The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People (9 page)

Rudy and Natacha legalized their union in March, 1923, and the newlyweds earned a living by dancing for the Mineralava Company, promoting beauty clay. To further supplement their income, the Valentinos wrote a book of poetry called
Day Dreams
. The contract problems ended when an independent filmmaker agreed to shoot Valentino’s films and let Natacha act as consultant.

She became involved in every facet of his pictures, provoking the press to say that she wore the pants in the Valentino family. They snickered at the platinum slave bracelet she gave him. Her mistake, she said later, was to go overboard in incorporating “beauty” into his films. It was beauty that hurt his career; in the films in which Natacha “meddled,” Valentino seemed effeminate. In
Monsieur
Beaucaire
he wore powdered wigs and a heart-shaped beauty spot on his face.

The publicity became vicious:
Photoplay
ran an article stating that “All men hate Valentino,” and the Chicago
Tribune
ran an editorial called “Pink Powder Puffs,” which blamed Valentino for the fact that a powder-vending machine had been installed in the men’s room of a Chicago ballroom. Finally, the independent filmmaker refused to work with the Valentinos and scrapped a film they had already begun. United Artists approached Valentino with a lucrative contract, but the company banned Natacha from its sets. Valentino tried to assuage her feelings by backing her in her own endeavor, a movie called
What Price
Beauty?
It failed miserably, and critics thought they detected lesbian-fantasy scenes in it. Once she no longer shared his career, Natacha wanted no part of Rudy’s bed. Valentino insisted that what he really wanted was a homemaker, not a business partner. He told the press, “Mrs. Valentino cannot have a career and be my wife at the same time.” They were divorced in 1925.

The “Great Lover” was a bachelor again. Detectives herded him home if he got too friendly with strange women, because the studio didn’t want more bad publicity if Valentino should turn in a less-than-successful amorous performance. But no one could keep him away from Pola Negri. He met the actress through Marion Davies, the mistress of publisher William Randolph Hearst. As Pola wrote in her autobiography, “Valentino’s true sexuality reached out and captured me.” She was fascinated, she said, by “the way in which he used his body,” and he took her in “a perfect act of love.” Valentino preferred sex first and intimate conversation afterward. She found him a very accomplished lover, able to size up a woman and judge exactly the right approach which would maneuver her into bed. One time he decided that strewing rose petals on Pola’s bed would do the trick, and it did. Pola hoped to marry him, though as a form of New Year’s resolution in 1926 he bet that he would still be a bachelor by 1930.

No one knows whether he would have won. After a brief illness, he died in 1926. Thousands of men and women crushed each other to view the body; some women who never knew him committed suicide, and for years a “Lady in Black” visited his grave on the anniversary of his death.

HIS THOUGHTS:
“To generalize on women is dangerous. To specialize on them is infinitely worse.”

—W.A.D. and V.S.

II

Acting It Up

MOVIES

The Great Profile

JOHN BARRYMORE (Feb. 15, 1882–May 29, 1942)

HIS FAME:
The son of Maurice Barrymore and the brother of Ethel and Lionel

Barrymore, Jack was a member of the

most distinguished family of actors to

appear on the American stage. Although

he conquered the legitimate theater with

his good looks, he in turn was conquered

by a riotous life of dissipation in Hollywood. His career was a duel between his

awesome talents and his inexorable drive

toward self-destruction.

HIS PERSON:
Inherently lazy and an

alcoholic from the age of 14, Jack chose

the stage as the easiest way of making a

living. He had been fired from a job as a

caricaturist on a New York newspaper

because of his heavy drinking, so he

joined an acting troupe on its way to Australia. Before departing, he managed to sleep through the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Soldiers pressed him into clearing rubble, causing his uncle to remark, “It took a calamity of nature to get him out of bed and the U.S. Army to make him go to work.”

He returned to America a polished light comedian and shortly was the toast of Broadway. The young matinee idol was kept busy trying to support his profligate lifestyle, and even though he despised the repetition involved in stage acting, his characterizations of Richard III and Hamlet are still regarded as classics. He made 15 films before following his drinking buddies Ben Hecht, Gene Fowler, and W. C.

Fields from New York to Hollywood. At his peak in pictures, he was earning a minimum of $76,250 per film and was nationally acclaimed as “the Great Lover.”

However, he hated his pretty-boy image and never missed an opportunity to act in grotesque makeup, relishing roles like Svengali, Mr. Hyde, and Captain Ahab.

Barrymore was a notoriously cruel wit. At the funeral of a friend, he was about to depart with the other mourners when he saw a doddering old man lingering behind, staring down into the grave. Barrymore sidled up to the old fellow, leaned over, and whispered, “I guess it hardly pays to go home.” When he met columnist Louella Parsons at a social function, he commented in a voice loud enough to be heard by the entire roomful of people: “She’s a quaint old udder, isn’t she?” He described another woman as looking “exactly like a dental filling.”

Barrymore was equally well known for his nearly superhuman drinking, which aged him rapidly. In 1935, in an attempt to dry out, he took his daughter Diana on a cruise on his yacht. All liquor was removed from the boat before it sailed. Yet Barrymore was drunk during the entire voyage, for he found a means of siphoning off alcohol from the yacht’s engine-cooling system.

By the end of his life the once great actor was reduced to a pitiful series of self-mocking roles that reflected his tarnished reputation—that of a lecherous old drunkard. A friend summed up Barrymore’s life by observing, “Nobody can run downhill as fast as a Thoroughbred.” He lived voraciously up to the moment of his death from extreme old age at 60.

SEX LIFE:
At age 15, Jack lost his virginity to his stepmother, who seduced him. After that he was to make love to countless women, but he could never really trust any of them. His first romantic scandal solidified this feeling. He had been sleeping with 16-year-old show girl Evelyn Nesbit, the girl friend of society architect Stanford White. Evelyn’s parents discovered the affair and hastily married her off to Harry K. Thaw, a psychotic millionaire. Thaw publicly murdered White out of jealousy, and Barrymore was forced to hide out for months until the case blew over.

In 1910 Jack married a debutante named Katherine Harris. Blond, shapely, cultured, and intelligent, Katherine married the actor against her parents’ wishes, yet she was the envy of her peers. However, Jack’s accelerating career, coupled with his impromptu drinking binges, brought their marriage to an end in 1917.

On the rebound, he met and married Blanche Thomas, who led suffragette marches and wrote poetry under the pen name Michael Strange. The couple startled New Yorkers of the day with their unisex attire—matching outfits of black velvet. His time with Michael Strange was marked with slugfests and sonnets and the birth of a daughter, Diana. When he divorced the poet in 1928, he renounced all rights to their infant daughter and headed west.

In Hollywood his lust seemed insatiable. Although most starlets succumbed to his charm, he struck out with a young Southern actress named Tallulah Bankhead. One afternoon he invited her to his backstage dressing room and, as Tallulah recalled, started making “little animal noises” as he led her to his casting couch. She refused to have sex with him and escaped intact. He was far more successful with 17-year-old Mary Astor, who would appear in his suite on Sundays, accompanied by her mother. After sending the mother outside onto the veranda to enjoy the sun, he would take Mary into his bedroom.

Soon the golden-haired bit player Dolores Costello caught his eye, and he chose her as his leading lady in
The Sea Beast
. When Michael Strange saw the love scenes in the film, she said bitterly, “That’s not acting. He’s in love with the girl.”

She was right. Barrymore dropped Michael flat for Dolores and conceded, “I’m just a son of a bitch.” He made Dolores his protégée and married her, but he was

insecure in the relationship. In a rage of jealousy, he snatched her away from a party when he saw her dancing with David O. Selznick, took her home, and lectured her until daybreak. He accused her of plotting an affair with Selznick and insisted that all married women were constantly unfaithful. On another occasion he physically ejected her obstetrician from the house, claiming she was infatuated with the man. Maybe she was; after divorcing Jack, she married the doctor.

In later years Barrymore was drawn to exotic prostitutes. When he took a trip to India in search of a guru, he wound up in a Calcutta whorehouse, which he described as a “pelvic palace.” He was delighted by the “gentle music that went directly to the scrotum and cuddled there,” and he stayed on for a month.

“And so I never met my saint,” he explained. “I met only dancing girls and singing girls, all of them devout students of the
Kamasutra
, which teaches that there are 39 different postures for the worship of Dingledangle—the god of love.” His sojourn in Calcutta was followed by a visit to a brothel in Madras, where he enjoyed himself so much that he rented the establishment exclusively for himself for an entire week.

His last wife, Elaine Barrie, married the wreckage of the once great actor in 1936. She met him when she was a sophomore at Hunter College and spent the next year chasing him across the country. The day before their wedding he told his cronies, “Gentlemen, you are talking to a man who is about to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel.” On their wedding night he was insanely jealous because she was such a good lover. He demanded to know exactly how, when, and where she had learned her skills. Later he said of Elaine: “That little filly made a racehorse out of me again.” Elaine made a banned film called
How to
Undress in Front of Your Husband
, starring “Mrs. John Barrymore.” Then, aware that he was nearly washed up in films, Elaine took her husband on the road in a play called
Dear Children
. People flocked to see the great Barrymore, a sick old man, humiliate himself. He vomited onstage and often relieved his bladder in public—once in a hotel lobby sandbox and another time in a socialite’s private elevator.

Aware that he was dying, he faced the end with his own brand of gallantry.

When a priest entered his hospital room with an extremely ugly nurse and asked, “Anything to confess, my son?” Barrymore replied, “Yes, father. I confess having carnal thoughts.” Astonished, the priest asked, “About whom?” Barrymore pointed at the ugly nurse. “About her,” he said.

The night Barrymore died, his longtime friend Gene Fowler and his son Will held vigil by his body at Pierce’s Funeral Home. The only person who came to pay him homage was an old prostitute, who knelt in silent prayer and then disappeared into the dark.

John Barrymore had earned over $3 million in his day. When his estate was auctioned off after he died, he was still $75,000 in debt.

HIS THOUGHTS:
“It’s a slander to say my troubles come from chasing women. They begin when I catch them.”

—M.S. and the Eds.

The Tramp

CHARLIE CHAPLIN (Apr. 16, 1889–Dec. 25, 1977)

HIS FAME:
The king of silent screen

comedies, Charles Spencer Chaplin made

with his portrayal of a pathetic yet humorous little tramp in such cinema classics as