The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People (55 page)

or music director for the Cincinnati,

Philadelphia, NBC, Hollywood Bowl,

New York Philharmonic, and Houston

Symphony orchestras during his 75-year

career. He popularized avant-garde

compositions, instituted “pops” and

youth concerts, and introduced modern

technology to the concert hall.

HIS PERSON:
Born in London, England, Stokowski was the son of an

immigrant Polish cabinetmaker and his

Irish wife. By the age of seven Leopold

Stokowski at age 54

was introduced to music, and he learned

to play the violin, piano, and organ before he was 13. While working as a church organist, Stokowski was discovered by a wealthy member of the congregation, who sponsored him at the Royal College of Music, after which he entered Queen’s College, Oxford.

Stokowski then studied in France and Germany before playing as an organist in prestigious churches in London and New York City. In 1909 the ambitious

young musician became the conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra despite the fact that he had no experience as a conductor. From Cincinnati he went to Philadelphia, where in the next three decades he created a symphony orchestra that gained world renown.

A great experimenter, Stokowski was one of the first conductors to record classical music and the first to introduce electrical instruments in the orchestra.

Working in Hollywood during the late 1930s, he was musical supervisor for Walt Disney’s
Fantasia
and performed in two other films.

After an amazingly productive and creative career, Stokowski died in his sleep in Nether Wallop, England, at the age of 95.

SEX LIFE:
Tall, handsome, slender, and blond, Stokowski devoted almost as much time and energy to the seduction of women as he did to his music. Of his early affairs we have only rumors until 1906, when he met concert pianist Olga Samaroff—born Lucie Hickenlooper in San Antonio, Tex. After five years as lovers, they married. Stokowski demanded that his new wife give up her career to help further his. For a decade she used her time and influence to secure his advancement. However, upon moving to Philadelphia Stokowski began his bedroom wanderings, and in 1923 Olga—tired of her husband’s domineering personality and sexual escapades—sued for divorce.

After Olga’s departure, Stokowski conducted his sexual affairs openly. In his bedroom with its chartreuse walls, he entertained Philadelphia society women, actresses, and chambermaids. Also, he became well known for his labors with the teenage female student body of Philadelphia’s prestigious music school, the Curtis Institute. His liaisons with these students became so notorious that the local citizens often referred to Curtis Institute as Coitus Institute. Stokowski showed little prejudice in his selection of bedmates, sleeping with single and married women alike. He referred to his sex companions as “nurses” because, in his words, “They are angels of mercy who rejuvenate us.” (Stokowski’s sex partners praised his general performance but complained of his sporadic impotence.) In 1926 at the age of 44, Stokowski suddenly dropped his 19-year-old debutante girl friend to marry Evangeline Johnson, an heiress to the Johnson and Johnson fortune, whom he had known for three weeks. A liberated woman active in social causes, Evangeline accepted her new husband’s claim that he needed his sexual maraudings to stimulate his musical creativity.

During the 1920s and 1930s, Stokowski’s musical fame and reports of his bedroom conquests raised him to the rank of a national sex symbol. This was reinforced in 1937, when Stokowski seduced Greta Garbo, who reported, “I felt the electricity going through me from head to toe.” During this tumultuously romantic affair, the couple resided in Italian villas, where Stokowski—a health fanatic—introduced Greta to yoga. However, after 10 months the flame suddenly died, and so did Stokowski’s second marriage. Complaining of her husband’s oppressive personality, long absences, and headline affairs with movie stars, Evangeline sued for divorce.

Stokowski continued his libertine ways until 1945, when he stopped off in Reno, Nev., on his way from New York to Los Angeles. There he married Gloria

Vanderbilt, who had just divorced her first husband. Like his two previous wives, Gloria was beautiful, young (23 years old), and rich (two years earlier she had inherited $5 million). At the age of 63, Stokowski had changed little. In 1956
Look
magazine reported that Gloria’s position in the marriage was “like that of an Arab wife: obedient, almost slavish, doing everything for her husband and her children and nothing for herself.” Stokowski’s demands on Gloria led her to a psychiatrist, who helped her become more assertive, which, in turn, ended the marriage. In 1962 she sued Stokowski for a divorce.

After this last divorce, Stokowski’s sexual adventures decreased in frequency, probably because he was then over 80. However, until his death 15 years later, Stokowski continued to have occasional affairs.

HIS THOUGHTS:
When asked by a friend whether he felt guilt over the fact that he was sleeping with a fellow musician’s wife, Stokowski replied, “None.

Conscience is that which hurts when everything else feels marvelous. The per-centage is against it!”

—R.J.F

.

The Closet Z

PËTR ILICH TCHAIKOVSKY (May 7, 1840–Nov. 6, 1893)

HIS FAME:
By composing such works

as
Swan Lake
,
The Nutcracker
,
Sleeping
Beauty
, and his Sixth Symphony, known

as the “Pathétique,” Tchaikovsky established a reputation as one of the world’s

great musical geniuses.

HIS PERSON:
Though strong, handsome, and abundantly talented, Tchaikovsky suffered from neurasthenia

throughout his life. This precarious emotional condition was touched off when his

governess, Fanny Durbach, left the family

employ in 1848. This was the first in a

series of painful separations from mother

Tchaikovsky in 1868

figures which he was to experience. His

actual mother died when he was 14, leaving him so inconsolable that 25 years later he wept uncontrollably for days after coming across a packet of her letters.

Following a miserable four-year stint as a clerk in the ministry of justice in St. Petersburg, he turned his full attention to music in 1863. He taught at the

Moscow Conservatory of Music and threw himself into Moscow nightlife, becoming a gay young fop who was popular at parties for his ability to create spontaneous melodies on the piano. But even his successes had a pathetic side.

The first time he conducted a piece of his own in public, he hallucinated that his head was going to come off unless he held it absolutely rigid. He didn’t conduct in public again for 10 years. In 1866 he suffered a nervous breakdown one night while composing and was so frightened by the experience that he gave up nocturnal composing forever.

SEX LIFE:
He called the murky undercurrent of his sexual life Z, using the letter in his diaries to refer to his homosexuality (alternately called “This” in letters to his homosexual brother, Modest). “Z tortures me unusually today,” reads one diary entry. Another reads: “Was very tortured, not by the sensation of Z itself, but by the fact that it is in me.” Who his homosexual lovers were is uncertain since he so feared exposure that he kept his activities extremely circumspect.

One likely candidate, however, is Vladimir Shilovsky, his favorite student at the conservatory and his frequent, often secret, traveling companion, to whom he dedicated two of his early piano pieces. Another is Vladimir “Bob” Davidov, his nephew, whose attraction for him is made clear in a number of diary entries.

“Oh, how perfect is Bob,” he wrote in one. “Am terribly reluctant to go away from here. I think it’s all on account of Bob,” he wrote in another. Havelock Ellis called the Sixth Symphony, which Tchaikovsky dedicated to Davidov, “the homosexual tragedy.”

His agonizing homosexuality, and the earlier heartbreak at losing Fanny and then his mother, made it just about impossible for him to have a normal relationship with a woman. The closest he came to such a thing was with Désirée Artôt, a French opera singer he met in 1868, while she was touring Russia. He fell madly in love with her and they became engaged, but his friends’ concern that he would fall into Désirée’s shadow awakened his own fears and caused him to postpone the wedding. Artôt resumed her tour and almost immediately married a Spanish baritone. Tchaikovsky was crushed.

In 1877 he married Antonina Ivanova Milyukova, a student of his at the conservatory. Antonina had professed an undying love in her letters, and she determined to marry him despite his admission of homosexuality. By all accounts she was deluded and stupid, constantly imagining that men were trying to seduce her and unable to name a single piece of her husband’s music.

Tchaikovsky married her out of pity, confusing her with Tatyana, the victim of love in Pushkin’s
Eugene Onegin
(the basis for an opera Tchaikovsky produced in 1877-1878). Three months after the marriage the composer fled, and he spent the rest of his life trying to extricate himself from the commitment. He attempted suicide, standing up to his armpits in the Moscow River one October night in hopes of catching pneumonia. He tried confessing to adulteries he hadn’t committed in order to secure a divorce, but she wouldn’t hear of it. He even contemplated murdering Antonina. Finally he learned of her own adultery in 1881, but now he hesitated to seek a divorce for fear she might tell the world about him. In the ensuing years she became increasingly deranged and carried on an endless string of affairs which resulted in several children. Nonetheless, Tchaikovsky faithfully supported her until his death in 1893. Three years later she was committed to an asylum, where she died in 1917.

As odd as his marriage was, it was no more bizarre than his relationship with Nadezhda Filaretovna von Meck, a wealthy widow nine years Tchaikovsky’s senior, who had such an addiction to music that she included pianists (among them Debussy) as members of her household staff. She fell in love with Tchaikovsky’s music and was his patron for 14 years. They communicated solely by letter, filling three volumes of oftentimes intimate correspondence. Even while he occupied an apartment of hers in Italy and she lived but a half-mile away in a villa, the two never spoke. In 1890, for some unknown reason, she broke off all communication with Tchaikovsky, and when he lay dying of cholera in St. Petersburg three years later, he repeated her name over and over again in what his brother Modest described as a “reproachful tone.”

HIS THOUGHTS:
When asked by Nadezhda Filaretovna von Meck if he had ever experienced love, he replied: “If you had phrased your question differently, if you had asked me whether I had ever discovered complete happiness in love, I should have answered no, and no again…. If, however, you ask me whether I have ever experienced the entire power and inexpressible tension of love, I must answer yes, yes, yes. For time and again I have labored to render in music all the anguish and ecstasy of love.”

—D.R.

The Cocksure Composer

RICHARD WAGNER (May 22, 1813–Feb. 13, 1883)

HIS FAME:
A multitalented genius, Wagner was the leading German composer of the late 19th century, and his revolutionary composition techniques crucially affected the development of modern opera. His magnum opus is
The Ring of the
Nibelung
, a four-opera series based on Norse mythology.

HIS PERSON:
Wagner was an arresting figure, with piercing blue eyes set in a large head, severe features, and an initially reserved manner. He had little formal musical education but was adept at reading music in his childhood.

Skilled as a writer and poet, he became his own librettist, and his operas are recognized as much for their poetry as for their musical scores. Unfortunately, his amazing knowledge doomed Wagner to continual disappointment when his works were produced, because no musician or performer could conduct, act, or sing them as well as he.

Wagner was well aware of his capa—