The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People (108 page)

Understandably outraged by her husband’s infidelity and lying, Elizabeth forced Pepys to fire Deborah Willet. But the night before she left, he confessed to his diary, “The truth is, I have a great mind for to have the maidenhead of this girl, which I should no doubt to have if
yo
could get time
para
be
con
her— but she will be gone and I know not whither.” However, he also noted the next day that he had made love to his wife “more times since this falling-out than in I believe 12 months before—and with more pleasure to her than I think in all the time of our marriage before.”

Within the week, Pepys had tracked down Deborah Willet, kissed her, and given her fatherly advice. But Elizabeth found out immediately and demanded that Pepys write a letter to Deborah in which he called her a “whore” and said he hated her. This he did, but only after Will Hewer, Pepys’ lifelong friend, agreed to deliver the letter and, with a wink, assured him that Deborah would never see the offensive portions.

Eventually life calmed down for Samuel and Elizabeth. However, on Apr.

9, 1669, Pepys was back with Mrs. Martin, doing what he would, and also with her sister, who was now Mrs. Powell. On Apr. 15 he even met with Deborah in an alehouse and kissed her and touched her breasts. Six weeks later, the threat of losing his eyesight forced Pepys to give up his diary. On Nov. 10 Elizabeth, after suffering a high fever, died at the age of 29. Shortly after his wife’s death Pepys became passionately close to a witty young lady named Mary Skinner.

Twenty years later she moved in with him, without scandal, and she nursed and consoled him in his old age. Not surprisingly, Pepys never remarried, preferring, no doubt, to do what he would for the rest of his life.

HIS THOUGHTS:
Dec. 25, 1665: “To church in the morning, and there saw a wedding … and the young people so merry one with another, and strange to see what delight we married people have to see these poor fools decoyed into our position, every man and woman gazing and smiling at them.”

—D.W.

The Celebrity Collector

ALMA MAHLER WERFEL (1879–Dec. 11, 1964)

HER FAME:
A classical composer who

received scant recognition, Alma

Mahler Werfel gained prominence

through her association with famous

men. Described by her admirers as the

“most beautiful
femme fatale
of turn-of-the-century Vienna,” Alma was married

in succession to the composer Gustav

Mahler, the noted architect Walter

Gropius, and the Austrian writer Franz

Werfel. A complete list of her lovers

would read like a history of the intelligentsia of eastern Europe.

HER PERSON:
“What I really loved

in a man was his achievement,” Alma

Werfel wrote in her autobiography,
And the Bridge Is Love
. “The greater the achievement, the more I must love him.” Alma lived up to her words, with the help of some of the greatest musicians, painters, and writers of her day.

Born in Vienna to the landscape painter Emil J. Schindler, Alma had wit and intelligence honed by the scores of intellectuals and artists who flocked to her family’s home. She received a formal education in music and composition from many of Vienna’s finest musicians and composers. When she became a teenager and blossomed into a classical beauty with high cheekbones, sensual eyes, and a full figure, her teachers avidly courted her. At 17 she was aggressively pursued by 37-year-old artist Gustav Klimt. But Alma held her admirers at bay because she “believed in a virginal purity in need of preservation.” She changed her mind at the age of 21 and began chasing after men of artistic achievement, involving herself in three marriages and innumerable affairs. Initially attracted to brilliant father figures, she married Gustav Mahler when he was 41 and she was 23. Later she reversed roles and married the poet and novelist Franz Werfel, who was 12 years her junior.

SEX LIFE:
A “small, repugnant, chinless, toothless, and unwashed gnome”

was Alma’s description of her teacher, Alexander von Zemlinsky. The Viennese musician and composer attracted her anyway. “I long so madly for his embraces. I shall never be able to forget how his touch stirred me to the depths of my soul … such a feeling of ecstasy filled my being…. I want to kneel down in front of him and kiss his open thighs—kiss everything, everything! Amen!”

During her affair with Zemlinsky, Alma met Gustav Mahler at a party.

He was a handsome but austere man, prone to attacks of nervous tension. His fame as a composer was based on his romantic symphonies, particularly the Eighth Symphony, known as the
Symphony of a Thousand
. Alma was in awe of Mahler’s musical genius but had doubts about accepting his marriage proposal. “Do I really love him?” she wrote in her diary. “I’ve no idea…. So many things about him annoy me: his smell—the way he sings—something in the way he speaks!” She finally agreed to marry him because “I am filled to the brim with my mission of smoothing the path of this genius.”

Mahler confessed to Alma that he was a virgin, and said he was worried about his ability to consummate their marriage. She agreed to participate in a premarital rehearsal. After engaging in several sessions of lovemaking, she wrote, “Joy, beyond all joy,” in her diary, and soon she was suffering the

“dreadful torment” of pregnancy. But on their wedding night a few months later, Mahler was impotent. When this problem continued, a frustrated Alma suggested that he consult their friend Sigmund Freud. The great analyst recommended that Mahler, who adored his mother, call his wife by his mother’s name, Marie. This seemed to work, and the couple had another child together, a daughter who became a sculptress.

However, their marriage still wasn’t satisfactory to Alma. Mahler had insisted that she give up her musical career when they married, saying, “You

… have only
one
profession from now on:
to make me happy
!” She hated being a traditional wife and mother. “I often feel as though my wings had been clipped. Gustav, why did you tie me to yourself—me, a soaring, glittering bird—when you’d be so much better off with a gray, lumbering one?”

During their marriage Alma flirted with Mahler’s rival, composer Hans Pfitzner. “I do not fight the sensuous excitement caused by his touch,” she confessed, “an excitement I have not felt for so long.”

After Mahler’s death in 1911, Alma was courted by her late husband’s physician, Dr. Joseph Fraenkel. In turning down Fraenkel’s marriage proposal, she wrote: “My watchword is:
Amo—ergo sum
[I love, therefore I am!].

Yours:
Cogito—ergo sum
[I think, therefore I am!]”.

Next, Alma became involved with Austrian painter and playwright Oskar Kokoschka, whom she described as a “handsome figure but disturbingly coarse.” Beginning his career as a portrait painter, Kokoschka became famous for the daring use of color and form in his landscapes. When he asked to paint Alma’s portrait, she wrote in her diary, “We hardly spoke—and yet he seemed unable to draw. We got up. Suddenly, tempestuously, he swept me into his arms. To me it was a strange, almost shocking kind of embrace.” She enjoyed that embrace for three years, which she called “one fierce battle of love. Never before had I tasted so much tension, so much hell, so much paradise.” Kokoschka wanted to marry her, but when she had an abortion in 1913, it spelled the end of their affair.

In 1915 Alma married the renowned architect Walter Gropius, whose advances she had spurned when married to Mahler. Their marriage lasted

four years and produced one child. While wed to Gropius, Alma became enchanted with the poetry of Franz Werfel, whose first prose piece,
Not the
Murderer
(1920), marked the beginning of the expressionist movement in German literature. A stocky man with burning eyes and elegant features, Werfel achieved his greatest popularity as a result of his book
The Song of
Bernadette
, which was later made into a highly successful film. In 1917 Alma and Werfel began an affair. “It was inevitable … that our lips would find each other…. I am out of my mind. And so is Werfel,” Alma wrote. The poet agreed. “We made love,” he said of their first sexual encounter. “I did not spare her. At dawn I went back to my room…. There is something suicidal in her climactic surrender.” Alma became pregnant with Werfel’s child while still married to Gropius. The child, a boy, was born in 1918 and died less than a year later. After the birth of Alma’s son, Gropius agreed to a divorce. Alma moved in with Werfel, and they were eventually married in 1929, when she was 50 years old. She remained passionate throughout their 16-year marriage.

An admirer, the German dramatist Gerhart Hauptmann, once said to Alma, “In another life, we two must be lovers. I make my reservation now.”

His wife overheard this request and quickly replied, “I’m sure Alma will be booked up for there, too.”

—R.S.F.

Designing Lover

FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT (June 8, 1867–Apr. 9, 1959)

HIS FAME:
Regarded as the greatest

American architect of the 20th century,

his creative, trend-setting designs for nearly 800 buildings earned him a reputation

as one of the giants of modern architecture. Among his most famous projects are

the Edgar J. Kaufmann house, known as

“Falling Water,” near Pittsburgh, Pa.; the

administration buildings of the Johnson

Wax Company in Racine, Wis.; and the

Guggenheim Museum in New York City,

which was opened in 1959, following

Wright’s death.

HIS PERSON:
Wright was the product

of a broken home. His minister father,

Wright, 28, took this photo himself.

William C. Wright, divorced his wife, Anna, because she refused him “intercourse as between husband and wife.” The elder Wright moved out of their Madison, Wis., home in 1885, and Frank, who continued to live with or near his mother until she died in 1923, never again saw his father.

Trained as an engineer, Wright worked for six years in the architectural firm of Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler before establishing his own office in Chicago in 1893. By the turn of the century the 33-year-old, predominantly self-taught designer had a lucrative business and was known for his revolutionary “prairie school” of architecture—a style widely recognized for its radical approach to building modern homes.

But despite his architectural achievements, Wright’s love life was marred by a series of scandalous romances.

LOVE LIFE:
Guided by conflicting sexual morals, Wright fluctuated between puritanism and liberalism. He denounced marriage, claiming no person should “own” another, and scorned fatherhood, saying the idea of having a child deeply disturbed him. However, he married three times, fathered seven children, and engaged in a number of adulterous affairs. These he justified by proclaiming that it was more honorable to live openly with a mistress than to carry on secret affairs.

He considered himself a lady-killer in his later years, but when at 21 he married 18-year-old Catherine Tobin, he was a beginner in the art of lovemaking. A handsome man with auburn hair, his classic features couldn’t mask his shyness; the very sight of a young girl could make him run like “a scared young stag, scampering back into his woods.”

In his autobiography Wright wrote that his and Catherine’s marriage on a rainy day in June resembled a funeral more than a wedding. As the years passed, Catherine’s affection for him turned to “an almost bitter love.” She shouldered the burdens of raising their six children with little help from him, and turned her head when he began seeing other women.

Many of his female clients were infatuated with him, but it was Mamah Borthwick Cheney—wife of one of his friends—who stole his heart. Impulsively, in September, 1909, he eloped to Europe with Mrs. Cheney, who was known in social circles as a capricious, temperamental lady. Although Catherine refused to give him a divorce, the lovers returned to the U.S. in 1910.