The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People (24 page)

HIS ADVICE:
“It is easier to be a lover than a husband, for the same reason that it is more difficult to show a ready wit all day long than to say a good thing occasionally.”

—G.A.M.

Never-Neverland

J. M. BARRIE (May 9, 1860–June 19, 1937)

HIS FAME:
Known today only as the

creator of the beloved Peter Pan, “the boy

who would not grow up,” J. M. Barrie

was a literary giant in his lifetime. He

wrote a number of bestselling novels

and a steady stream of plays that wee performed to packed houses.

HIS PERSON:
Wrote James Matthew

Barrie, “To be born is to be wrecked on an

island.” Perhaps this is an apt description

for one whose long life was peppered with

the tragic deaths of those he loved. The

first occurred when Barrie was six,

growing up in the little Scottish village of

Kirriemuir. His father was a handloom weaver, and he and his wife, Margaret Ogilvy (it was a Scottish custom for a married woman to keep her maiden name), had 10 children. Margaret’s favorite, David, was 13 when he died after an ice-skating accident. His death plunged her into a black depression. Little Jamie Barrie did all he could to cheer his mother; he tried to be so much like his brother “that even my mother should not see the difference.” Once he even put on the dead boy’s clothes and imitated his whistle, hoping to fool his mother with his disguise.

As Barrie grew up, his dream of becoming a writer solidified, and by age 25

he was a London journalist. Success came quickly as he turned to novels and plays, churning out a prodigious amount of work. Soon London was at Barrie’s feet, worshiping the shy little playwright (he was barely over 5 ft. tall) who had become an immensely wealthy and famous man.

In addition to his work, Barrie amused himself with his cricket team, the Allahakbarries (“Allah akbar” is Arabic for “Heaven help us”), which was made up of noted writers and artists such as A. Conan Doyle and P. G. Wodehouse.

Barrie’s primary pleasure, however, was in his numerous friendships with children. Despite these diversions, his personal life was usually troubled. His mother died, one of his sisters died, and another sister’s fiancé died after falling off the horse Barrie had given him as a wedding present.

These tragedies contributed to Barrie’s lifelong reserve. Only children always felt comfortable with the tiny man with the deep, rumbling Scottish voice. His behavior often intimidated adults, for he would lapse into silences that went unbroken for hours and he swung regularly from dark depression to charming gaiety. One of Barrie’s better traits was his unstinting generosity. He gave abundantly to friends and strangers in need, often doing so anonymously.

Barrie died at the age of 77, finally worn down by emotional duress and by the physical ailments that had long troubled him—a constant cough (he was forever puffing on his pipe), colds, headaches, and insomnia. His last words were

“I can’t sleep.”

LOVE LIFE:
Barrie had one of the most profound cases of mother fixation ever recorded. When he was 36, he wrote a book called
Margaret Ogilvy
, a sentimental memoir of his mother. The book was so personal and adoring that one critic called it “a positive act of indecency.”

In addition to being completely wrapped up in his mother, Barrie was woe-fully self-conscious about his height, and this strongly affected his attitude toward the opposite sex. When he was 18, he made these notes in his notebook (in which he often wrote in the third person):

He is very young-looking—trial of his life that he is always thought a boy.

Greatest horror—dream I am married—wake up shrieking.

Grow up & have to give up marbles—awful thought.

Barrie wrote of being crushed that women found him “quite harmless,” and summed up his misery in this outpouring:

Six feet three inches … If I had really grown to this it would have made a great difference in my life. I would not have bothered turning out reels of printed matter. My one aim would have been to become a favorite of the ladies which between you and me has always been my sorrowful ambition. The things I could have said to them if my legs had been longer. Read that with a bitter cry.

Barrie frequently got crushes on actresses, but he did little in the way of pursuing them. In 1892 he was looking for a second leading lady for his new play,
Walker,
London
. He wanted a woman who was “young, quite charming … and able to flirt.” He gave the part to 29-year-old Mary Ansell, who met all the requirements.

Mary and Barrie began to see a great deal of each other. There are two versions of what ensued. In one, Barrie, after keeping Mary anxiously waiting, finally proposed. He then fell seriously ill with pneumonia—a matter of national concern—and Mary rushed to his side and nursed him back to health. In the other version, she refused to marry him many times. When he fell ill, she went to him at his mother’s behest, and they were married on what was expected to be his deathbed. The wedding took place on July 9, 1894.

What followed on the fateful honeymoon is a matter of speculation. It has been much rumored that Barrie was completely impotent—he was jokingly labeled “the boy who couldn’t go up”—but no one knows for sure. One biographer states that Mary told her friends that the marriage was never consummated. In Andrew Birkin’s excellent biography,
J. M. Barrie and the Lost Boys
, Mary is said to have confided to a friend that she and her husband had “normal marital relations” in the early days of their marriage. John Middleton Murry, a friend of Mary’s, wrote in a journal that Barrie was guilty of “unmentionable sex behavior towards Mary.”

Wherever the truth lies, it does not point to sexual harmony between the Barries. Nevertheless, the couple settled down to married life, and Mary turned her frustrated maternal instincts toward Porthos, their big brown-and-white St.

Bernard, who was the model for Nana in
Peter Pan
. While Mary tried to amuse herself with clothes and house-hunting, Barrie plunged himself into his work, which he never discussed with his wife. He remained silent for hours in her company and, in fact, rarely spent any time with her.

What hours they did pass together were spent walking Porthos in London’s Kensington Gardens. On one such stroll, Barrie met two handsome, charming little boys wearing red berets, out walking with their nurse. They were four-year-old George Davies and his three-year-old brother Jack. They were the sons of Arthur Llewelyn Davies, a good-looking, struggling young barrister, and his wife, Sylvia, a marvelous, enchanting woman, sister of actor Gerald du Maurier and daughter of author George du Maurier. Sylvia had another boy, Peter, and would soon add two more to her brood, Michael and Nico.

Thus began the truly great love affair in J. M. Barrie’s life. Barrie “adopted”

the Davieses. He visited them daily, bought them presents, flirted sweetly with Sylvia (whom he worshiped), and entertained the boys with the stories of fairies and pirate adventures that were to become
Peter Pan
. Years later Barrie told the boys, “I made Peter by rubbing the five of you violently together, as savages with two sticks produce a flame.” Barrie’s “adoption” disgruntled Arthur Davies, but he
The Pen Is Prominent
/ remained a gentleman. What could he do? Barrie, as he had written of himself, was “quite harmless,” and the boys loved “Uncle Jim.” What Mary Barrie felt about all this can be imagined. To add to the irony, Barrie was working on a novel,
Tommy
and Grizel
, and switched from Mary to Sylvia as his model for Grizel.

In 1907 tragedy struck. Arthur died of a terrible disease of the jaw, having been previously disfigured by facial operations. Barrie was at his side throughout the ordeal, and at the courageous Sylvia’s side as well. It was understood that Barrie would assume financial responsibility for the family.

Two years later, as Barrie sat working at his desk in his summer cottage, a second blow fell. The gardener informed him that Mary Barrie (now in her 40s) was having an affair with Gilbert Cannan, a 24-year-old barrister and writer and a friend of the Barries. A stupefied Barrie confronted his wife, who denied nothing and asked for a divorce. In a letter to her friend H. G. Wells, she wrote, “He seems to have developed the most ardent passion for me now that he has lost me; that frightens me.” In 1909 the couple filed for divorce; it was granted the following year. Barrie was shattered. In an attempt to keep publicity from further upsetting the miserable playwright, a petition was prepared asking the press to treat the matter discreetly. It was signed by Henry James, H. G. Wells, and Arthur Wing Pinero, among others.

Barrie found his only solace in his work and in the Davies family. But one year later, in 1910, Sylvia died. The 50-year-old Barrie legally adopted the five boys. George and Peter were then at Eton, Jack was in the navy, and Michael and Nico were 10 and 6, respectively. All the boys felt well loved by “Uncle Jim,”

though George and Michael were the favorites. Michael, particularly, had much in common with Barrie; he was sensitive, poetic, and brilliant. In 1914 George went to war in France; in March, 1915, he was killed.

Barrie’s grief was terrible. But an even greater grief was waiting. In May, 1921, Michael died. He drowned with a friend in a pool at Oxford. Because he could not swim and was terrified of water, his death was thought by many to be a suicide. It was the greatest and the cruelest blow Barrie had ever received. He never fully recovered. A year after Michael’s death, Barrie wrote to Michael’s Oxford tutor, “What happened was in a way the end of me.”

The question has often been asked: Was Barrie homosexually in love with the boys? It is a difficult question to answer, for J. M. Barrie was not a simple man. In many ways his love for the boys was an odd mixture of a father’s, a mother’s, and a lover’s. Nico, the last Davies boy alive, does not feel it was a sexual love. He once said, “Of all the men I have ever known, Barrie was the wittiest, and the best company. He was also the least interested in sex. He was a darling man. He was an innocent; which is why he could write
Peter Pan
.”

HIS THOUGHTS:
From
Tommy and Grizel
: “He was a boy only. She knew that, despite all he had gone through, he was still a boy. And boys cannot love.

Oh, is it not cruel to ask a boy to love?”

“What is genius? It is the power to be a boy again at will.”

“Nothing that happens after we are 12 matters very much.”

—A.W.

Lecherous Bozzy

JAMES BOSWELL (Oct. 29, 1740–May 19, 1795)

HIS FAME:
James Boswell had long been

known for his
Life of Samuel Johnson
, but

the discovery of Boswell’s papers in the

1920s made him the “best-self-documented man in all history.” Entering the

pages of Boswell’s private journals, the

armchair voyeur is propelled into the

ribald life of 18th-century London, where

the all-too-human Boswell, with a wink,

leads his reader into the most licentious

and fleshly of pleasures.

HIS PERSON:
Boswell’s mother was a

Calvinist, his father a stern Whig. He

grew up in Scotland on the family estate,

Boswell at age 25

abnormally afraid of sin and hellfire.

Throughout his life, he suffered from episodic depression. At 16 he was laid low by a “terrible Hypochondria” and became a Methodist vegetarian, which, like a later fling with Catholicism, did not last.

After graduating from the University of Edinburgh at 18, he hoped to become a military man, but his father insisted he study law. Boswell capitulated and began his practice in Edinburgh in 1766. Meanwhile, he pursued a literary career and spent as much time in London as he could. It was in London, in 1763, that he met the ponderous and morally wise Dr. Johnson—then 53 years old while Boswell was only 22—in the back room of a bookstore.

Boswell hunted throughout Europe for a dowried wife, recording the yearly income of various women in his journal along with their other attributes.

But in 1769 he married his penniless first cousin, Margaret Montgomerie, when he suddenly realized he loved her while he was on his way to court an Irish heiress. Margaret was a buxom, witty, patient woman with beautiful eyes.

Her life with Boswell was stormy. He would debauch and reform, debauch and reform. Grand gestures, hedged with prudence, were typical of him, and he would promise “from henceforth I shall be a perfect man; at least I hope so.” In 1789 his wife died of tuberculosis, leaving him to raise five children, who adored him in spite of his failings. His last decade was spent in public disgrace and private remorse because of his dissolute lifestyle.

SEX LIFE:
The story of Boswell’s sex life is littered with a multiplicity of characters—innumerable whores, several mistresses, uncountable partners in
The Pen Is Prominent
/ casual sex, and many rich ladies unsuccessfully pursued with marriage in mind. Even in the context of his time he was a male chauvinist, with a great need for women and a great need to consider the opposite sex inferior.