together. Lucille’s mother heard about it and came screaming into town to stop it. She insisted Johnson be charged with abducting her underage daughter. Headlines condemned Johnson. Lynch crowds gathered. Defiantly, Johnson married Lucille Cameron.

The reformers decided to get Johnson once and for all, and for that purpose they employed the Mann Act, the federal white slavery law of 1912 that made it a crime to transport a woman across state lines for immoral purposes. But the government needed a witness. They found one in Belle Schreiber, who was determined to have her revenge on Johnson for discarding her. She told authorities that Johnson had taken her over one state line after another for the purposes of debauchery, prostitution, unlawful sexual intercourse, and crimes against nature. On May 13, 1913, a jury found Johnson guilty. He was sentenced to one year and one day in a federal penitentiary. Out of jail on bail, Johnson, at the urging of his mother, posed as a Canadian baseball player and skipped the country.

With Lucille, Johnson spent five years of exile abroad. In France Johnson had love affairs with the leggy star of the Folies Bergère, Mistinguette, and with actress Gaby Deslys. In Germany he had a love affair with Mata Hari. Later, in Hollywood, he had an intense relationship with actress Lupe Velez. After 12

years of marriage, his third wife, Lucille Cameron, quietly divorced him. In August, 1925, Johnson married the last of his white wives, Irene Marie Pineau, another blond who divorced her white husband, an advertising man, to wed him. His love for her, Johnson said, knew no parallel in his life. By this time, there was no public fuss. Despite his arrogance, Jack Johnson was an easygoing, affable fellow. He just had the misfortune of being born in the wrong time.

—I.W.

The Bambino Of The Bed

GEORGE HERMAN “BABE” RUTH (Feb. 6, 1895–Aug. 16, 1948)
HIS FAME:
The best-known baseball player in the history of American sports, he was the first one to gain world renown. In WWII, when Japanese troops charged a U.S. Marine emplacement, they shouted, “To hell with Babe Ruth!”

Babe Ruth
was
America. Born into an impoverished family in Baltimore, he was saved from becoming a juvenile delinquent when his exasperated parents sent him to St. Mary’s Industrial School. Excelling in baseball, he was hired by

the minor-league Baltimore Orioles,

then signed by the major-league Boston

Red Sox, and finally sold to the New

York Yankees. From the best left-handed

pitcher in the American League, he was

transformed into a full-time outfielder

and hitter. At his peak he was 6 ft. 2 in.

and weighed between 215 and 240 lb.,

and his fame came from his ability to

lash out home runs. He led his league in

home runs for 12 years, slugging a

record-making 60 in 1927 (broken by

Roger Maris during a longer season in

1961). He was called “the Sultan of

Swat” and “the Bambino.” Lovable and

sentimental, he was also undisciplined,

Ruth and Claire Hodgson on their wedding day

crude, bawdy, vulgar. Although a selfish

hedonist, Babe Ruth never forgot the advice Mayor Jimmy Walker of New York gave him: to remember that he was the idol of millions of “dirty-faced kids” out there, and that he must behave accordingly. After retiring from the Yankees in 1934, Ruth’s one ambition was to become a team manager. But no team would hire him as manager because of his irresponsibility. His last years were embittered, before he died of throat cancer at 53. Over 100,000 fans paraded past his bier in Yankee Stadium, “the house that Ruth built.”

HIS LOVES:
His appetites were gargantuan. His excesses included eating (a stack of mutton chops for breakfast, endless hot dogs throughout the day), gambling, drinking, partying, spending, and copulating. Hardly a day passed during his career that he did not have sex with at least one woman. He liked women as much as baseball. He had no favorites, bedding tall women, short ones, fat ones, thin ones, beautiful ones, ugly ones, socialites, film starlets, secretaries, other men’s wives, and whores in every big city of the U.S. Whenever the team arrived in a new town and checked into a hotel, Babe Ruth left his suitcase with teammate Ping Bodie and hastened out to find some young woman. He was usually gone all night. When a reporter asked Bodie what Ruth was really like, Bodie said he did not know. “But you room with him,” the reporter persisted. Bodie shook his head. “I don’t room with him. I room with his suitcase.” Other times Babe Ruth entertained women in his hotel. In Detroit once, he rented four adjoining rooms, purchased a piano, and invited teammates and stray women to his party. After a while, Babe Ruth stood on a chair, waving his beer mug, and bellowed, “All right, ladies, any girl who doesn’t want to fuck can leave right now!”

When it came to sex he was insatiable, and he possessed great stamina. In St. Louis he took over a whorehouse for an entire night, stating he was going to have sex with every woman in the house. After that he took them on one by one,

made love to each successfully, and in the morning celebrated by consuming an omelet made with 18 eggs.

Robert W. Creamer researched and described Babe Ruth in action—

sexually—in his excellent biography,
Babe
:

One teammate, asked if Ruth had an exceptionally big penis, frowned a little as he searched his memory and shook his head. “No,” he said.

“It was normal size … Babe’s wasn’t noticeably big. What was extraordinary was his ability to keep doing it all the time. He was continually with women, morning and night. I don’t know how he kept going.” He was very noisy in bed, visceral grunts and gasps and whoops accompanying his erotic exertions. “He was the noisiest fucker in North America,” a whimsical friend recalled.

All this carnal activity got Babe Ruth into trouble from time to time. Biographer Ken Sobol noted, “The circumstances of one unsavory rape in which he had been involved were already known to several sportswriters.” Late in 1922

Babe Ruth was slapped with a breach-of-promise suit for $50,000, filed on behalf of Dolores Dixon, a teenage employee in a Manhattan department store. She claimed that she had become pregnant by Ruth, that he had promised to marry her, and that he had committed statutory rape. Ruth called it blackmail, his lawyer called it extortion. The matter went to trial in 1923, but the case was settled out of court.

The tragic part of Ruth’s sex life was that during his busiest years in bed with other women he had a wife whom he sorely neglected. Helen Woodford, an auburnhaired Texas girl and quite pretty, was a waitress in a Boston café when Ruth fell in love with her. They were married in 1914 in a Catholic church just outside Baltimore. He was 19 and she 17. Throughout their 14 years of marriage, Helen’s life with Ruth was hell. He gave her furs, an 80-acre farm, and an adopted daughter named Dorothy, but he gave her neither time nor fidelity. His affairs with other women caused her to have a nervous breakdown. She left Ruth in 1928, and the following year—while living with a dentist in Watertown, Mass.—she died in a house fire. Ruth mourned her briefly. Three months later he wed Mrs. Claire Merritt Hodgson, who had married a Georgia cotton broker at 14 and had had a child named Julia before divorcing him. She was classy, well-off, and still a beauty when she moved to New York to become a model and part-time actress. Ruth had been introduced to her at a ball game, had been smitten, and was having an affair with her when Helen died. He married Claire in April, 1929. Claire tamed him, changing his entire lifestyle. She put him on a strict diet. She curbed his drinking. She saved his money. She forced a ten o’clock curfew on him when he went to parties, and she knew about all the other women. “The Babe brought out the beast in a lot of ladies the world over,” she wrote in her autobiography, “and I enjoyed very much setting them straight on their problem.” To the end, the marriage was a happy one.

—I.W.

Net Loss

WILLIAM TILDEN, JR. (Feb. 10, 1893–June 5, 1953)

HIS FAME:
In 1950 a poll conducted

by the Associated Press proclaimed that

“Big Bill” Tilden was the greatest tennis

player of the first half of the 20th century, and some of America’s leading

sportswriters called him the greatest U.S.

athlete in any sport at any time. Perhaps

these writers hoped to bring solace to a

onetime giant—a closet homosexual

revealed—who was suffering his last

years in disgrace and near oblivion.

HIS PERSON:
He was Mr. Tennis to

the world and to himself, a dazzling star

fiercely dedicated to the game he dominated. Yet from the moment of his

conception he was marked for personal

tragedy. Seven years before his birth, Selina and William Tilden had watched in horror as all three of their babies—two girls and a boy—died one by one during a diphtheria epidemic. The following year Selina Tilden bore their fourth child, Herbert. Still stunned by her loss, and longing for a daughter, Selina yielded Herbert’s upbringing to his father. With the appearance of another son, Selina’s maternal instincts resurfaced. She named her new baby William Tilden, Jr., but from the beginning she called him “June” (short for Junior) and he became her obsession. To keep him close, she convinced herself he was a sickly child. When June reached school age Selina refused to relinquish him, hired tutors for his lessons, and deprived him of playmates. June adored his mother and absorbed every word she uttered. When she spoke to him of sex, it was to warn him of the frightful venereal diseases that could result from genital contact. Not until he was 18, when a crippling illness confined Selina to a wheelchair, was June released—to become Bill, at last.