The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People (57 page)

In his “suicide” note, Cobain poured out his feelings of self-loathing and unworthiness, and proclaimed “I have a goddess of a wife who sweats ambition and empathy and a daughter who reminds me too much of what I used to be, full of love and joy, kissing every person she meets because everyone is good and will do her no harm. And that terrifies me to the point where I can barely function.”

HIS THOUGHTS:
“I started being really proud of the fact that I was gay even though I wasn’t.”

—J.L.

Are You Experienced?

JIMI HENDRIX (Nov. 27, 1942–Sept. 18, 1970)

HIS FAME:
Jimi Hendrix has been

hailed as the greatest rock ‘n’ roll guitar

virtuoso in history.
Life
magazine called

him “a rock demigod,”
The New York

Times
called him “the black Elvis,” and

John Lennon called him the “Pied Piper

of rock.” Among his many hit songs were

“Hey Joe,” “Foxy Lady,” and “Purple

Haze.” Among his hit albums were
Are

You Experienced?
and
Electric Ladyland
.

All these remain classics of acid rock.

HIS PERSON:
As a guitar player, Jimi

was unique, outstandingly daring and

ground-breaking. As a performer, he was,

well … you had to see it to believe it. He

wore outlandish, crazy clothes. He writhed, he snaked, he moaned around the stage. He played his guitar at earsplitting volume with his teeth, his tongue, his elbow; but mostly, it seemed, with his crotch. One of the most sexual performers in history, Hendrix thrust his guitar madly against his groin and rubbed it between his thighs, often ending these orgasmic episodes by smashing the guitar to bits in an explosion of love and fury. At the Monterey Pop Festival of 1967, after a particularly explosive performance, he caused a sensation by dousing his guitar with lighter fluid and setting it on fire. He eventually grew tired of all these histrionics and wanted to be appreciated purely for his musical ability.

Onstage, Jimi was a wild man. Offstage, he could be anything—polite and gentlemanly, someone you could bring home to your mother (except for his

clothes and general appearance), or angry and destructive. He was a true enig-ma. Everyone describes him differently. Sometimes he was painfully withdrawn, shy, and inarticulate. And then again he could be voluble and gregarious. Some who knew him claim it was impossible to get really close to him; others speak wistfully of the deep intimacy they shared with him. But who knew what he was really like? Possibly Jimi was as confused about himself as everyone else. He frequently had fits of violence and tears, beating up girl friends and smashing furniture, for which he would apologize abjectly afterwards. His song lyrics ranged, like Jimi himself, from the cosmic:
Purple Haze was in my brain

Lately things don’t seem the same

Actin’ funny, but I don’t know why

Scuse me while I kiss the sky.

to the fleshly

But first are You experienced?

Ah! have you ever been experienced?

Well, I have.

He certainly frequented parts of the mind that most of us have never visited once.

Jimi Hendrix’s cultural heritage may be a key to his many-sidedness. His father was an easygoing black gardener in Seattle, his mother was a hard-drinking American Indian, and his stepmother was Japanese. For most of his life Jimi was not especially conscious of his “blackness” and chose his friends and lovers from all races and nationalities. He picked up the guitar at an early age, left home to join the army, became a parachute jumper, and was discharged when he was injured. Then he began his travels, playing backup guitar for such greats as the Isley Brothers, B. B. King, Sam Cooke, Wilson Pickett, Ike and Tina Turner, King Curtis, James Brown, and Little Richard.

In 1966 he was discovered in New York by Chas Chandler, formerly of the Animals. Chandler took him to England, put him together with two English musicians, and managed the Jimi Hendrix Experience. They took England by storm but scandalized mothers and teenyboppers in America, where they opened the show for the clean-cut Monkees. The Experience was thrown off the tour, which was great publicity.
Rolling Stone
called Jimi “the first black performer to take on white rock ‘n’ roll head-on and win.”

Jimi handled success relatively well at first, but eventually business and legal difficulties, the pressures of the road, and the breakup of the band exhausted and depressed him. Popular opinion holds that Jimi was a heavy drug abuser. And he did try everything—LSD, uppers, booze, even snorting a little heroin. The manner of his shocking, sudden death at 27 added to the reputation. He took too many sleeping pills and died of suffocation, having inhaled his own vomit.

Some called it suicide, but it was undoubtedly at least as much an accident as Janis Joplin’s tragic drug death three weeks later.

The loss of Jimi Hendrix truly rocked the rock ‘n’ roll world. A genius was dead.

SEX LIFE:
The consummate superstud, Hendrix is something of a sexual legend today. His appetite was voracious, and he often indulged it with three or more girls at a sitting (or lying). He was exotically good-looking,
very
famous, and so sexy. Women flocked to him like bees to honey. And what a honey he was reputed to be! One girl said his member was “damn near big as his guitar.” He was one of the major black sex symbols for white women of the 1960s.

Jimi started early. Never shy about finding women, although self-conscious about his skinny chest and long arms and legs, he had his first sex at age 12. At age 15 he was expelled from high school for holding hands with a white girl during class. When his teacher confronted him with this crime, he replied,

“What’s the matter? Are you jealous?”

Jimi’s immense popularity and his cooperation with groupies (he called them “Band-Aids”) led to an unusual experience. In Chicago two chubby teenaged groupies devised a scheme to make themselves something special on the competitive market. They called themselves the Plaster Casters, dedicated to making molds and then true-to-life reproductions of rock stars’ penises.

Although one of the girls performed fellatio prior to the casting, it was often difficult for the stars to sustain their erections in the wet plaster. But not Jimi. One of the Plaster Casters wrote, “He has got just about the biggest rig I’ve ever seen!

… He even kept his hard for the entire minute. He got stuck, however, for about 15 minutes (his hair did) but he was an excellent sport—didn’t panic … actually enjoyed it and balled the impression after it had set. In fact, I believe the reason we couldn’t get his rig out was that it wouldn’t GET SOFT!”

SEX PARTNERS:
Despite his rampant promiscuity, Jimi had a number of intimate relationships. Today some of these girls vie for the envied historical position of having been the greatest love in Jimi Hendrix’s life. Any girl who attained this status would still be second to Jimi’s guitar, which he called his

“Electric Lady.” His greatest human love was probably Kathy Etchingham, an attractive redheaded English girl with whom he lived on and off in London for over three years. She said that Jimi “used girls like some people smoke cigarettes,” and that he had children in Sweden, the United States, and Germany.

Kathy usually didn’t mind his groupie infidelities. There were occasions, though, when one or the other got jealous, and there were fights. During one of these, Jimi fractured Kathy’s nose with his foot. She took her revenge by hitting him over the head with a frying pan while he was asleep. Once she was attacked and viciously beaten by four jealous groupies. Later, when Kathy married, her husband agreed that she could still go out with Jimi.

There were a number of other girls with whom Jimi had involved relationships; some he lived with, but never monogamously. “If I stay with one person too long,” he said, “I feel more obligated than I do pleased.”

One long-lasting, unconventional relationship was with groupie Devon Wilson. Devon was black, tall, voluptuous, regal (she looked like Jimi), bright, and wily. She was totally into sex, and also totally into heroin (which Jimi did not approve of ). She had been a teenage prostitute, had been rescued by com-Rockin and Rollin / poser Quincy Jones, and eventually turned Queen of the Groupies. She served for years as Jimi’s lover, pimp, secretary, drug procurer, and girl Friday. In return he gave her companionship, a salary, sex, love of a sort, and a distinguished position among her peers. He wrote a song about her, half-erotic, half-sardonic—called “Dolly Dagger”—(a word play on her on-off affair with Mick Jagger, of whom Jimi was a little jealous) which went: “… her love’s so heavy / Gonna make you stagger.”

One unconsummated passion (these were rare) was with singer Marianne Faithfull, then Mick Jagger’s girl friend. One night after playing in a London club, Jimi seated himself between Mick and Marianne at their table. According to biographer David Henderson, Jimi turned his back to Mick and whispered in Marianne’s ear that he “wanted to fuck her and that she should leave Mick who was a cunt and come with him, right now.” A tempted Marianne refused.

When Jimi met Monika Danneman, a tall German ice-skating instructor, he played a whole concert to her in the midst of a crowd of thousands. Naturally, it thrilled her, but she played it cool for a while. Monika did fall madly in love with Jimi, and he was her first lover. She claimed they were going to be married, which friends doubted. True love or not, it was Monika who was with him the night he died.

HIS THOUGHTS:
“It was fun. I didn’t know it was anger until they told me that it was—all that destruction. Maybe everybody should have a room where they can get rid of all their inhibitions. So my room was a stage.”

—A.W.

Take My Breath Away

MICHAEL HUTCHENCE (Jan. 22, 1960–Nov. 22, 1997)

HIS FAME:
The lead singer of Australian chart-toppers INXS, Michael Hutchence was one of the most prominent, charismatic and successful rock musicians of the 1980s. He rode high throughout the ‘80s, dating supermodels and actresses and launching his own acting career before crashing in the ‘90s and, eventually, committing suicide in 1997 in an act of autoerotic asphyxiation.

HIS PERSON:
Born in Sydney and raised in Hong Kong, Hutchence was the son of a model-turned-makeup artist and a businessman. Returning to Sydney in his teens, he befriended Andrew Farriss—along with Farriss’ brothers and friends, the duo would form the band The Farriss Brothers, which would soon change its name to INXS with the release of their first album in 1980. It was under this name that Hutchence proceeded to co-write and perform, with Farriss, some of the most crowd-pleasing rock songs of the 1980s, such as “New Sensation,” “Devil Inside”

and “Need You Tonight.” Producing

several
Billboard
smash albums, their

popularity peaked with 1987’s album

Kick
. In many ways INXS had found

themselves in the right place at the right

time: instead of remaining another Stones

knock-off Australian pub-rock band,

INXS was perfectly suited to capitalize on

the new medium of the music video. Both

Hutchence’s mother and sister were

actresses and he had spent much of his

youth on film sets. Combined with the

looks and fashion sense he had inherited

from his model mother, Hutchence was

the nascent MTV network’s dream come

true. By the 1990s, however, the band’s

slick and accessible style was on the way out: attempts to experiment with the band’s sound met with complete critical and financial disaster in the United States, despite success in the UK and Europe. A 1997 comeback effort,
Elegantly Wasted
, completely tanked in the U.S. yet again; it was tragically followed by Hutchence’s probably accidental death in November of the year—he was found hung by a belt in his Sydney hotel room, ruled the result of autoerotic asphyxiation.

SEX PARTNERS:
If Hutchence’s final moments were lonely ones, such was not the case throughout the preceding years. One of the most recognizable sex symbols of the decade, Hutchence’s every move was trailed by the Australian tabloids as he dated a string of actresses, supermodels and singers—most famously the nascent Aussie diva Kylie Minogue in 1989, whom he helped to transform from an innocent soap actress into the internationally-worshiped sex-bomb performer she quickly became. Hutchence penned the song “Suicide Blonde” about her. Of the pair’s relationship, Minogue later stated, “Everything I know about sex, I learned from Michael.” Their life together fell apart after Kylie caught Michael cheating on her with the supermodel Helena Christensen. Other romances included the transsexual model April Ashley, 25 years his senior, and British television presenter Paula Yates, whom he began dating after his relationship with Kylie Minogue fell by the wayside. Yates left her husband, Boomtown Rats frontman and humanitarian bard Bob Geldof, for Hutchence in 1995, after almost a decade together. Divorce was finalized within months—Hutchence and Yates’ daughter, Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily Hutchence, was born shortly thereafter. Their couplehood was shortlived—Yates spiraled into depression after Hutchence’s death, refusing to accept the suicide verdict, and subsequently found herself locked in a custody battle with Hutchence’s mother and sister for the custody of her daughter. Kylie Minogue has claimed at times to the press that she believes that Hutchence’s ghost still watches over her. “People might think I’m mad,” she stated in the years following his death, “but I feel his
presence. It’s very personal. He checks in with me and it’s typical of him that I feel his presence just when I need him most. It’s not spooky, it’s reassuring, although the force of his presence can be scary.”