The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People (94 page)

Intensely patriotic if politically naive, he became a strong Fascist supporter of Mussolini, who sent him on numerous political missions. His later years were occupied by research on shortwave and microwave transmission. When he died in Rome at age 63, radio transmitters throughout the world shut down in tribute, and for two minutes in this century the ether was silent.

LOVE LIFE:
“My father’s eye for feminine beauty was unerring,” wrote Marconi’s daughter Degna, and he lost his heart “with fair regularity,” but seldom

impulsively. Shipboard romance was a recurring motif of his love life, partly because he spent so much time afloat and also because he seemed able to unbend at sea more than anywhere else. Women chased him, perhaps because of his intriguing Valentino-like features and air of moody disdain. His first serious love affair was with Josephine B. Holman, a rich girl from Indianapolis, whom he met on a transatlantic liner in 1899. They were engaged before the ship docked, and remained so for two years. Josephine broke it off, apparently after realizing that this strange, driven man would never make an Indianapolis-style husband.

In 1903 he met another beautiful American woman, Inez Milholland, on board the
Lucania
. However, her beauty was about all that he could relate to. A dedicated feminist and pioneer suffragist, she embodied “everything he basically disapproved of,” wrote Degna. He proposed and she accepted, but the romance quickly died and instead became an enduring friendship.

Marconi met his first wife, 19-year-old Beatrice O’Brien, daughter of an Irish peer in the House of Lords, when he was 30. The courtship was strictly old-world, grave and formal. She refused his first proposal but, despite a disapproving family and the fact that the couple scarcely knew each other, accepted his second. “I don’t love him,” she wrote her sister. “I’ve told him so over and over again; he says he wants me anyhow and will make me love him. I do like him so much and enough to marry him.” They married in 1905 and produced four children, of whom three survived infancy. From the outset, however, Bea often found herself abandoned for long periods as “Marky” pursued his work.

When present, Marconi constantly rocked the marriage with his explosive jealousy and possessiveness. Not exactly the domestic housewife type, Bea was an extrovert and “born flirt” who could no more resist smiling at a handsome man than her husband could stop fiddling with transmitters. At one point he taught her Morse code, hoping to give her a hobby to occupy her free time. The couple underwent years of tense separations and hopeful reconciliations.

Beatrice tolerated his extramarital flings because they always “ended in home-comings,” wrote Degna. As their daughter further explained: “She played on the side of his nature that dreaded permanence, fearing that it would trap him.”

Joining the first
Elettra
cruise in 1920, Beatrice learned that her husband’s latest paramour was also aboard. Marconi made no attempt to hide his newest love, and Beatrice was no longer able to remain deaf and blind to his indiscretions. “A man like Marconi should never marry,” Queen Elena of Italy sympathetically told her. Still beautiful at 38, Beatrice soon began to see other men, divorced Marconi in 1924, and then promptly married the Marchese Laborio Marignoli.

Marconi, whose
Elettra
affair had ended, became much more friendly and wrote long, confidential letters to his ex-wife. His sporadic diaries indicate that he sometimes had several affairs going at once, but he never seemed terribly passionate about any of them. Women came so easily to him that, though necessary, they were a distinctly secondary pursuit.

In 1925, at 51, he became engaged to 17-year-old Elizabeth Paynter, a Corn-wall debutante. Beatrice was astonished and wondered “after all the years we were together when your own desire expressed continually was for freedom … as your

family impeded and oppressed you, why you should suddenly find … this craving for fresh ties!! I fail to understand.” The engagement lasted only a few months.

His next one, however, led to marriage. He met Christina Bezzi-Scali, a quiet, serious, blue-eyed Italian of 25, on the
Elettra
and promptly took her into the solitary wireless room. Because she was Catholic—her parents of Vatican nobility—Marconi had to construct an elaborate ruse, with Bea’s ironic complicity, to annul his first marriage. Both had to swear that they had wed with mental reservations, as in a virtual “trial marriage,” thus providing grounds for lack of consent. In an impressive wedding ceremony, with Mussolini as his best man, Marconi married Christina in 1927. Several months later he suffered the first in a series of heart attacks. A daughter, Maria Elettra, was born in 1930. In declining health, Marconi pushed away from his first family, virtually ignored them in his will—leaving most of his $25 million fortune to Maria Elettra—and spent his last years as an apparently faithful if semi-invalid husband.

HIS THOUGHTS:
Not given to intimate expressions on paper, Marconi usually wrote several drafts of his love letters before sending them. Probably his most typical and self-revealing line was “In very great haste. Yours affectionately, Guglielmo.”

—J.E.

The Virgin Genius

SIR ISAAC NEWTON (Dec. 25, 1642–Mar. 20, 1727)

HIS FAME:
Newton was an English

physicist and mathematician whose discoveries earned him a place as one of the

greatest scientists in history. He is perhaps best known for his formulation of a

theory of gravitation.

HIS PERSON:
Newton was born three

months after the death of his father, a poor

farmer. Until he was three years old he

had no rivals for the love and attention of

his mother, Hannah. Then she married

Barnabas Smith, a minister, and the newly

wedded couple moved away to a nearby

village. Newton was left in the care of his

grandmother for the next eight years. He remained absolutely devoted to his mother, even in the face of seeming abandonment, but he hated his stepfather.

Later he remembered “threatening my father and mother Smith to burne them and the house over them.” Hannah had three children by Smith. When Smith died, she and 11-year-old Isaac were reunited. Perhaps his fixation on her developed new dimensions at that point. Regardless, she remained the central figure in his life.

He grew into an almost stereotypical recluse, an absentminded, ascetic, and devoted scientist. He lived in the world of the mind, often simply forgetting to sleep or eat.

LOVE LIFE:
Newton apparently experienced some sort of tender feelings for Anne Storey, the stepdaughter of a family he boarded with while he was in school. They may even have been formally engaged for a short time, but almost certainly they did not have a sexual relationship. They parted in 1661, when Newton went off to Cambridge University, but remained friends over the years.

Historians who have studied Newton are divided into two schools of thought concerning his sex life. Some insist he died a virgin. Others, referring to the rumors that circulated during and after his life, believe that he had at least one great love affair.

It seems that Newton did indeed love Fatio de Duillier, a handsome young Swiss mathematician. The two men were inseparable companions for several years, starting in 1687, when Fatio was 23. They shared a burning interest in science and mathematics; whether they also shared a bed is speculation. For reasons known only to them, Newton and Fatio broke off their intense relationship in 1693. For the next 18 months Newton suffered a complete mental breakdown. He was depressed and hostile and had delusions that his friends had abandoned him. He reacted by writing poisonous letters, accusing them of betrayal and deceit. To John Locke he wrote, “Sir, being of opinion that you endeavored to embroil me with women and by other means, I was so much affected by it … ‘twere better if you were dead.” When Locke calmly and kindly replied, Newton apologized, explaining that he had been delirious from lack of sleep and didn’t know what he was writing. Newton and Fatio exchanged occasional letters for the rest of their lives, but the friendship remained distant.

A rather mysterious “love triangle” involved Newton with the young, witty, and beautiful Catherine Barton, who was Newton’s niece and lived in his London home for over 20 years, and Charles Montague. Contemporary observers believed that Newton may have connived at an affair between Catherine and the increasingly influential Montague (later Lord Halifax) in order to gain a highly paid position as master of the mint. Later historians, putting the theories of Freud to work, have suggested that Newton enjoyed the affair between Montague and Catherine because he identified with Montague and saw Catherine as an embodiment of his own mother. He could thereby enjoy a vicarious sexual relationship with his mother, a woman whom, although she deserted him early in life, he loved deeply. Some have even suggested that he himself actually had an affair with Catherine. The most reasonable consensus, however, seems to be that Newton had no sexual interest in women.

—R.W.S.

PHILOSOPHERS

The Bourgeois Communist

KARL MARX (May 5, 1818–Mar. 14, 1883)

HIS FAME:
Revolutionary theorist Karl

Marx was the source of some of the most

powerful ideas of modern times, ideas

that have inspired revolutions and that

permeate governments in countries all

over the world.

HIS PERSON:
Descended from a long

line of rabbis, Karl was baptized at age

six in the Evangelical Church in his

hometown of Trier, Prussia, at the

request of his father, who had repudiated

the family faith. Later Karl himself

rejected all religion (“Religion is the

opium of the masses”) and has been

Marx in his early 30s

accused, probably justly, of anti-Semitism.

At 16 he fell in love with aristocrat

Jenny von Westphalen, whom he married eight years later, after completing his education. (He received his doctorate from the University of Jena, something of a diploma mill.) The inflammatory articles he wrote for literary and cultural magazines in several European cities were partly responsible for his expulsion from three of those cities—Paris, Cologne, and Brussels. He was also active in the underground Socialist movement. In Paris he met Friedrich Engels, son of a wealthy textile manufacturer, who became his lifelong collaborator. Among their joint works is the
Communist Manifesto
(1848), written for the Communist League.

In 1849 Marx moved to London, “where the next dance [revolution]

begins,” he said hopefully. Engels went, too, to work at his father’s textile firm in Manchester. Their hopes for revolution ended in disappointment when the stolid British showed little interest.

Money was Marx’s
bête noire
. He refused to be a “money-making machine,”

so he and his family lived on what he earned writing and on handouts from Engels and relatives. The Marx children were trained to say to bill collectors,

“Mr. Marx ain’t upstairs.” (Later, family fortunes improved.) Only three of the seven children grew to maturity, and of those three, two committed suicide.

Marx spent his days in the reading room of the British Museum doing research for his major work,
Das Kapital
, and for the articles and editorials he and Engels wrote for the New York
Daily Tribune
.

His physical condition was poor. Run-down and nervous, he rarely took baths, and for the last 20 years of his life he was afflicted with boils all over his body. In addition, he suffered from liver and eye problems.

A Victorian autocrat, Marx was not above faking a fit of temper and shouting,

“I will annihilate you!” during arguments. He was prone to sarcasm and intolerant of others’ opinions. Nicknamed “the Moor” for his swarthiness, he grew a flowing beard to point up his resemblance to a statue of Zeus he kept in his study. His brown eyes were passionate and defiant, his laugh was infectious.