The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People (20 page)

MEDICAL REPORT:
According to Rivera’s autobiography, his last years were sexless and his second marriage was unconsummated because he had cancer of the penis. Supposedly, his doctors repeatedly told him his penis had to be amputated, but Rivera refused to submit to such an operation.

HIS THOUGHTS:
“If I loved a woman, the more I loved her, the more I wanted to hurt her.”

—R.J.F.

The Coffeepot

HENRI DE TOULOUSE-LAUTREC (Nov. 24, 1864–Sept. 9, 1901)
HIS FAME:
Toulouse-Lautrec’s naturalistic style had a great influence on Postimpressionist French art. Considered a minor talent while alive, Lautrec achieved international renown after his death. Indeed, our image today of

Paris in the Gay Nineties is very much

a result of Toulouse-Lautrec’s paintings

of prostitutes, bohemians, and, especially, the performers and audiences of

the Moulin Rouge and other Parisian

night spots.

HIS PERSON:
The only surviving

child of an eccentric count and his shy

and patient wife, Toulouse-Lautrec suffered two falls as an adolescent which

broke both his thighbones. He was left

crippled for life, and his growth was

frozen at 5 ft. 1 in. This greatly disappointed his father, who had been

counting on a strong and healthy son to

join him when he went hunting and

debauching. Ugly, deformed, and quite

a bit shorter than his peers, Toulouse-Lautrec nonetheless had personal

charisma and a quick wit, which made

him a much-sought-after companion in

Toulouse-Lautrec at age 26

the counterculture of Paris in the late

1880s and throughout the 1890s. He became a well-known figure on the streets of Montmartre, dressed in baggy trousers, an overlong overcoat, and a bowler hat, and sporting a beard, a bamboo cane, and pince-nez.

Despite his blue-blooded origins, Toulouse-Lautrec felt most at home with society’s outcasts and devoted extended periods of his life to living in brothels and hanging out in lesbian bars. Alcoholism, syphilis, and general abuse of his health led to his death in his mother’s arms two and a half months before his 37th birthday.

SEX LIFE:
Although he didn’t reach too far from head to toe, Toulouse-Lautrec had unusually well developed sexual organs, even for a man of normal size. His genitals were so out of proportion to the rest of his body that he compared himself to a “coffeepot with a big spout.”

Coming from an aristocratic family, Toulouse-Lautrec was introduced to brothels early. Because he was misshapen and somewhat grotesque-looking, marriage with a woman of his own class was considered unthinkable. He moved to the Montmartre district of Paris when he was 19 and divided his time between painting and observing the extremes of Paris nightlife. He began having sexual affairs with some of his models, in particular Marie Charlet, a teenaged adventuress who spread the word about the painter’s sexual prowess.

In 1885 Toulouse-Lautrec became involved with model Suzanne Valadon, the mother of artist Maurice Utrillo and an artist in her own right. For three
Painting The Town
/ years they carried on a stormy affair, which ended abruptly when he learned that Valadon’s threats of suicide, which he had taken seriously, were in fact sheer playacting. After the breakup with Valadon, Toulouse-Lautrec painted six studies of Rosa la Rouge, a red-haired prostitute from whom he contracted syphilis.

In 1891 Toulouse-Lautrec prepared his first poster for the Moulin Rouge nightclub, and his fame began. Following a breakup with another lover, Berthe La Sourde, he began frequenting brothels with great regularity and by 1894

had taken up residence in a high-class house of prostitution in the Rue des Moulins. He lived in this brothel and others on and off for the rest of his life.

This unusual living arrangement provided Toulouse-Lautrec with the opportunity to indulge completely his sexual appetite, while simultaneously allowing him to observe and paint unposed nude and seminude women. “The professional model is always like a stuffed owl,” he said. “These girls are alive.”

He lived with the prostitutes day in and day out. He played cards with them, laughed with them, and surprised them in their beds. He shared their meals and brought in pâtés and fine wines to brighten up the menu. He kept track of each woman’s birthday and brought them all presents. On their days off, he would invite these women of the night to his studio and take them to a restaurant or to the circus or a theater.

When he began to tire of brothels, Toulouse-Lautrec moved on to lesbian bars, particularly La Souris and Le Hanneton, near the Place Pigalle. Here, also surrounded by women, he again became a popular figure who could be turned to for advice.

In 1897 he fell in love with a young relative named Aline, who had just left a convent. For a while he cleaned up his act, forswearing cocktails (which he had helped popularize), talking of entering a clinic for alcoholics, and drinking only port. But when Aline’s father forbade Toulouse-Lautrec to see his daughter, the artist plunged deeper than ever into the Paris underworld, eventually being sent to a mental asylum with delirium tremens. Within months of his release he was drinking heavily again. Struck down with paralysis on Aug. 20, 1901, he died three weeks later.

QUIRKS:
An extreme sensualist, Toulouse-Lautrec periodically zeroed in on different parts of the female body. It was said that he could caress a woman’s hand for an hour. Red hair drove him to ecstasy. His friend Thadée Natanson described how Toulouse-Lautrec would “purr with delight as he plunged his face into a woman’s bosom, wrapping her two enormous breasts around him like a comforter made of human flesh.” He would also “clutch a pair of women’s stockings that had fallen to the ground, roll them into a ball, and inhale their scent with his eyes closed.”

At one point Toulouse-Lautrec became obsessed with the actress and dancer Marcelle Lender. Night after night, more than 20 times, he reserved the same seat in the orchestra stalls so that he could watch her dance the bolero. When asked why he kept returning, he replied, “I simply come to see

Lender’s back. Take a good look at it; you’ve never seen anything so magnificent.” Apparently he was impressed with her nose as well. According to Natanson, Toulouse-Lautrec loved the sight of finely chiseled nostrils since, owing to his size, they were the first things he saw when he looked up at a woman’s face.

HIS THOUGHTS:
“Love is when the desire to be desired takes you so badly that you feel you could die of it.”

“A woman’s body, a splendid woman’s body … is not for making love….

It’s too beautiful, eh? For making love anything goes … anything … anything at all, eh?”

—D.W.

IV

The Quill is

Compelling

Chéri

COLETTE (Jan. 28, 1873–Aug. 3, 1954)

HIS FAME:
One of the most celebrated

French authors of the early 20th century,

Sidonie Gabrielle Claudine Colette wrote

73 books—fiction, nonfiction, and a mixture of the two—about the sorrows and

delights of love. In her life, as in her art,

she gave a new dimension to two of

France’s most enduring sexual archetypes,

the schoolgirl seductress and the aging

coquette.

HER PERSON:
Colette grew up in the

country, the adored youngest child of a

fiercely possessive mother and a vaguely

literary retired army captain. She was a singular child, a tomboy who went by her

family surname and communed intimately with the flowers and animals in her own private enchanted garden. At 20, an ingenuous provincial with braided hair falling below her knees, she married Henry Gauthier-Villars, a 35-year-old writer and friend of the family. “Willy,” as he was known, added his young bride to his collection of mistresses, ghostwriters, and pornographic postcards in decadent
fin-de-siècle
Paris.

At Willy’s urging, Colette began to fill notebooks with vicariously erotic stories about the adventures of a young girl. The four Claudine novels, published from 1900 to 1903, enjoyed a great vogue, giving rise to a whole line of

“Claudine” products and to a cult of the precocious schoolgirl, innocent yet alluring, a sort of androgynous Lolita.

Rebelling against her literary bondage to Willy, who signed his name to his wife’s first six books, Colette began publishing voluptuous nature stories, using the name Colette Willy until 1906, and then simply Colette. (She could describe a vegetable as if it were a love object, it was said.) She took up the study of mime, divorcing Willy in 1906 to tour in mildly erotic mime melodramas. She also contributed articles (published in 1970 in book form as
Tales
of a Thousand and One Mornings
) to
Le Matin
, a leading French newspaper. The editor, Henry de Jouvenel, fathered her only child (a girl) and became her second husband, in that order. This marriage also ended in divorce, but while it lasted Colette achieved her greatest fame with
Chéri
(1920), the sexual tragedy of a young gigolo and an aging coquette, followed by
The Ripening
Seed
(1923), a classic tale of adolescent sexual initiation.

Married yet again in 1935, to journalist Maurice Goudeket, Colette enjoyed both fame and an active old age, raising the coquette to the rank of patriotic heroine with the publication of
Gigi
(1945) when she was 72.

LOVE LIFE:
Colette’s first husband, Willy, was constantly unfaithful to her.

Once she followed him to an assignation and found him fornicating with one Lotte Kinceler, a foul-mouthed, hunchbacked dwarf. Sometimes, according to one biographer, Willy “brought his other coquettes to Colette’s apartment, where they would finger her things and speak smut.” Willy tried to promote a liaison between his young wife, who described herself as “sexually impartial,”

and one of his mistresses. At the time, Colette was more comfortable with her husband’s male young homosexual secretaries. But as she became disillusioned with Willy, who with his bulbous eyes and drooping cheeks reminded her of Queen Victoria, she took refuge in her somewhat exhibitionistic career in mime and music-hall dancing. She also found comfort in the company of an aristocratic lesbian, “Missy,” the former Marquise de Belboeuf and a descendant of Napoleon, with whom she lived for six years after leaving Willy.

Full-bodied and feline in her 30s, with sloe eyes and a mop of curly hair, Colette appeared in the mime theater seductively draped like an odalisque. One play required her to bare her breasts, which created “a luscious thrill of sensation” in the audience. Sensation turned to scandal when, miming a ballet in which “a mummy awakes from eternal sleep, undoes its bandages, and, near nude, dances its ancient loves,” she ardently embraced her “prince,” who was in fact Missy, the choreographer of the ballet.

Colette and Missy de Belboeuf, who looked and dressed like a man in daily life, enjoyed what was then known as “a loving friendship.” Colette, who also appeared in tuxedo at the famous sapphic banquets of the day and wore an ankle bracelet engraved “I belong to Missy,” described her friend’s love as maternal and possessive. She wrote of Missy: “You will give me sensual pleasure, leaning over me, your eyes full of maternal anxiety, searching through your passionate friend for the child you never had.” Colette had numerous lesbian loves, one of the most colorful being Natalie Barney, an American expatriate in Paris known for her Friday salons and her affairs with other women. On one occasion, Colette sent Barney a message reading, “Natalie, my husband kisses your hands, and I the rest.”

After entering the world of journalism, Colette began a whirlwind affair with the aggressive, virile Henry de Jouvenel. (Fond of pet names, she called him “Sidi the Pasha.”) The affair ended in marriage when Colette, nearly 40, became pregnant. Jealousy blooms “like a dark carnation,” she wrote in reference to her husband’s chronic infidelity. De Jouvenel complained, for his part, about his wife’s preoccupation with “love, adultery, and half-incestuous relationships.” The latter was rumored when Colette took off on a Swiss winter vacation with her 19-year-old stepson, Bertrand de Jouvenel, after her separation from his father.