The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People (58 page)

HIS THOUGHTS:
“Fame makes me feel wanted and loved. Everybody wants that.”

—J.L.

Victim Of The Kozmic Blues

JANIS JOPLIN (Jan. 19, 1943–Oct. 4, 1970)

HER FAME:
Janis’ whiskey-drenched,

gutbucket brand of blues singing earned

her comparison with the likes of her

idols, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday.

She is remembered for her version of

“Ball and Chain” and her four albums:

Big Brother and the Holding Company
,

Cheap Thrills
,
I Got Dem Ol’ Kozmic Blues
Again Mama
, and
Pearl
.

HER PERSON:
Born into a middle-class family in the conservative

backwater of Port Arthur, Tex., Janis was

made to suffer for her nonconformity at

an early age. She had an artistic bent and

liked to read and paint, but neither activity was accorded much respect by her high school peers. Her “beatnik” lifestyle, coupled with the fact that she was overweight and had severe acne, earned her the cruel nickname of “Pig Face.” In college she was nominated for “Ugliest Man on Campus.” In turn, she adopted a self-defensive pose which stayed with her for the rest of her life—that of a hard-drinking, shoot-up-anything, good-time mama. Ever trying to become one of the boys, she often crossed into nearby Louisiana for the honky-tonk life. It was there that she discovered the blues. She began imitating the style of Bessie Smith and performed for free, or for the price of a drink, in cafés and roadhouses near Port Arthur.

She left home to join Big Brother and the Holding Company, a San Francisco based rock band, as their lead singer. Janis’ virtuoso performance at the first Monterey Pop Festival (captured in the film
Monterey Pop
), coupled with the success of Big Brother’s second album,
Cheap Thrills
, pushed Janis into the nations spotlight and made a cult figure of her. She used drugs and alcohol daily and made no secret of it. Janis pressured the manufacturers of Southern Comfort into giving her a fur coat for all the free publicity she’d given them. Her hell-bent image was adored by her fans and feared by her promoters. Yet at the height of her fame she often wistfully confided to friends that what she really wanted was a home life: “Just give me an old man that comes home, like when he splits at nine, I know he’s gonna come back at six for me and only me, and I’ll take that shit with the two garages and two TVs.” When friends pleaded with her to stop using hard drugs, she told them, “Let’s face it, I’ll never see 30.” While recording her third album in 1970, she returned to her room at the Landmark Hotel in Hollywood and mainlined a large shot of unusually pure heroin. A member of her entourage found her the next morning, dead from an overdose at age 27.

SEX LIFE:
When Janis was 18, she made an illfated first trip to San Francisco in search of the bohemian life she had dreamed of as a high school student. She moved in with a man who soon tired of her and walked out. Throwing her arms around his knees as he walked up a San Francisco hill, she begged him not to leave her. He kept walking, dragging Janis behind him. It was a cathartic moment for her. She picked herself up, said, “O.K., Daddy, what the fuck,” and resolved never again to beg for love. Strung out on Methedrine, broke and alone, she tried to sell her body for five dollars a trick and was devastated when prospective johns either laughed at her or ignored her completely. She eventually returned to Port Arthur to lick her wounds. She said of herself in this period: “I’d’ve fucked anything, taken anything … I did. I’d take it, suck it, lick it, smoke it, shoot it, drop it, fall in love with it….”

In 1966 she made her second trip to San Francisco with an emissary from Big Brother, who made love to her in order to secure her services as a singer. Later, she delighted in telling people how she had been “fucked into being in Big Brother.”

Her constant and graphic remarks about her love life became a Joplin trademark.

Although her primary interest was heterosexual, Janis often enjoyed sex with women, and sometimes liked to indulge in threesomes with her girl friends and men she picked up at random. She had a come-on style all her own and frequently panicked potential sex partners with the directness of her approach: “I thought we’d go back to the dressing room and get it on.” For these casual encounters she favored “pretty young boys” of 16 or 17.

The schoolyard taunts she had suffered stayed with her to the extent that she was unable to handle her sexy, onstage image, although her performances had the same effect on men that Jimi Hendrix’s and Mick Jagger’s did on women. She frequently commented that she was too ugly to attract men, and was heard to lament, “I’m a big star and I can’t even get laid.” Actually, she got laid quite a lot, but seldom more than a few times by the same person. Once, after a long train trip, she complained that there were over 365 men on board and she’d had sex with only 65 of them. Terrified of rejection, she histrionically faked orgasm at times, feeling that if she didn’t have one it was
her
fault. On other occasions she wore partners down with demands for nonstop sex. She never let pickups become too close, because she feared being financially exploited.

Janis made a distinction between sex for the hell of it and serious relationships, and even considered marriage with one of her lovers. Her most serious relationship with a “star” involved Kris Kristofferson, with whom she fell in love.

Unfortunately, a romantic triangle occurred when one of Janis’ female lovers fell for him too. She also had a four-month affair with singer Country Joe McDonald, who described her as “pretty” and “a very feminine woman.”

According to Peggy Caserta in her book,
Going Down with Janis
, she also slept with a number of other well-known personalities.

HER THOUGHTS:
“My music isn’t supposed to make you wanna riot! My music is supposed to make you wanna fuck!”

“Onstage I make love to 25,000 people, then I go home alone.”

—M.J.T.

Ride The Snake

JIM MORRISON (Dec. 8, 1943–July 3, 1971)

HIS FAME:
The lead singer of The Doors,

Jim Morrison remains an enduring

symbol of priapic adolescent lust (rock

critic Lester Bangs called him a “Bozo

Dionysus”), his burning gaze staring

forth from the wall of suburban teenage

bedrooms, his throne in the Valhalla of

Dead Rock Stars secured for eternity.

HIS PERSON:
The son of an admiral,

Morrison was raised throughout the

United States, never settling in one place

for long. However, it was the landscapes

and mythology of the Southwest that left

the most lasting mark on the young man,

and would later come to haunt his lyrics.

After studying film at UCLA, Morrison

lived itinerantly on Venice Beach, writing poetry. After showing some of it to fellow student Ray Manzarek, the two formed a pact to start a band, taking the name The Doors from a line in William Blake’s
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
:

“If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.” After the quick addition of musicians Robby Krieger and John Densmore, the band was complete; their initial gigs at the Whisky-A-Go-Go in Los Angeles put them well on the road to stardom; they were signed to Elektra

Records in 1967. Their first album,
The Doors
, was a massive black sheep in an era of flower power, charting Morrison’s excursions into his id with murder ballads like “The End,” a long Oedipal freak-out in which he fantasizes about murdering his father and fucking his mother “all night long.” In a career-making appearance on
The Ed Sullivan Show
, Morrison scandalized the nation by clearly singing the word “higher” in “Light My Fire.” They were soon one of the most popular bands in the country, soundtracking the country’s dark passage through war and assassination. His Dionysian good looks didn’t last for long, however; fame and alcoholism took their toll and Morrison was smashed on the rocks, a corpulent Rasputin, by 1969. At a concert in Miami he finally “gave the audience what they wanted” and exposed himself on stage, for which he was arrested. The band split up the following year, and Morrison moved to Paris with his common-law wife Pamela Courson to pursue his writing career. He was dead by June 1971, at the age of 27 (there are persistent rumors that he faked it), found by Courson bloated and KO’d from a heroin overdose in his bathtub. His gravesite in Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris remains one of the most frequented, and vandalized, plots in the world, haunted by generation after generation of devoted fans.

SEX LIFE:
What can be said about the man who made leather pants fashionable, and who had over 20 paternity suits pending against him at the time of his death?

The Doors shot to prominence largely because the Whisky nightclub in Los Angeles continually booked them due to female frenzy—Elmer Valentine of the Whiskey recalls “The chicks, the chicks, the chicks all asking ‘Is that horny moth-erfucker in black pants there tonight?’” Some of these calls were arranged by the band themselves; in a brilliant PR moment, Morrison dubbed the band “erotic politicians.” Despite his revelry, Morrison remained in a relationship with L.A.

groupie Pamela Courson from before the time of his success to the time of his death (she overdosed and died a few years after him). They maintained an open, and frequently tense, arrangement. Though he slept with numerous groupies and celebrities—including Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane,
16 Magazine
editor-in-chief Gloria Stavers, Janis Joplin and Nico, who was utterly obsessed with him—the real “other woman” in his relationship was rock critic, science fiction writer and witch Patricia Kennealy. Kennealy played High Priestess to Morrison’s High Priest, bewitching him with tales the old Goddess Religion, of her status in her coven, and of her hereditary connection to old witch and shamanic lineages, something she shared in common with Morrison. Jim was so impressed and so sought a deeper connection with Kennealy that he regularly removed her diaphragm before sex—this would eventually result in the conception of a child that Kennealy aborted. In her memoir of the relationship,
Strange Days
, Kennealy spoke of wanting “molecular fusion” with Morrison. The two were wedded in a Celtic Pagan handfasting ceremony, and their relationship soon ratcheted Morrison’s darkside trip up even further. His increasing involvement in the occult wound up in blood-drinking rituals—coked out of his mind, Jim spent an evening quaffing blood out of the wrists of a Scandinavian groupie named Ingrid Thompson. Kennealy, however, blamed Courson’s heroin death trip for
Morrison’s end; the triangle between Morrison, Kennealy and Courson was vicious to say the least (Kennealy called Courson “The Redheaded Remora”).

HIS THOUGHTS:
“Sex is full of lies. The body tries to tell the truth, but it’s usually too battered with rules to be heard, and bound with pretenses so it can hardly move. We cripple ourselves with lies.”

—J.L.

I’ll Be Your Mirror

NICO (Oct. 16, 1938–July 18, 1988)

HER FAME:
Singer, musician, fashion

model, actress and Warhol icon Nico cast

a long shadow over the New York artistic

underground of the 1960s and, by proxy,

the world art scene. Most famous for her

appearance on the Velvet Underground’s

first album at Andy Warhol’s request,

Nico proceeded to quietly record several

solo albums that are remembered as

bleak masterpieces that predated or,

more accurately, created Goth.

HER PERSON:
Born out of wedlock in

Cologne in 1938, Christa Päffgen came

into the world just in time to be conscious

through the horrors of the fall of the