The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People (88 page)

—A.K.

The Lord’s Ringmaster

AIMEE SEMPLE McPHERSON (Oct. 9, 1890–Sept. 27, 1944)

HER FAME:
As founder of the International Church of the Four-Square

Gospel, “Sister” Aimee was the spiritual

leader of thousands and one of the foremost big-money evangelists of the early

20th century.

HER PERSON:

Aimee Elizabeth

Kennedy spent her childhood near the

rural hamlet of Ingersoll in Ontario,

Canada, in an atmosphere of religious

fervor. Her father was a Methodist

farmer, her mother a Salvation Army

zealot who consecrated Aimee’s life to the

Lord’s service a few weeks after she was

born. As a teenager, Aimee shocked her

pious parents with her desire to become an actress. She eventually managed to satisfy all concerned by combining religion and show business in a successful, money-making formula that is still widely emulated.

Aimee first hit the revival circuit with a fiery Pentecostal preacher named Robert Semple, whom she married at age 17. Semple died of typhoid fever in Hong Kong, where the young couple had gone to set up a mission. The 19-year-old widow returned home with her infant daughter, Roberta, and shortly thereafter married Harold McPherson, a grocery clerk. After the birth of a son, Rolf, Aimee coaxed her reluctant husband into accompanying her and the children on the hallelujah trail. But McPherson quickly became disgusted with life under Aimee’s revival tent and ordered his wife to settle down. In response, she cut loose from him and continued her wanderings. He divorced her in 1921 for desertion.

In 1918 Aimee set up her headquarters in Los Angeles, then as now a hotbed of religious cults, She began to receive invaluable newspaper publicity for her faith-healing services and quickly accumulated a large following. An attractive, dynamic woman, she was widely criticized for her Paris gowns, makeup, and tinted blond hair. Her massive concrete church, called the Angelus Temple, was famous for its theatrical religious spectacles. On one occasion Sister Aimee donned a policeman’s uniform and rode a motorcycle down the center aisle to introduce a sermon on the consequences of breaking God’s law.

During the 1930s her Four-Square Church was the center of a series of internecine intrigues and lawsuits. In a celebrated fight with her mother, Aimee

broke the old woman’s nose. After a third unhappy marriage, Aimee began to shy away from publicity. Her death from an overdose of barbiturates in an Oakland, Calif., hotel room was ruled an accident.

SEX LIFE:
Aimee used to declare that her ideal man would be 6 ft. tall, have wavy hair, and play the trombone. In fact, her men adhered to no such specifications. Kenneth Ormiston, a radio engineer for her church station, was tall and slender, but he had a receding hairline and bat ears. If he played the trombone, he kept it to himself. Ormiston was already married. In addition, he was an agnostic who refused to treat Sister Aimee with the respect she was accustomed to receiving, and this she found attractive.

On May 18, 1926, the superstar evangelist was reported missing while swimming in the ocean off Venice, Calif. For days her followers searched for her body, and two of the faithful died during the search. Five weeks later Aimee turned up in Agua Prieta, a town near the Mexico-Arizona border, and she spun a fantastic tale of having been kidnapped and held captive in Mexico. Her clean clothes and fresh appearance gave little credence to her story, and a county grand jury decided to investigate. It was revealed that during the time Aimee claimed she was held by hoodlums in a shack in the Sonora Desert, she was actually enjoying an idyllic month with Ormiston in a rented cottage in Carmel, Calif. Aimee was forced to sever her relationship with Ormiston to preserve her career.

By her own admission, she was often lonely, and the tenets of her church forbade a divorced person to remarry while an ex-spouse was still living. Nevertheless, Aimee eloped in 1931 with 30-year-old David Hutton, Jr., a 250-lb.

baritone. They met when he sang the role of Pharaoh in one of Aimee’s biblical stage productions. The couple had been married for just two days when Hutton was named as defendant in a $200,000 breach-of-promise suit, initiated by a woman who worked in a massage parlor. The plaintiff was awarded damages of $5,000, and when Aimee heard the news she pitched forward in a faint, fracturing her skull. After her recovery, she left on a European tour without Hutton. He divorced her during her absence, and for a time eked out a living as a nightclub singer billed as “Aimee’s man.”

She indulged herself in discreet affairs in a special, out-of-the-way apartment in Los Angeles. One of these was with a Hearst reporter she had hired to ghostwrite her autobiography. Another was with a rising young comic named Milton Berle. He remembers her as a worldly and passionate woman who charmed him into her apartment and made love with him in front of a homemade altar— candles, crucifix, Calvary scene, and all.

In 1936 the
Los Angeles Times
reported that unknown persons were demanding money to refrain from releasing nude photographs of the evangelist, but the pictures never surfaced. Still, she was often a target for innuendo and obscene phone calls. Like it or not, Aimee had become a sex symbol, “the evangelist with pulchritude,” as one reporter called her.

HER THOUGHTS
: “I have never yielded one inch to a man … I have beaten the men at their own game. Who ever heard of a woman preacher, and a successful one at that?”

—M.J.T.

The Lustful Monk

GRIGORI RASPUTIN (1871?–Dec. 30, 1916)

HIS FAME:
Born a rustic Siberian

peasant, Rasputin had a combination of

charisma, keen opportunism, and sexual

prowess that helped him rise from the

status of an unwashed back-country

healer and mystic to a position of power

and influence with the ruling families of

prerevolutionary Russia.

HIS PERSON:
Rasputin was born in

the village of Pokrovskoye, the third and

last child of Efim Akovlevich Rasputin, a

farmer, and Anna Egorovna, who may

have been a Mongol from Tobolsk. As a

young man, Grigori gave every appearance of growing up to be a peasant

farmer, with a farmer’s appetite for work, hard drinking, and loose women. At 20 he married a local girl, Praskovia Feodorovna Dubrovina, and fathered four children, three of whom lived to adulthood. Around 1900 he had joined a heretical religious sect known as the Khlisti. These flagellants believed that man must sin first in order to be redeemed later, so they practiced an incredible variety of bizarre sexual customs and rites. Pushed out of his native village for these practices, Rasputin wandered through rural Russia, performing cures and initiating hordes of women into the rituals of the flagellants. By 1905 he had settled in the capital, St. Petersburg, where tales of his “miraculous” healing powers brought about an audience with Czar Nicholas and Czarina Alexandra.

The imperial couple had a son, Alexis, who was a hemophiliac, and Rasputin’s apparently genuine ability to ease the boy’s suffering won him immense favor, especially with Alexandra. Rasputin used the czarina’s protection to build his own influence, and at the same time scandalized St. Petersburg with his wild sexual antics. In 1916 a conspiracy of conservative noblemen assassinated him.

After drinking poisoned wine, and being shot and beaten, Rasputin was tied up and thrown into the icy Neva River, where he finally died from drowning.

Rasputin with devoted followers

SEX LIFE:
Rasputin was undoubtedly one of the most profligate sexual adventurers in history. He seems to have been born with an overabundance of natural lust, a lust which, according to his daughter Maria, seemed to “radiate” from his 13-in. penis. Even as a young boy his magnificent phallus was the delight of all the village girls, who observed him swimming in the nude—as they were—in a local pond. But his real initiation into the world of sex came at the hands of Irina Danilova Kubasova, the young and beautiful wife of a Russian general. She enlisted the help of six of her maids in a mass seduction of the 16-year-old Rasputin. With suggestive moves, Irina lured him into a bedroom. When he stripped and followed her to the bed, the maids suddenly leaped out of hiding, dousing him with cold water and grabbing his penis. Following this episode, he sported with prostitutes in his native village, even after his marriage to Praskovia Feodorovna. A sexual frolic with three Siberian peasant girls whom he chanced on while swimming in a lake led Rasputin to a religious revelation of sorts, and he soon joined the Khlisti, who not only allowed but actively encouraged the indulgence of the flesh. Thus converted, Rasputin embarked on a journey through Russia, during which he gathered women “about him through the magnetism of his animal attraction,” celebrating his peculiar rites. These included enormous bacchanalian orgies, complete with partner-swapping “in any convenient place, the woods, a barn, or the cottage of one of his converts.” His doctrine of redemption through sexual release allowed a multitude of guilt-ridden women to enjoy themselves sexually for the first time, despite the grubby, slovenly appearance of the “holy satyr.” As biographer Robert Massie noted, “making love to the unwashed peasant with his dirty beard and filthy hands was a new and thrilling sensation.” Even the sophisticated women of St. Petersburg fell under Rasputin’s sexy sway. He set up shop in an apartment, and the ladies gathered about his dining room table to wait for an invitation to his bedroom, which he called the “holy of holies.” So fashionable did his attentions become that the husbands of his conquests sometimes bragged to one another that their wives had

“belonged” to the incredible Rasputin; one of his steady customers, an opera singer, often telephoned her mentor for no other reason than to sing him his favorite songs. Typically, he could be found in his dining room, surrounded by lovely “disciples,” sometimes sitting with one of them on his lap, stroking her hair and whispering softly of the “mysterious resurrection.” He would begin to sing, and eventually the ladies would join in. Soon the singing would erupt into wild dancing, which itself often led to passionate swoonings and trips to the “holy of holies.” At one of his sessions in St. Petersburg, Rasputin abruptly launched into a graphic description of the sex life of horses. He then roughly seized one of his distinguished guests and said, “Come, my lovely mare.”

Even Rasputin’s death had sexual overtones. Described by biographer Patte Barham, in collaboration with Rasputin’s daughter Maria, the mystic’s murder was plotted by men jealous of his power. His assassins invited him to a midnight repast and fed him poisoned cakes and wine. One of the murderers, Felix Yussupov, was a prince, reputedly with homosexual tendencies, who had been rebuffed several times for his advances to the mystic. When Rasputin grew dazed from the poison, Yussupov sexually used him and then shot him four times.

Rasputin fell, still alive, and another attacker pulled out a knife and “castrated Grigori Rasputin, flinging the severed penis across the room.” A servant recovered the penis and turned it over to a maid, who, at last account, was living in Paris in 1968. Inside a polished wooden box she preserved the organ which looked “like a blackened, overripe banana, about a foot long.”