The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People (36 page)

Wells, and Noel Coward. Maugham’s appearance, at his peak, was that of a natty gentleman, 5 ft. 7 in., with dark hair and mustache. His manner was diffident and remote, yet (despite his stammer) he was a witty storyteller. In his last years he was not afraid of death. “Death, like constipation, is one of the commonplaces of human existence,” he told a friend. “Why shy away from it?” He didn’t.

In his 92nd year, partially demented, often angry, sometimes euphoric, he died of lung congestion and too many years.

LOVE LIFE:
Maugham was bisexual. While most gossip made him out to be largely homosexual, one of his oldest friends, author Beverley Nichols, said he “was not predominantly homosexual. He certainly had affairs with women…. He had no feminine gestures nor mannerisms.”

SEX PARTNERS:
At age 16, while studying in Heidelberg, Maugham had his first sexual encounter. His mate was 26-year-old Ellingham Brooks, an attractive Cambridge graduate with a private income, who devoted himself to travel and reading. Returning to London, Maugham was afraid to consort with male homosexuals there because copulating with them was a criminal offense. Only five years before, Oscar Wilde had been sent to jail for two years for practicing homosexuality. So, while still a medical student, he cast his eye on women. “One Saturday night,” he confessed, “I went down Piccadilly and picked up a girl who for a pound was prepared to pass the night with me. The result was an attack of gonorrhea…. Undeterred by this mishap, however, I continued whenever I could afford it.” Shortly after, Maugham shared a flat with a friend, Walter Payne, an accountant who was good at obtaining girls, “small-part actresses, shopgirls, or clerks in an office.” When Payne was through with each, he passed her on to Maugham, who would take her to dinner and then to bed. “There was no romance in it, no love, only appetite.” In the two decades to follow, Maugham had a number of sexual affairs with well-known women. One was Violet Hunt, a feminist who edited
The Freewoman
. Violet was 41 and Maugham 29 when she confided in her diary that she had seduced him. Another was Sasha Kropotkin, daughter of Pëtr Kropotkin, the Russian anarchist who lived in exile in London.

There were two important mistresses in Maugham’s life. One he loved, and the other he married. The one he loved was Ethelwyn Jones, known as Sue Jones, whom he always referred to as “Rosie,” since he had used that name for her in his novel
Cakes and Ale
. A sparkling 23, the daughter of a successful playwright, she was a divorcée and a rising actress when Maugham met her. After a few dates, Maugham took her to his room and made love to her. He guessed she wanted to marry him. “I didn’t want to do that,” he wrote long after, “because I knew that all my friends had been to bed with her. That sounds as though she were something of a wanton. She wasn’t.

There was no vice in her. It just happened that she enjoyed copulation and took it for granted that when she dined with a man sexual congress would follow.” Later, when Sue was doing a stage play in Chicago, Maugham had second thoughts. He pursued her and proposed. When she turned him down, he was stunned. But Sue was already pregnant by another man, and soon she married the son of the 6th Earl of Antrim.

The other mistress, the one Maugham married, was Syrie Barnardo Wellcome. Her father, a German Jew, had founded the orphanages known as the Barnardo Homes. At 22, Syrie, a shapely, lively young lady, met and married 48-year-old Henry Wellcome, an American-born pharmaceutical giant. The marriage was a disaster. Syrie had an affair with Gordon Selfridge, also American-born and a London department store tycoon. Annoyed, Wellcome had her sign a deed of separation. Maugham met Syrie in 1911 and found her gay, smart, charming. By 1913 they were sleeping together. She wanted a baby by Maugham, and eventually he gave her one, a daughter named Elizabeth. Wellcome, who’d hired detectives to detail his wife’s adultery, now sued for divorce, naming Maugham as corespondent. Syrie tried to kill herself but survived. Once she was divorced, Maugham did what he felt to be the right thing. He married her on May 26, 1917.

It was a poor marriage. All the love was on her side. She constantly wanted sex with him. He wanted no more with her. In a letter to Syrie, Maugham cruelly outlined his complaints: “I married you because I thought it the best thing for your happiness and for Elizabeth’s welfare, but I did not marry you because I loved you, and you were only too well aware of that.” She was too shallow for him, he felt, interested only in “frocks and furniture.” They went their own ways. She became a renowned interior decorator, doing houses for Tallulah Bankhead and Wallis Simpson. Syrie had her own big grievance. She had lost her husband to a man and to homosexuality. She asked for a divorce, and in 1929 she got it.

Unexpectedly, Maugham had found his greatest love in France during WWI. Gerald Haxton was born in San Francisco but had been raised in England. He was slightly taller than Maugham, brown-haired, blue-eyed, pock-marked, somewhat dissipated in appearance. Many women thought him handsome. Some men thought him evil. Haxton was 22 and Maugham 40 the night they met. Maugham asked him what he wanted out of life.

Haxton said, “Fun and games. But I’ve not got a cent. So I want someone to look after me.” They went up to Haxton’s quarters, undressed, and got into bed. After they’d made love, Maugham whispered, “You needn’t worry about the future, Gerald, because I’ll look after you.” For almost 30 years, until Haxton’s death of edema of the lungs, Maugham looked after him.

Haxton served as Maugham’s secretary-companion on the Riviera and during his travels. Throughout the years Haxton—a drunkard, gambler, liar—held a strange dominance over the author. But he was cherished by Maugham as caretaker and lover. And in their travels, because he was a good mixer, Haxton provided Maugham with raw material for some of his best characters and stories. Also, to give his employer sexual variety, Haxton turned procurer. In 1924 Haxton found Maugham some lovely teenage boys in Mexico. In Indochina, Maugham had the happiest love encounter he had ever known, with a young boy in a sampan. In New York, in 1943, the 69-year-old Maugham had an affair with 17-year-old prep school poet and admirer David Posner. In his thorough biography,
Maugham
, author Ted Morgan quotes a letter from Posner on Maugham’s lovemaking. “He wasn’t particularly virile, but he was full of lust. He was rather businesslike about sex, but it’s equally true that there were occasions when he spent a long time just fondling…. He profoundly disliked women sexually … he was very disturbed once when he saw me with a girl.”

After Haxton’s funeral Maugham took on a new secretary-companion.

This was Alan Searle, a sweet, kind young man who’d been a hospital social worker and had once had an affair with Lytton Strachey. Searle adored Maugham, waited on him hand and foot, and considered him the best lover he’d ever known. In 1962, Maugham, upon hearing that his daughter Elizabeth might have him confined for incompetence, followed the advice of a French lawyer and adopted Alan Searle as his son, disowning Elizabeth as his legal daughter. Elizabeth hauled her father into court in Nice, proved her legitimacy, and had Searle’s adoption nullified. On his deathbed, Maugham’s last words were spoken to Searle: “I want to shake your hand and thank you for all that you’ve done for me.”

—I.W.

The Tireless Frenchman

GUY DE MAUPASSANT (Aug. 5, 1850–July 6, 1893)

HIS FAME:
He gained celebrity in his

native France and throughout the world

as the author of 300 popular short stories

including, “
La Maison Tellier
” [“The Tellier House”] and “
Sur l’Eau
” [“On the

Water”] and six novels, including
Bel—

Ami
and
Pierre et Jean
.

HIS PERSON:
Two occurrences in

Maupassant’s youth, spent near Dieppe,

France, scarred him for life. One was the

separation of his parents when he was 11

years old. Raised by his strong, neurotic

mother, Maupassant adored her, hated

his father, despised all husbands, and

Maupassant, age 40

remained a bachelor. The other was the

discovery that he had syphilis, which he had either inherited or contracted. He claimed he was cured of it, but in fact he wasn’t, and in his later years it destroyed him. Living in Paris and studying law, he began to write on the side, with his mother’s friend Gustave Flaubert as his stern mentor. Quitting law, Maupassant worked for 10 years as a government clerk, mostly for the Naval Ministry. When he was 30, his first published short story, “
Boule de Suif
”

(“Ball of Fat”), caused a sensation, and three years later he published his first novel,
Une Vie
(“A Life”), called by Leo Tolstoi “the best French novel since

Les Misérables
.” After that, writing steadily, Maupassant became rich and famous, ultimately possessing four dwellings and two yachts. He was a powerful man, able to row a boat 50 mi. in a single day. But syphilis brought him down in the end. He became ill, began to hallucinate, and tried to cut his throat.

Committed to a Paris insane asylum, he died there at the age of 42.

SEX LIFE:
Guy de Maupassant was one of the most prodigious lovers in modern French history. In a quarter of a century of steady lovemaking, he reportedly had sexual intercourse with thousands of young women. He was prouder of his sex exploits than of his books. He possessed three qualities that made him a much-sought-after lover: the ability to go on and on in his couplings without coming, the ability to have multiple orgasms, and the ability to bring most women to a climax. He credited his carnal successes, above all, to his intelligence. He said, “Most people are inclined to think that the lower classes … are better lovers than those who live sedentary lives. I don’t believe that…. It needs brains to give another the greatest possible amount of pleasure.”

From age 12 to 15 he masturbated “occasionally.” Then he had his first love affair. “When I was about 16 I had a girl, and the delight she gave me cured me of self-abuse.” He never forgot the feel of her loins or the way she gasped,

“Enough, enough!” Later, he enjoyed consorting with prostitutes, and at the peak of his fame preferred wealthy young society women, favoring those who were married and Jewish.

Maupassant was very matter-of-fact about his endurance and insisted that successive sex bouts did not exhaust him. “I’m as tired after 2 or 3 times as I am after 20,” he once said. “I’ve counted 20 and more. Surely you know that in 2

or 3 times you exhaust your stock of semen, so you can go on afterward without further loss.” When Flaubert doubted his endurance, Maupassant had a bookkeeper accompany him to a Paris brothel as a witness, and there he “had six girls in an hour.” Another time, to impress and “stagger” Bobukin, a visiting Russian writer, Maupassant picked up a dancer at the Folies Bergère, took her to a nearby brothel, and in front of his visitor had sexual intercourse with her six times in a row. When he finished with her, he went across the hall and had sex three more times with a young prostitute.

SEX PARTNERS:
Whenever Maupassant saw an attractive woman, he wanted her. In 1889, on his only visit to London, he was taken to lunch at an Earl’s Court restaurant by Henry James. Noting a beautiful woman at the next table, Maupassant asked James to “get her” for him. James was never more horrified.

Most women Maupassant wanted only once, but there was a handful that he saw frequently. All of them were married. One affair—with Marie Kann, a wealthy young brunette—lasted eight years. Maupassant wrote her 2,200

steaming love letters. Another of his long-lived affairs was with Blanche Roosevelt Macchetta, born in Sandusky, O., who married a Milan nobleman and became a marchesa. She was a shapely redhead who made a brief singing debut at Covent Garden in London, then became a published novelist. She bedded
The Pen Is Prominent
/
down with Maupassant regularly at his country retreat in Étretat and admitted enjoying “the maximum of sensual pleasure” with him. For variety, Maupassant sometimes liked his women on the kinky side. After Gisèle d’Estoc, who affected close-cropped hair and men’s clothes, had had an affair with Emma Bouer, a trapeze artist with the Cirque Medrane, and had stabbed her in a fight, Maupassant took up with Gisèle. Often Gisèle shared her broad-hipped lesbian ladies, as well as hashish or ether, with him.