The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People (89 page)

SEX PARTNERS:
Rasputin’s willing sex partners—often anonymous—constituted a large tribe. He had probably been enjoying himself with the village girls long before Irina Danilova came on the scene. Dunia Bekyeshova, who at 14 was one of the girls who helped Irina seduce Rasputin, later became a servant of the priest’s family and his lifelong mistress. Another of the many conquests noted by Rasputin’s daughter was Olga Vladimirovna Lokhtina, the wife of a minor nobleman. The list goes on and on, including actresses, military wives, and— when no one else was available to quell his mighty lust—chambermaids and prostitutes. But the most famous of Rasputin’s ladies—the czarina herself—was probably never a conquest, despite her flowery letters to the priest in which she vowed to “kiss your hands and lean my head on your blessed shoulder.”

Certainly the most patient of all his women was his wife, Praskovia, who suffered his lifelong infidelities without complaint, shrugging them off by saying tolerantly: “He has enough for all.”

HIS THOUGHTS:
“So long as you bear sin secretly and within you, and fearfully cover it up with fasting, prayer, and eternal discussion of the Scriptures, so long will you remain hypocrites and good-for-nothings.”

—W.L.

The Passionate Philosopher

PAUL TILLICH (Aug. 20, 1886–Oct. 22, 1965)

HIS FAME:
An eminent 20th-century

Protestant theologian and existential

philosopher, Paul Tillich was a central

figure in the intellectual life of Europe

and America.
The Courage to Be
(1952)

and
Dynamics of Faith
(1957) remain his

most widely read works.

HIS PERSON:
Tillich’s involvement

with Protestantism began in the rustic

town of Bad Schönfliess, Germany,

where his father was a Lutheran minister.

As a chaplain and gravedigger during

WWI and a socialist professor during

the Marxist revolution which followed,

Tillich at age 33

Tillich never lost his faith in man’s

“religious center.” Out of those shattering times emerged his fundamental

“Protestant principle,” the idea that freedom and faith will resolve the conflict between personal needs and universal realities.

After the war, a love triangle involving his first wife, Margarethe Wever, and his best friend, Carl Richard Wegener, led to a divorce. In 1921 Tillich fell in love with Hannah Werner, an art teacher whom he met at a masked ball Ten years younger than he and unconventional in outlook, Hannah was engaged to Albert Gottschow, also an art teacher. She fell in love with Tillich but married Albert anyway, because she considered him such an affectionate lover. Hannah continued to see Tillich. When she became pregnant by Albert, she decided sex was not enough; she would leave him for someone who could inspire her intellectually. She became Tillich’s wife in 1924.

During the next eight years Tillich, happily but turbulently married, dedicated himself to professorships at important German universities, and to lecturing and publishing over 100 articles. Outspokenly critical of Hitler’s rise to power, Tillich was dismissed from the University of Frankfurt and exiled by the Nazi government in 1933—a deportation he considered an honor. In the same year, Tillich and his wife immigrated to New York City, where Reinhold Niebuhr had secured him a post at Union Theological Seminary.

Besides holding subsequent teaching positions at the University of Chicago and at Harvard, he published many popular and influential books. In 1940 he and Hannah became American citizens. The third volume of his magnum opus,
Systematic Theology
, was published in 1963, bringing him recognition as

a world-renowned philosopher. A paradoxical and complex man, Tillich was not ultimately freed by his faith or his tragic burden of guilt. He died in Chicago of a heart attack at the age of 79.

SEX LIFE:
While a seminary student in Germany, Tillich had a priggish attitude toward sex. His group of friends took a vow of chastity, which Tillich, an ordained minister, kept with difficulty until his marriage at 28. His first wife hurt him by scoffing at his belief in monogamy and his wish to be faithful to her. This led to her affair with Wegener and the divorce. His wife’s desertion inspired him to plunge into a bohemian life in Berlin, seemingly bent on making up for lost time. He too began to consider monogamy unrealistic and unnatural. In his second marriage, he insisted on the freedom to be open to all experience. Possessive, jealous, and spiteful, Hannah begrudgingly accepted her husband’s need for other women but sought equality in her own series of extramarital affairs.

Hannah was the great love of Tillich’s life; he needed her for stability and order. But he could not live without his passionate relationships with other women, believing that his work would suffer without the excitement and stimulation of new sexual encounters. Tillich had a genius for friendships with women and a healthy appetite for play. He cast an erotic spell. Hannah liked to say she had turned him into a “boy Eros.” Wherever he lectured in Germany and the U.S., women swarmed around him. Some wrote him poetry, many became his lovers. Tillich also enjoyed good pornography, which he felt venerated the female body and the phallus. Both lusty and reverent in regard to lovemaking, with women he was able to achieve a spiritual transformation, a union with the divine. “Women are closer to God,” he once said.

In the 1920s, Tillich’s “erotic solution” became a moral imperative. Having already experienced one tragic love triangle, he was determined to avoid jealousy and guilt in his second marriage. He accepted Hannah’s lovers and expected her to extend him the same courtesy. Since her schoolgirl days, Hannah had formed erotic alliances with men and women alike. She was introduced to lesbian love at 15 by a young woman named Annie, who was so seductive that for years afterward Hannah sought the charms of women. Once Tillich took a lesbian friend of Hannah’s to bed while Hannah tried to enjoy her lover Heinrich in the next room. The situation was painful for Hannah, however, and she brought it to a halt. On another occasion, Tillich necked with a woman in full view of his wife.

As he grew older he became more reliant on Hannah, until their interdepen-dence finally superseded every conflict and bound them closely together.

Self-doubt and inner conflict persisted, however, until Tillich’s dying day.

Once he admitted to a friend that he was a great sinner. When asked why, he said, “Because I love women, drinking, and dancing.” To all who knew him, Paul Tillich remained paradoxically Christian and pagan.

QUIRKS:
Tillich was aroused by women’s feet. He himself traced this fetish to one of his most erotic childhood memories: the sight of a friend of his mother’s

walking barefoot on the beach. Hannah wrote of a walk she once took with her future husband in the woods: “When I took off my shoes, Paulus became ecstatic about my feet. In later years I often said that if I hadn’t walked barefoot with him that day, we would never have married.”

—A.S.M.

The Polygamous Preacher

BRIGHAM YOUNG (June 1, 1801–Aug. 29, 1877)

HIS FAME:
Quickly taking command

as the second president of the Mormon

Church upon the death of Joseph Smith,

Young held the post for 33 years. He was

instrumental in leading the church to

Utah, where it established enduring

roots, and in making polygamy an official Mormon doctrine.

HIS PERSON:
Born into a puritan New

England household, Young spent an

impoverished childhood, which instilled

in him a respect for physical labor—he

prided himself on his skills as a carpenter

and painter—and an austere morality,

Young with Margaret Pierce, wife # 17

which his father reinforced with whippings whenever the motherless boy (Abigail Young had died when Brigham was 14) broke even minor rules. A self-taught reader (by age 16 he had attended school only 11 days), Young discovered the
Book of Mormon
in 1830 and soon embraced the religion founded by Joseph Smith. He was baptized in 1832, and, once commissioned to preach, he zealously fulfilled his missionary assignments as he rapidly climbed in the church’s hierarchy.

When anti-Mormon feelings culminated in the 1844 murder of Smith in an Illinois jail, Young succeeded him as president, a position he held until his own death from natural causes. His authority soon pervaded all aspects of life in the flourishing Mormon communities and industries he helped found in the Utah desert to which he and his followers had fled. A strict disciplinarian, Young unsparingly wielded his powers; dissidents often found themselves dispatched on far-flung “missions” to convert the unfaithful. Only once was his will widely ignored, when Mormon women were as one in opposing his proposal that they dress in a “Deseret costume” of his own design (an ungainly ensemble that united an 8-in.-high hat, a baggy calf-length skirt over trousers, and an antelope-skin jacket). But that was one of the rare times women—or indeed, any Mormons—disobeyed the “Lion of the Lord.”

SEX LIFE:
Much of the Mormon Church’s troubles in Illinois and points east stemmed from polygamy, a principle Joseph Smith claimed was “revealed” to him as a divine truth. Young insisted that, upon learning “plural” marriages were necessary for salvation, “it was the first time in my life that I had desired the grave … knowing the toil and labor that my body would have to undergo.”

Nonetheless, it was Young himself who in 1852 officially incorporated polygamy into the church’s canon—a move that led some members to resign, since the
Book of Mormon
itself forbids plural marriages. And it was also Young who most fervently practiced what he preached. No Mormon had more wives than Young, a man who wed so frequently that a precise accounting does not exist. Conservative counts give him 19 wives, possibly 27. The Mormon Genealogical Society credits him with 53 wives. Others peg the total at 70 or higher. No matter the precise count, Young indisputably and enthusiastically fulfilled his “duty” to marry often.

Nor had Young waited until 1852 to begin. His first wife, whom he married when he was 23, died soon after the pair joined the church. Two years later, in 1834, Young wed again, and then waited only until 1842 to take his initial

“plural” wife. By the time he issued his official blessing of polygamy in 1852, Young had wed at least 22 times. Many of the older women were not his mates; he merely wanted to give them his name and financial support.

Was polygamy simply a tool to satisfy male lust? This was what one of Young’s daughters-in-law suggested when she said, “If Salt Lake City were roofed over, it would be the biggest whorehouse in the world.” But lust had nothing to do with it in Young’s eyes. “There are probably few men in the world who care about the private society of women less than I do.” Polygamy, he proclaimed, was a divinely sanctioned way to enhance the church’s population and to eliminate prostitution, spinsterhood, and adultery. But when a pretty girl caught Brigham Young’s eye, he was quick to invoke his orthodoxy. “You must be my wife,” he told one. “You cannot be saved by anyone else…. If you refuse, you will be destroyed, both body and soul.” Few women resisted the potent advances of the barrel-chested (44 in. around), 5-ft. 10-in., blue-eyed, robust Young. Only one, the beautiful actress Julia Dean Hayne, whom he unembarrassedly pursued, is known to have successfully spurned him. But, even with Hayne, Young had the last word. After the death of this woman, in whose honor he had named an ornate sleigh, he had a “proxy” marriage performed so that they could be together eternally in heaven. But Young also had no aversion to fleeting temporal weddings; while staying with the Sioux in 1847, for instance, he happily accepted the company of two young squaws, who, at least for the length of his encampment, were married to him.

His other marriages proved more lasting. One home held most of Brigham Young’s wives. This was the Lion House (named after the reclining stone lion set over the entrance), located in a central block of Salt Lake City. No more than