The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People (16 page)

Lillie’s dominant nature and open disregard for Victorian morality enthralled Prince Albert. They would meet regularly at the homes of friends, ostensibly for tea, and were given adjoining accommodations during weekend retreats. The intimate details of their affair were kept discreetly hidden, although the fact that they were lovers was no great secret. When Albert once complained, “I’ve spent enough on you to buy a battleship,” Lillie snapped back, “And you’ve spent enough in me to float one!” Edward Langtry, meanwhile,
was bribed into silence. Lillie remained Albert’s mistress until she playfully dropped a piece of ice down his back at a party. The prince was not amused and abruptly ended the affair.

On the rebound, Lillie consoled herself with yet another prince, Louis Alexander of Battenberg, Albert’s nephew. Louis, an officer in the Royal Navy, was perhaps the only man Lillie ever really loved and the father of her only child, a daughter named Jeanne-Marie.

To Lillie’s credit, she was never a hypocrite about her many affairs and could even be amused by bawdy items such as this one from a scandal sheet of the time: “We heard that Mrs. Langtry has lost her parrot…. That the lady possessed such a bird we were unaware, but we knew she had a cockatoo.”

HER THOUGHTS:
“We women begin the world with such limited prospects, and we surprise ourselves sometimes.”

—M.S.

Unlucky In Love

LILLIAN RUSSELL (Dec. 4, 1861–June 6, 1922)

HER FAME:
In the era just before radio

and motion pictures, when the great

medium of entertainment was the stage,

Lillian Russell was the ranking American

star. Celebrated for her great beauty, her

clear soprano voice, and her flamboyant

lifestyle, she specialized in light operatic

and musical comedy roles.

HER PERSON:
Helen Louise Leonard’s

parents were advanced thinkers for their

day. Her father was a midwestern publisher of agnostic tracts, her mother an

ardent suffragette. At 17, accompanied

by her mother, Helen left Clinton, Ia.,

for New York to study voice with Dr.

Leopold Damrosch. Too impatient to

endure the long years of training for a career in grand opera, she made her debut as a teenage chorine in Gilbert and Sullivan’s
H.M.S. Pinafore
. A golden blonde with cornflower-blue eyes, a peaches-and-cream complexion, and an exaggerated hourglass figure, she soon came to the attention of impresario Tony Pastor, who promoted her to overnight stardom as “Lillian Russell, the English Ballad Singer.” Russell went on to sing the role of D’Jemma in
The Great
Mogul: or, the Snake Charmer
, to star in Jacques Offenbach’s
The Grand
Duchess
, and to appear in the vaudeville and burlesque vehicles
Whoop-dee-doo
and
Hokey Pokey
. But such was her stature that, whatever the role, her arrival onstage was greeted by a “rush of pure awe.” She reigned as the toast of Broadway for some 30 years.

LOVE LIFE:
Russell, who was said to possess the enchantment of a Dresden shepherdess and the radiance of Venus emerging from her bath, exuded a sexual magnetism comparable to that of Marilyn Monroe. She was surrounded by wealthy and titled suitors who showered her with flowers, furs, jewels ($100,000

worth from one anonymous admirer alone)—even cold cash. But like the latter-day sex goddess, Russell also had a streak of vulnerability, which involved her in a succession of disastrous marriages.

Russell married at 18. Her husband was Harry Braham, the musical conductor of her first show, and she bore him a child, who died while in the care of a nursemaid. (The parents were busy at the theater at the time.) The Brahams’

marriage never recovered from this loss. Seduced again by music, she eloped a few years later with Edward Solomon, a composer and conductor who neglected to tell his bride that he was already legally married, and also failed to provide for Russell and their daughter. Husband number three was Giovanni Perugini (real name: Jack Chatterton), a caricature of the handsome tenor, vain, fatuous, and, as it happened, gay. Theirs was derisively called “a marriage of convenience—his,” for Perugini was so absorbed in the advancement of his career that he left Russell a “kissless bride.” (“I love you too much to defile you,” he claimed.) Russell, who passed her wedding night playing poker, was not amused, particularly when her husband began verbally abusing her in public. She left Perugini after two months of marriage when he tried to throw her out of a seventh-story window. “When the woman is the breadwinner, the superior in both intelligence and disposition,” Russell complained, “she should at least be respected and not nagged at and worried….” But Perugini had his side too. In his defense, he told a newspaper reporter: “Do you realize the enormity of this woman’s offense—her crime? Do you know what she did to me? Why, sir, she took all the pillows; she used my rouge; she misplaced my manicure set; she used my special handkerchief perfume for her bath; … Once she threatened to spank me, and she did, with a hairbrush, too. You can’t expect a fellow to take a spanking with equanimity, can you?”

Her fourth and final husband was Alexander P. Moore, a politically ambitious Pennsylvania newspaper publisher, who offered her stability and respectability if not grand passion.

Russell was painted in the press of the Gay Nineties as a scarlet woman, a modern Jezebel. It was rumored that she smoked cigarettes (which ladies simply did not do), conducted orgies on the tiger-skin rugs in her New York townhouse, and went out with a circus strong man. Actually, she was involved in a long-standing affair with Jesse Lewisohn, heir to a copper fortune and a fellow poker player. Together they made up a frequent foursome with “Diamond Jim”

Brady, the corpulent salesman of steel railway cars, and Edna McCauley, a woman whom Brady passed off as his niece for 12 years. Unhappily for Russell, however, this was to be another star-crossed love affair. Lewisohn eloped with McCauley, leaving Russell to console herself with Brady.

In fact, theirs was a unique friendship. It centered on their huge appetites.

One appetite they shared was a taste for high living. Brady overindulged himself in everything except alcohol. It was his habit to give away everything he owned once a year and then to replace it all in a flurry of buying. He customarily wore up to $250,000 worth of precious gems. Their second shared appetite was for the pleasures of the table. Russell was by now a well-upholstered 165 lb., and Brady was a king-size 250 lb. Russell was the only woman he had ever met who could keep up with him at the table; the two of them often got together just to gorge themselves on several trays of well-buttered sweet corn. (Brady often single-handedly depleted the entire pantry at Charles Rector’s restaurant on Broadway. After his death, his stomach was found to be six times normal size.) Brady proposed marriage to Russell several times, once by spilling a million dollars into her lap. She declined with thanks, fearing it would wreck a beautiful friendship, but she often took him along on her dates with other men.

In her 50s Russell retreated from the stage to a second career as a syndicat-ed columnist, offering advice on health, beauty, and love. She also lent her celebrity to the cause of women’s suffrage. When, as the greatest sex symbol of her day, whose profile was practically a national institution, she marched the length of New York’s Fifth Avenue in the great suffrage parade of 1915, it was one of her proudest performances.

—C.D. and M.S.

III

PaintingTheTown

Painter In Paradise

PAUL GAUGUIN (June 7, 1848–May 8, 1903)

HIS FAME:
Generally regarded as the

best Postimpressionist painter to come

out of France, Gauguin gained fame and

honor, albeit posthumously, for brilliantly

colored, highly subjective works of art

depicting unspoiled Polynesian life. His

paintings include
Daydream
,
Two Tahitian Women
, and the sprawling canvas

Where Do We Come From? What Are We?

Where Are We Going?

HIS PERSON:
Born in Paris, three—

fourths French and one-fourth Peruvian

Creole, young Paul was taken to live in

Lima, Peru, in 1851 when Napoleon III

Gauguin in 1888

staged a coup d’état in France. Nudity was

commonplace in South America, and these early experiences affected him strongly. All his life he felt most comfortable among naked women. Paul returned to France with his mother in 1855, and at age 17 he decided to explore the world as a sailor. Six years later he quit the sea for the more respectable but no less uncertain life of a stockbroker. The French Bourse enriched him for a time, but when the Paris exchange crashed in 1883, he decided to chuck it all and concentrate full-time on his hobby—painting. The decision ruined his marriage, doomed him to a life of penury, and gave the world some of its most treasured art. Gauguin’s vivid, primitive canvases represented a departure from traditional art. Instead of reproducing an image with photographic fidelity, he chose to project his mind’s eye and turned to primitive cultures for inspiration. He made little money at it.

Gauguin befriended other painters of the period, among them Pissarro, Cézanne, and Van Gogh, and joined in the Impressionist exhibitions of the 1880s.

For 10 weeks toward the end of 1888 he lived and worked with Van Gogh in “the yellow house” in Arles, France. Their incompatibility drove Gauguin to Paris.

Increasingly alienated from his wife as well as from Western civilization, Gauguin managed to sell 30 paintings in 1891 and booked passage to Tahiti. Except for a brief return to Europe in 1893, he spent the rest of his life in the South Seas, painting and sculpting. He died bitter and broke, on Hiva Oa in the Marquesas Islands.

SEX LIFE:
From his early days as a teenage seaman to his last months as a dying syphilitic on the Marquesas, Gauguin had an extremely active sex life, even though a large, bumpy nose dominated his angular face and he could hardly be called handsome. With his marriage in 1873 to Mette Sophie Gad, a tall, blond Danish governess, he settled into what promised to be a life of respectability and comfort.

Then one day in 1883 Gauguin came home from the stock exchange and announced, “I’ve handed in my resignation. From now on I shall paint every day.”

Mette, stunned and outraged, hoped that this was just some phase Gauguin was going through. His in-laws in Copenhagen, Denmark, where the couple lived for a time, ridiculed his aspirations. The resultant strain and lack of money caused the Gauguins to separate. Still, even after leaving for Tahiti he clung to the hope that his wife and five children would one day join him there. They never did.

In Tahiti in 1891, Gauguin found artistic inspiration and all the breasts he could fondle. At first he reveled in the local custom of welcoming a different native woman into his hut each night, but he soon learned that such promiscuity hindered his work. He longed for his own
vahine
(“woman”). He set out to find one, and at a neighboring village he was offered the hand of a nubile native, barely into her teens, named Tehura. Gauguin was instantly attracted to her.

Assured that she was entering the union willingly and that she was free from disease, Gauguin took her to his hut. After a week’s trial marriage she agreed to remain permanently. With Tehura by his side, frequently as his model, the artist turned out much work. Inspired one night by her fear of the
tupapau
, or evil spirit, he created
The Spirit of the Dead Is Watching
.

In 1893 he sailed for France, leaving a pregnant Tehura behind. In Paris he renewed his relationship with a former mistress, a simple, withdrawn seamstress named Juliette Huet. He also began an affair with a 13-year-old waif known as Anna the Javanese, who was half Indian, half Malay. Anna turned out to be disastrous for him. She kept him from his work, and, when they went to Brittany, her unpopularity among townspeople was immediately evident. One afternoon she stuck out her tongue and thumbed her nose at a group of children who were making fun of her outlandish clothes. The incident touched off a melee that ended with Gauguin’s being kicked unconscious by a gang of 15 fishermen. Gauguin had barely recuperated when Anna deserted him after carefully stripping his studio of all valuables except his paintings.