The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People (100 page)

famous as any star Hollywood would later

produce. Of her American debut on Oct.

1, 1890, the New York
Tribune
headline

declared: OTERO CONQUERS NEW YORK. A reviewer for
The New York Times
marveled, “She appears to dance all over. Every muscle, from her dainty toes to the crown of her head, is brought into play, and the consequent contortions are wonderful and, at times, startling.” Acton Davies, writing for the New York
Sun
, dissented, saying, “We have seen Otero sing, we have heard her dance.”

She was a compulsive gambler and occasionally mixed business with pleasure. An employee at the casino in Monte Carlo maintained that Otero, running low on funds, went to bed at a nearby hotel with 11 men in a 24-hour period.

He added that she never spent more than a half hour away from the gaming tables during this marathon. In her lifetime, she lost an estimated $20 million at the casino. Asked what she would have done with that money if she hadn’t been a gambler, Otero replied, “I might have endowed a university for prostitutes. Think of the variety of courses we could have offered.”

SEX LIFE:
People said that she was a nymphomaniac, or that she sought to punish men in retaliation for her childhood rape. In any case, Otero was a strikingly beautiful woman, around 5 ft. 10 in. tall, with measurements of 38-21-36. Her face was symmetrically oval, her hair black and silky, her teeth pearly white. Her friend, French writer Colette, said that Otero’s breasts “were of curious shape, reminding one of elongated lemons, firm and upturned at the tips.” An anonymous source added that Otero’s breasts “preceded her by a quarter of an hour.” The touch of foul language in her speech titillated her patrons, and she believed in always making a man feel like a king in the bedroom, whether he was royalty or not. During her prime, Otero charged $10,000, or the equivalent in jewelry, for a night of her services.

SEX PARTNERS:
According to Otero’s autobiography, on Nov. 4, 1898, a group of men with whom Otero had been having profitable affairs for several years gathered to give her a birthday party. The guest list was impressive,

including King Leopold II of Belgium, Prince Nicholas I of Montenegro, Prince Albert of Monaco, the Grand Duke Nicholas of Russia, and Albert, Prince of Wales, who would become King Edward VII of the United Kingdom.

Otero made love with Baron Lepic in a hot-air balloon floating 200 ft. over the Aube River near Provins, France. On June 15, 1902, the New York
World
reported that “the gondola remained high above the earth for more than an hour.”

Sixty years later, Otero purred, “It was an experience
every
woman should enjoy.”

Otero did not limit herself to royalty. William K. Vanderbilt, of the famous (and rich) American family, offered Otero a yacht and showered her with $250,000 worth of jewels, including a pearl necklace Napoleon III had given the Empress Eugénie.

Her five-year affair with the Muzaffar-ed-Din, shah of Persia, netted Otero a stream of jewels. “He was a dirty, smelly old man, and very strange in his desires,” she recalled. “He visited me every afternoon at two o’clock and left at five. Ten minutes later one of his servants would be at the door to hand my maid a gold, inlaid cassette, lined with velvet. It contained a single jewel but a very magnificent stone—diamond, ruby, pearl, jade, or emerald, some worth as much as 25,000 francs. I would remove the jewel and return the box.”

For her part, Otero later wrote that she did not always enjoy sex with her men, but she was unfailingly hospitable. In the 1890s, Prince Albert of Monaco earned low marks because he had trouble getting an erection. After a night of conversation, he finally did, and Otero exaggerated the truth to tell him he was

“formidable”—whereupon he “strutted around the room.” The grateful Albert set her up in a choice apartment and gave her more than $300,000 worth of gems. “He was not a very virile man and I don’t think he got his money’s worth,”

Otero concluded. “But as long as he didn’t care, neither did I, and he seemed to enjoy taking me where we could be seen together publicly.”

In 1894 Prince Nicholas of Montenegro (who would become his country’s first and last king) moved into the apartment Albert had given Otero. The tall, slender prince was in his early 50s, and their relationship lasted for several years.

After presenting Otero with “a simply gorgeous diamond bracelet and at least five … beautiful watches,” he persuaded her to visit his palace in 1897. Otero later complained, “I saw practically nothing the whole trip … all the prince wanted to do was to make love to me so I obliged.”

Sixty-year-old King Leopold II of Belgium “was not very generous at the start but I taught him how to give. He was an apt student.” They met in 1894 and were part-time lovers for three or four years. Leopold, said Otero, “gave me my own small villa by the sea” at Ostend, in west Flanders, then an exclusive summer resort.

One of the richest men in the world, Nicholas II, czar of Russia, had a bad complexion and rarely bathed. “He really stank,” said Otero, and was still shaken from an assassination attempt that had occurred six years earlier. “There were always a half-dozen huge, black-bearded armed guards at our bedroom door, some more at every window, and if there was a rear exit, he’d have half a regiment posted there. It almost felt like I was undressing in an army barracks or a bullfighting arena. If I happened to move a chair suddenly or drop a perfume bottle, Nick would jump out of bed screaming with fright.” But Otero “grew quite fond of him” even though “he had the strangest views about sex.”

When she returned to Paris in September of 1897, the Prince of Wales was waiting for her. “He was surprisingly virile and generous,” but he had to stand her up one night in London when his official mistress, Lillie Langtry, arrived unexpectedly.

The Khedive of Cairo saw her perform and, after three torrid days in his palace, gave her a 10-carat diamond ring with a setting of 12 pearls worth half a million francs at the time.

On a visit to Monte Carlo in 1905, Otero “deflowered” 19-year-old King Alfonso XIII of Spain. “He was rather aloof at first,” she remembered, “but I taught him how to relax.” In 1913, at the age of 27, he set the 44-year-old Otero up in Madrid in the last apartment she would ever occupy courtesy of a royal client.

Otero’s 40th birthday had found her with a new lover, Aristide Briand, who would become one of France’s greatest statesmen and win the 1926 Nobel Peace Prize. Otero must have sensed his coming greatness, because his appearance did not foretell such a future: “He was … hideously ugly. He was fat. He dressed like a slob—often there’d be remains of an omelet on his vest, his nails were black, but there was a fascination to him I never found in any other man.” He could only afford “an occasional cheap jewel and flowers,” Otero recalled. “Once …

he made love to me eight times before morning. And he was 50 years old at the time.” Their affair lasted 10 years.

When La Belle Otero retired in 1914, she had amassed a fortune, and for a while the money kept coming, occasionally from secret benefactors. In 1935, at age 66, she was still beautiful, but age eventually crept up on her, and her money disappeared in the casinos. She was alone when she died of a heart attack at age 96 in Nice, France, but she never had any regrets about her life.

HER THOUGHTS:
“I have been a slave to my passions, but never to a man.”

—A.L.G. and L.S.

Uncultured Pearl

CORA PEARL (1835–July 8, 1886)

HER FAME:
Despite her poor manners, incomprehensible French, and penchant for cruel practical jokes, Cora Pearl enjoyed a long reign as the most popular courtesan in the Paris of Napoleon III.

HER PERSON:
Cora was born Emma Elizabeth Crouch to a family of 16 children in Devonshire, England. Her father was a musical director and the composer of “Kathleen Mavourneen,” a popular ballad of the time, which he sold for £20 to a publisher who earned £15,000 from it. Cora, however, did not sell her wares so cheaply, and the time came when a single night with her cost 10,000 francs.

The age at which Cora began her

mercenary career is uncertain, but she was

apparently young enough to be lured into

a low-class pub by promises of sweets.

There, a merchant gave the naive girl her

first taste of gin. When she woke up in his

bed the following morning, he compensated her with a £5 note. Thus, she had

inadvertently begun her career. That same

day she left home and soon began an

apprenticeship in a London brothel. From

there she moved to Paris, where she

worked independently. Among her customers were the wealthiest and most

powerful men of her day, whom she collectively called her “Golden Chain” of lovers. Later in life, Cora wrote her memoirs and sent excerpts to former clients, offering to delete certain parts in exchange for money. The extortion scheme was apparently a success, for the published version made dull reading.

Cora was fond of practical jokes. She once lured a prominent Parisian into a compromising position in her bedroom, only to throw open the closet doors and reveal a contingent of his friends. Another time Cora hosted a dinner party at which she was brought out naked on a silver platter in order to win a bet. She had wagered that she could serve “a meat nobody could cut.”

Her face was plain, but she had beautiful skin and hair and her body was one of the most perfect in France. With it she earned a vast fortune. Ironically, when Cora died of cancer at the age of 51, she was penniless and alone.

SEX LIFE:
Cora arrived in Paris in 1858 with the proprietor of the Argyle Rooms, a seedy London brothel where she had perfected her bedroom skills. The trip was for pleasure rather than business, but duty eventually called and Cora’s patron returned to England without her. She took up with a sailor for a while, and when he shipped out she was fortunate enough to meet a mysterious man known as “Roubisse,” who procured for her the first in her golden chain of clients.

For six years she was the mistress of Victor Massena, third Duc de Rivoli.

The staid aristocrat indulged her every whim, yet Cora later described Massena as “the man who received the least in return.” Throughout their relationship, which ended in 1869 when Massena drifted out of her life, she had many other lovers. One of these was 17-year-old Prince Achille Murat, a grandnephew of Napoleon I. While the young man was not rich, Cora helped him run through what money he did have. He fought (and won) a duel over Cora’s bills once, and got so badly into debt that Emperor Napoleon III sent him to Africa.

Once Cora herself fought a duel, with Marthe de Vère, a fellow courtesan, over a good-looking Serbian prince. Riding whips were used as weapons. Both Cora and Marthe remained in seclusion for a week to let the wounds on their faces heal. The prince, in the meantime, disappeared.

After Murat, the next link in Cora’s golden chain was William, Prince of Orange, heir to the throne of the Netherlands. The Prince of Orange had little to his credit besides money, and Cora found him tiresome. However, a woman who would bathe nude in a champagne-filled silver tub in front of her dinner guests might easily find many men tiresome.

Cora was ice-skating one day when she was picked up by the Duc de Morny, the second most powerful man in France, the emperor’s half brother. “Cora on the ice?” he said to her. “What an antithesis!” She replied, “Well, since the ice is broken, take me for a drink.” De Morny was a stepping-stone to Prince Napoleon, “Plon-Plon” to his friends, who fell madly in love with Cora. The prince installed her in a grand house and gave her a monthly allowance of 12,000

francs. But her barnyard manners and cockney-accented French annoyed the prince at times, as did her habit of entertaining hordes of men. During one party, when Cora was the only woman at a table full of male admirers, she coyly remarked, “There is only one of you with whom I am still a virgin.”

Although there is no conclusive evidence that Plon-Plon’s cousin, Napoleon III, was among Cora’s lovers, it is reasonable to assume that he was. It was a rare man indeed who did not sample Cora’s perfect body. She was a sexual common denominator, a conversation piece when men talked among themselves, and it is unlikely that the emperor overlooked her.

For a time all Paris was buzzing with the tragic story of one of Cora’s lovers, Alexandre Duval, a gentleman with a fortune of 10 million francs. Duval showered Cora with gifts of carriages, horses, jewelry, furnishings, and other expensive items. He once gave her a book, which she contemptuously tossed aside, not realizing that its 100 pages consisted of 1,000-franc bank notes.

Despite the lavish presents, Cora treated Duval with disdain. And when he eventually shot himself in her house, Cora coldly remarked, “The dirty pig. He fucked up my beautiful rug!” Duval recovered at length from both the bullet wound and his near fatal devotion to Cora.

Cora’s spurned lovers might have been gratified to see her in her later years—