The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People (54 page)

SEX PARTNERS:
Regardless of the circumstances, Édith Piaf enjoyed her innumerable lovers. During her early days of singing in the street, all she could afford was a hotel room with one bed. One young lover, Louis Dupont, didn’t object to sharing the bed with Édith and Momone. “There was a deep purity in Édith,” said Momone, “which nothing ever spoiled. Three in a bed may not be right, of course, but at 17 and as poor as we were, love is so marvelous, it’s made silently. It lulled me and I dropped off to sleep like a little kid.”

Despite the many men in her life, there was but one true love, a shy, muscular, and graceful Arab-French prizefighter. Marcel Cerdan already had a wife and three sons. Called the “Moroccan Bomber,” he took the middleweight crown from Tony Zale at Madison Square Garden on Sept. 21, 1948. Even when Cerdan was in training for the Zale return fight, Piaf needed to be with him constantly. She took a room in the Waldorf-Astoria for appearance’ sake, but it was Momone who used it. Hiding in the trunk of Cerdan’s car, Édith was smuggled into his training camp, where she stayed in a shabby bungalow that smelled of sweat and liniment, but she did not dare open the windows. Marcel joined her there during breaks in his grueling training. One day they chanced a relaxing afternoon in the open air. A friend walked by and warned them of an approaching group of reporters. Luckily there was a large willow basket close by.

Cerdan stuffed Édith inside and sat down on the lid just as the reporters arrived.

For the next three hours he answered questions without moving. When Piaf, cramped beyond endurance, groaned aloud, Cerdan growled a Moroccan curse and silenced her by digging his heel into the basket. She didn’t complain when she finally crawled out. For Marcel she had only embraces.

A year later Piaf was in New York while Cerdan held boxing exhibitions in Europe. She missed him terribly and persuaded him to visit her, insisting that he travel by plane rather than by ship. He was killed when his plane crashed in the Azores. Momone had to have her sister sedated to prevent suicide.

Among Piaf ’s other lovers were actors Eddie Constantine, Yves Montand (one of the few men she was faithful to), and John Garfield. She spotted Garfield when he was in a play in Paris, and sat through the performance every night for weeks, entranced by this “handsome beast.” Finally she spent the night with him. He didn’t try to see her again until months later, and by then she had lost interest.

Piaf claimed not to believe in marriage, but she was married twice. In 1952

she wed Jacques Pills, a singer. They divorced five years later. In the last year of her

life she married Theo Sarapo, a 26-year-old Greek hairdresser and singer, who was deeply devoted to her. After she died, he cradled her body in his arms for hours.

QUIRKS:
For Piaf, men with blue eyes were especially irresistible, but she was not indifferent to the charms of any man. Each time she fell in love, it was love at first sight. Her need for love produced such tension that she slept with her hands clenched into fists. She was so obsessed by love that, as Momone said,

“She went wild. She ate her heart out, she was jealous and possessive … she howled, she locked her guys up. She was demanding, she was unbearable; they slapped her around and she cheated on them.”

Whenever her lover was a blue blood, she itched to provoke him into coarse behavior. Of Paul Maurisse she said, “He’s an iceberg … a handbook of etiquette

… I’m going to make him forget his good breeding. He’s going to smack me yet, do you hear? I’ll get my smack out of him.”

HER THOUGHTS:
Édith Piaf valued love above all. Her songs and her life were full of the search for it and the pain of its loss. She said to her sister, “Can’t have a house without a man, Momone. It’s worse than a day without sunshine.

You can get along without the sun—there’s electricity. But a house without some guy’s shirt lying around, where you don’t run across a pair of socks, or a tie …

it’s like a widow’s house—it gets you down!”

—B.J. and K.P.

Bighearted Bessie

BESSIE SMITH (1894?–Sept. 26, 1937)

HER FAME:
Bessie Smith is regarded

by many as the greatest blues singer in

history. Columbia Records released 44

of her recordings during her lifetime,

some of which were million-sellers, and

8 posthumous LPs. Smith toured with

her own vaudeville-type show and performed as a special guest in others. Her

accompanists included such jazz notables as Louis Armstrong, Fletcher

Henderson, Coleman Hawkins, and

Benny Goodman. In 1929 she starred

in a short sound film called
St. Louis

Blues
, a musical dramatization of the

famous W. C. Handy song. Her career

Smith by Carl Van Vechten in 1936

declined in the 1930s, primarily because of widespread economic disaster brought on by the Depression, evolution of musical tastes from blues to swing, and the advent of movies and radio as cheap entertainment. She continued to perform, but never again for the big crowds and money.

HER PERSON:
Bessie Smith was born into total poverty in Chattanooga, Tenn.

Her birth date is unknown, although Apr. 15, 1894, appears on her marriage license. Smith’s appearance was striking, for she was a tall, heavy, very dark black woman who wore strange hats and colorful costumes onstage. She had a quick temper and would not hesitate to attack a man or woman with her bare fists.

Bessie especially hated to see black people behave with servility toward whites.

Occasional bouts with alcoholism were a problem in her personal life, although they rarely affected her performances. She never learned the value of money and would hand out cash to strangers. At the same time she was tightfisted about paying her own performers and crew. Despite her lusty, violent, pleasure-seeking ways, Smith was religious and would attend church whenever possible.

HER DEATH:
The rumor that Smith died because a white hospital refused to treat her after a car accident is false, but this story has persistently been used as an example of Southern racism. The facts are that Bessie—who hated racism as much as anyone—died at the Afro-American Hospital in Clarksdale, Miss., where she had been taken after receiving first aid from a white doctor who happened on the scene of the auto accident.

LOVE AND SEX LIFE:
Smith was married young to Earl Love, who came from a prominent black Mississippi family. The wedding took place following WWI (the exact date is unknown), and Love died soon after.

In 1922 Bessie met Jack Gee, a watchman who falsely claimed to be a policeman, and moved in with him. Although Gee was illiterate, he wanted to manage Smith’s career, and did so for a while. Because of his carelessness, Bessie received only $125 per recording, and not a penny of royalties during her entire career.

In fairness to Gee, it should be remembered that while he did take advantage of Bessie later on, their affair began before Bessie was discovered. On June 7, 1923, they married in a simple ceremony. The marriage was good in the beginning but deteriorated into wild jealousy in less than three years. One time, while on tour, Bessie heard that Gee was “messing around” with a chorine in her show. Without bothering to verify the story, Bessie beat up the girl and threw her out of their railroad car onto the tracks. Gee appeared on the scene and stopped to comfort the bleeding and bruised chorine. An outraged Bessie emerged from the car and emptied Gee’s own pistol in his general direction as he fled down the tracks. The train left without Gee.

Bessie was not innocent of indiscretions herself. She had her own lover on tour, a young male dancer named Agie Pitts. Bessie’s affair with Pitts ended when Bessie was jailed for beating another chorine. Pitts, entrusted with the $1,000 bail money to free Bessie, skipped town instead and was soon jailed himself.

Despite their violence and infidelities, and Gee’s opportunism, the couple seemed unable to break up. Whenever Gee was around, the fun-loving, carousing Bessie would be on her best behavior. They never divorced, but a final separation did occur. In early 1929 Gee financed a show with Bessie’s money, making his girl friend, Gertrude Saunders, the star. This hurt Bessie more deeply than anything else Gee had done. When she read about the show in a newspaper, she took a cab from Cincinnati to Gee’s hotel in Columbus, O. Fortunately, Saunders was out when Bessie arrived, for the ensuing fight with Gee left the furniture in the hotel room in a shambles, and Bessie emerged bleeding. Though Gee reunited briefly with Bessie, he returned to Gertrude. Bessie’s married days were over.

She took the breakup very hard and began drinking heavily. A brief affair with blues singer Lonnie Johnson did not relieve her loneliness. The Great Depression finally began to affect Bessie, a year and a half after most other performers had been forced to give up. But she still toured, and when her troupe stopped in Chicago in the summer of 1939, an old platonic friendship with bootlegger Richard Morgan grew into the love she had never had before. Morgan genuinely admired Bessie both as an artist and as a person, and she was happier than she had ever been. Morgan was tall, handsome, a sharp dresser, and he liked having a good time as much as Bessie did. His profitable bootlegging operations, and his management of Bessie’s business affairs, helped end her financial decline. He also filled the void left by Gee and Bessie’s adopted son Jack, Jr. (whom Gee had kidnapped and placed in foster homes). Bessie and Morgan lived together happily until Bessie’s death in 1937.

It is not known when Bessie began to enjoy sex with women, but the first provable affair was in late 1926. Lillian Simpson was a young chorine in Bessie’s show, and she regularly slept in Bessie’s room on the railroad car. One night Bessie kissed Lillian publicly in the car, and the girl objected. Bessie threatened to throw her out of the show, saying, “The hell with you, bitch. I got 12 women on this show and I can have one every night if I want it.” Simpson attempted suicide four nights later. Bessie saved her life, and the episode seemed to release Lillian’s inhibitions, for she never complained again. But the whole troupe feared Gee might visit the tour at any time, as he usually did when he ran out of money, and discover the lesbian affair. Gee finally did catch Bessie in a compromising situation with another chorine named Marie. He chased them through the hotel corridors, and Bessie hid in a girl friend’s room, terrified as only Gee could make her. When Gee ran down the street thinking Bessie had escaped from the hotel, Bessie quickly told the entire troupe to grab what they could carry and run for the train depot. Still in pajamas, the entourage quietly slipped out of Detroit in a darkened railroad car.

Another of Bessie’s fears was that Gee would discover her visits to “buffet flats.” Buffet flats were small, private establishments run by women which featured gambling, sex shows, and kinky or straight sex for the customers. Bessie went only to watch, afraid word would get back to her husband if she participated.

HER SONGS:
The lyrics of Bessie’s songs, some of which she wrote, were masterpieces of the sexual double entendre. A classic example is “Kitchen Man,”

written by Razaf and Belledna, in which “Madame Bucks” who is “quite deluxe”

receives notice from her cook:

His frankfurters are oh so sweet;

How I like his sausage meat;

I can’t do without my kitchen man.

Oh how that boy can open clams;

No one else can touch my hams;

I can’t do without my kitchen man.

When I eat his donuts, all I leave is the hole.

Anytime he wants to, why he can use my sugarbowl.

—J.M.

The Maestro Seducer

LEOPOLD STOKOWSKI (Apr. 18, 1882–Sept. 13, 1977)

HIS FAME:
A flamboyant showman,

Leopold Stokowski served as conductor