The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People (56 page)

bilities and was noted for his conceit.

He regularly regaled friends with dramatic readings of his writings, and

these—plus his incessant, passionate

conversation—ensured that he was

always the center of attention. One

evening when his guests were peacefully

chatting, Wagner was so annoyed that

he screamed until all eyes were once

again riveted on him.

Wagner sincerely believed that,

owing to his genius, it was the duty of

others to support his extravagant

lifestyle. “The world ought to give me

Cosima and Richard Wagner

what I need. Is it an unheard-of demand

if I hold that the little luxury I like is my due? I who am procuring enjoyment to the world and to thousands?”

His standard of living required a lot of money, which was provided by friends, admirers, patrons, and his salary from conducting jobs. Wagner’s creativity demanded sensuous surroundings. No angular objects, such as books, no noise or commonplace odor was allowed to remind him of the real world. Rooms were draped with varicolored satins and silks, with violet and red predominating. Thick carpets covered the floors, perfumes scented his chambers, and natural light was muted. He dressed in similar luxury, favoring lace shirts, satin pants, fur-lined slippers, and satin or silk dressing gowns. His preferred colors were yellow and pink.

The combination of his opulent tastes and financial irresponsibility put Wagner in constant debt. He spent one night in debtors’ prison and had to leave two cities hastily to avoid arrest. (One of these escapes required that he, his wife, and their dog cross the Russian border; if caught, they would have been shot.)

In later years Wagner adopted a vehement anti-Semitism that sometimes embarrassed his family and his benefactors. He was much more talk than action, though, and the three men who were responsible for his last production—
Parsifal
in 1882—were Jews.

LOVE LIFE:
The composer’s attraction to women began when he was a boy and became aroused at the touch of his sisters’ clothing. At 13 he boarded with another family and enjoyed “pretending to be too sleepy to move so that I might be carried to bed by the girls.” Wagner detested being alone and constantly sought out feminine company. He felt that women, much more than men, had the capacity to understand and sympathize with him and with his art. His fondness for the opposite sex carried him through many affairs, both before and after his marriage. He was always searching for a “love that knew no bounds in the way of trust and self-surrender.” He wanted a woman who was unquestioningly devoted to him and willing to be devoured in return. His lovers ranged from intellectuals to maids and covered all age groups. They included one amiable young woman who also served as his housekeeper and cooked and cleaned in her pink pantaloons to please him.

However, his most notorious attachment was not to a woman but to 18-year-old Ludwig II, king of Bavaria. (Wagner initially avoided his messenger, fearing the stranger was a creditor.) The blatantly homosexual king idolized Wagner’s music and provided the composer with housing and money. Infatuated with the older man, Ludwig addressed Wagner in letters as “My loved one” and “Darling of my soul.” Wagner reported spending hours with the king engaged in earnest conversations about art and music or simply sitting in enraptured silence. He was sufficiently involved to write: “Shall I be able to renounce women completely? With a deep sigh I confess I could almost wish it! … Now he is everything to me, world, wife and child!” The king evidently wasn’t enough, however, for Wagner was simultaneously living with Cosima von Bülow (later his wife). The royal liaison was ended after a year and a half by the king’s advisers, who objected to Wagner’s “unwholesome influence” on the monarch.

SEX PARTNERS:
In 1836 Richard married Christiane Wilhelmine “Minna”

Planer. She was 27 and he was 23. The pretty, sedate leading lady of a regional theater troupe had been ardently pursued by its young conductor for two years and had rejected his proposals several times. Their marriage contained early bright spots, but was largely composed of 25 years of fights, jealousy, intellectual and emotional differences, and separations. Minna steadfastly stood by Wagner during his poverty-stricken early years, but his inability to remain debt-free and his flights of imagination alienated her sensibilities.

Moreover, Wagner expected her to be content housekeeping while he pursued his extramarital loves and his work. In 1847 Wagner tried to convince 37-year-old Minna that she was too old and frail for sex. He wrote her, “What is a young passion compared to an
old
love such as ours? Passion is only fine when it ends in love in this sense….” Minna finally agreed with him 11 years later, when her heart trouble was aggravated by the discovery of her husband’s affair with Mathilde Wesendonk.

In April of 1848 Wagner met Jessie Laussot, a beautiful 21-year-old Englishwoman whose husband financially supported Wagner. Jessie’s intellectual capacities endeared her to Wagner, and they plotted to flee to Greece together. But her husband discovered the plan, threatened to shoot Wagner, took his wife to the country, and, when Richard followed, had the police run him out of France. (His visa had expired.) In the end Wagner felt that Jessie had failed him by not rushing to his side against all odds.

Several years later Wagner, in his early 40s, became enamored of another patron’s wife, Mathilde Wesendonk, his inspiration for
Tristan und Isolde
. He revered her as his muse and insisted that their relationship was on an otherworldly

plane and totally virtuous. Of course, he also declared, “she is and remains my first and only love,” and stated that her love was his highest possession. Scrupulously honest, Mathilde made her husband her confidant and convinced him to support Wagner financially, provide him with a house next to their own, desist from sexual relations with her, and maintain warm, friendly relations with the composer. Wagner regularly crossed the garden to converse with her, and servants also ferried messages. Minna Wagner did not agree that their love was pure after she intercepted a hotly worded letter. In a rage, she went first to her husband and then to Mathilde. Mathilde, aghast that Wagner had neither been honest with his wife nor mollified her anger, became estranged from the composer and returned to her husband’s bed. Minna moved out, and except for brief periods the Wagners did not live together again.

At 50 Wagner became the lover of 25-year-old Cosima von Bülow, whom he had known for 10 years. She was the daughter of his friend Franz Liszt and Countess Marie d’Agoult, and the wife of his favorite pupil and dear friend, Hans von Bülow. Five years earlier Wagner had been involved with her older sister, Blandine, who was prettier, but Cosima was to become his true love.

On their honeymoon the Von Bülows went to Zurich, where they visited Wagner at the Asyl, the country home of Mathilde Wesendonk, with whom the composer was in love at the time. His wife, Minna, was there also. When Mathilde visited the Asyl, the trio of women Wagner loved—Minna, Mathilde, and Cosima—was assembled under one roof.

In the beginning Cosima was openly shared by Wagner and Von Bülow, but eventually she left her husband, taking their two children, and went to live with Wagner and the two children she had borne him. After Minna died and Von Bülow sued for divorce on grounds of infidelity, Cosima and Richard were married in 1870. She ran the household and Richard’s life efficiently, and emerged as the woman who was best suited to live with the genius on a daily basis.

Wagner died in Cosima’s arms after a heart attack. She clung to his body for 24 hours, then cut off her long hair and placed it in the coffin on his heart.

HIS THOUGHTS:
“Soul, character, talent—everything, in fact, shrivels up unless new and extraordinary relations, and always highly passionate ones, are entered into.”

—P.A.R.

VIII

Rockin’and Rollin’

“God Is Gay”

KURT COBAIN (Feb. 20, 1967–Apr. 5, 1994)

HIS FAME:
Every generation, it seems,

demands its dead idols. The lead singer

of the grunge band Nirvana, Cobain

rose to fame by mainstreaming the

underground post-punk and hardcore

sound of the 1980s, causing an unprecedented sea change in popular music and

the self-image of the American teenager—

yet in addition to the revitalizing energy

he poured into rock music, his suicide in

over popular music, lasting for more

than a decade.

HIS PERSON:
The man who put Seattle

on the map as a cultural mecca, Kurt

Cobain was born in Aberdeen, Washington. His parents divorced when he was a child, an act that profoundly scarred him. An unenthusiastic student, Cobain spent his time pursuing art and baiting the other students by spray-painting messages like “God is Gay” and “Homo Sex Rules” across town, for which he was briefly arrested. Given his first guitar by an uncle at 14, Cobain trained himself to play with determination before meeting bassist Krist Novoselic. The duo instantly gelled, forming the first incarnation of Nirvana. Going through a
Spinal
Tap
-worthy succession of drummers, Nirvana would eventually settle on Dave Grohl, shortly thereafter finding overnight international success with their huge-ly popular second album,
Nevermind
. It was at this time that Kurt found his Yoko: actress, performer, stripper and seasoned rock-star succubus Courtney Love. The two bonded over post-punk music and, especially, heroin, and were married within the year. Love was already pregnant with the couple’s daughter, Frances Bean (allegations that Love had not ceased using heroin during the child’s pregnancy would soon sweep the press). Cobain himself had likely been a user since 1986, and a fully-fledged addict since 1990; he spent most of Nirvana’s successful years nodding out at the wheel and more-than-occasionally overdosing. The stresses of fame mounting through the release of
In Utero
, the band’s tormented 1994 follow-up to
Nevermind
, found Cobain in a suicidal mood. An unsuccessful suicide attempt in March of the year was followed by a successful attempt in April, when Cobain escaped from rehab and was subsequently found dead in his Lake Washington home with a shotgun wound to the head. Although his death was ruled a suicide, many fans believe that he was murdered. Though many blame heroin for Cobain’s downward spiral, he had often remarked that heroin was the only thing keeping him from the grave.

LOVE LIFE:
Cobain’s first and most formative sexual experience was with a developmentally disabled girl. Already suicidal at age 16, and determined to lose his virginity before he went, Kurt followed a “half-retarded” girl home with two of his friends. After they left, he stayed. “I tried to fuck her, but I didn’t know how,” he wrote later. “I got grossed out very heavily with how her vagina smelled and how her sweat reeked, so I left.” Later interrogated by the police after the father claimed his daughter had been molested, Kurt escaped charges when it turned out the girl was over 18, and not legally mentally disabled. Kurt was deeply scarred, however, and incessantly tormented over the scandal. Furthermore, he was friends with a gay student and, though not gay himself, he remarked “I Am Not Gay, Although I wish I were, just to piss off homophobes.”

Cobain was famous for wearing dresses onstage, leading to further rumors.

He was a relentless troublemaker on the behalf of the downtrodden, and he carried this role with him into his adult career, most famously in the lyrics of one of his finest songs, “All Apologies”: “What else could I say? Everyone is gay.”

Some have suspected that Cobain was indeed homosexual and struggled to hide it behind a sham family life and drugs and, eventually, his possible suicide; what is certain, however, is that heroin at times took much of the place of sex for Cobain, gay or straight. Cobain’s sexuality, like that of many addicts, was somewhat less than heroic. He gave up sex completely for a period at the age of 23 and stopped masturbating for months, writing in his journal that “I am a male age 23

and I’m lactating. My breasts have never been so sore, not even after receiving titty twisters from bully schoolmates. I haven’t masturbated in months because I’ve lost my imagination. I close my eyes and I see my father, little girls, German Shepherds, TV news commentators, but no voluptuous pouty-lipped naked female sex kittens wincing in ecstasy. I see lizards and flipper babies.” His meeting with Love, however, changed that—Kurt had had a few short, emotionally traumatic relationships previously (including six months with Bikini Kill’s Tobi Vail), but Courtney was the one. He often spoke in interviews of the couple’s exhibitionist penchant for copulating against walls in public, among many other less-than-appetizing displays (both individuals bore the look of homeless squatters throughout the early nineties; Radio One DJ John Peel once remarked of Love’s appearance, shortly after Cobain’s death, that she “would have drawn whistles of astonishment in Bedlam.” By many accounts, Cobain’s relationship with Courtney Love was a downward spiral of drug abuse and psy-chodrama, with Love continually pushing him further down into the depths and stripping away his self-confidence. Seattle Police Department reports from the couple’s many domestic disturbance calls reek of animalistic rage—Courtney throws a glass at Kurt’s face; Kurt chokes her on the floor and slashes her arms with the broken glass; both parties refuse any medical treatment. The situation only worsened. Drugs and despair took Cobain’s sex drive in turns; after a suicide attempt it had vanished altogether. As Love later told
Spin
magazine, “I
tried to have sex with him in the hospital afterward. He was just gone. Gone.”