The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People (87 page)

physical orgasm. Father Divine—the exalted, the beloved, the God incarnate—

would watch complacently.

HIS ADVICE:
“The spirit of the consciousness of the presence of God is the source of all supply and will satisfy every desire and it does.”

—N.C.S.

The Infallible Healer

MARY BAKER EDDY (July 16, 1821–Dec. 3, 1910)

HER FAME:
Mary Morse Baker Eddy

was the founder of the Christian Science

Church. Her book,
Science and Health

with Key to the Scriptures
, which at the

time of her death had appeared in 160

editions, was the basic tract for her

church and dealt in large part with

mental healing. Mrs. Eddy was also

responsible for establishing the newspaper
The Christian Science Monitor
.

HER PERSON:
Mary Morse Baker, the

youngest of six children divided equally

between boys and girls, was born in

Bow, N.H. Her father, Mark, was a pious,

hardworking farmer. Mary was small,

delicate, and rather pretty, with wavy brown hair and striking blue eyes. She was a sickly child who suffered from hysterical seizures, often throwing tantrums to get her way. As a result, she was sometimes treated by the family doctor with mesmerism and mental suggestion. Mary was also a romantic child with a penchant for writing flowery verse, and in adulthood she fancied herself an author.

In 1843 she married George Washington Glover, a hearty building contrac-tor, and they moved to Wilmington, N.C. There, after less than a year of marriage, Glover died of yellow fever, and Mary, pregnant, was forced to move back to her father’s home in New Hampshire. In 1844 she gave birth to a son, George Washington Glover II. Mary did not take well to motherhood, and at the age of 6 George was sent off to Minnesota to live with foster parents. Mary did not see him again for 23 years. (Her father said: “Mary acts like an old ewe that won’t own its lamb.”) In Bow, Mary became a chronic invalid, having to be rocked to sleep in her father’s arms. Her sister Abigail had a huge cradle constructed for her, and

neighborhood boys often earned extra

money by rocking Mary to sleep.

In 1862, still suffering from extreme

hysteria, Mary visited Phineas P. Quimby,

a famous Maine faith healer, and was at

least temporarily cured. She was much

taken with Quimby’s methods and studied with him for a time. In 1866 she fell

on an icy sidewalk and was once again

incapacitated. This time, however, she

was able to “cure” herself by reading the

Bible. Her recovery eventually led to the

development of her Christian Science

Church. In 1875 she published
Science

and Health
, and through the strength of

her personality as much as the merits of

Asa Gilbert Eddy become Mary’s third husband

her book, she managed to gain adherents

throughout New England. By the time of her death at 89, she’d earned more than $400,000 in book royalties and left behind a flourishing church.

SEX LIFE:
Her first love came when she was 15. Andrew Gault, her neighborhood swain, was 21. Though Mary went so far as to write him a love poem, the only one she ever wrote, Andrew married someone else. Her marriage to George Washington Glover having ended tragically, she went into a mental and physical tailspin.

Nine years later she married Dr. Daniel Patterson, an itinerant dentist who had a reputation as a philanderer. He was off on trips much of the time, and Mary spent most of their married life as an invalid. During the Civil War Dr.

Patterson joined the Union Army, was captured by the Confederates, and passed most of the war in prison. Shortly after returning to his wife, Patterson left home for good in 1866, and Mary, now deeply involved in her mental healing, took on several protégés, including young Richard Kennedy, with whom she set up a profitable “healing” business. She also took on the writing of her book,
Science and Health
, and finished the first draft in 1870. In 1873 she finally divorced Patterson on grounds of desertion, though she later insisted that it was because of adultery. Patterson sent Mary an allowance of $200 a year. In 1896 he died in a Maine poorhouse.

In 1877 Mary was wedded to Asa Gilbert Eddy, a sewing-machine salesman who became the first person to announce publicly that he was a Christian Scientist. On their marriage certificate, the 56-year-old Mrs. Eddy gave her age as 40. The presence of a new husband seemed to aggravate Mary’s various illnesses. More and more often she found Eddy irritating. Said biographer Dakin: “He was constant in his efforts to please her and to anticipate her whims; but she showed an increasing annoyance at his slowness, his round awkwardness, and his rather rustic manners and appearance.” She did not have to put up with him too long. In 1882 Eddy died of organic heart disease.

But Mary had become used to having a man nearby, and the same year as Eddy’s death a young machinist named Calvin Frye entered her life. He served as her steward, secretary, bookkeeper, and footman until her death. In 1888 she met Dr. Ebenezer Johnson Foster, a homeopathic physician, and adopted him as her son. In Mary’s later years, all the men close to her seemed to have one thing in common: They were inferior to her and she could easily manipulate them. When she couldn’t, she got rid of them by accusing them of being “mesmerists.”

QUIRKS:
She believed fervently in something she called “malicious animal magnetism” (M.A.M.), which she thought her enemies were using to destroy her. (When her last husband, Asa Gilbert Eddy, died, she insisted that the cause was arsenic poisoning at the hands of the “mesmerists,” by the use of M.A.M.) In order to protect herself, she created a select bodyguard of “watchers” to ward off these attacks of mental mesmerism. As Mrs. Eddy’s stature in the community grew, she found it necessary to institute numerous lawsuits (all of which were thrown out of court) against her enemies and their use of M.A.M. In fact, one of the reasons she took on Calvin Frye was his supposed efficacy as an “antimesmerist.”

Eventually Mrs. Eddy began to think herself infallible and became extremely autocratic in her rule. She preferred that her followers call her

“Mother,” and she wrote memos about controlling the weather through mental processes. Continuing to suffer from bouts of hysteria, she took morphine to ease her physical pain. She advised complete celibacy as the only true spiritual state.

HER THOUGHTS:
About marriage she said, “it is often convenient, sometimes pleasant, and occasionally a love affair. Marriage is susceptible of many definitions. It sometimes presents the most wretched condition of human existence.” Her last written words were “God is my life.”

—C.H.S.

Tempted By The Devil

MARTIN LUTHER (Nov. 10, 1483-Feb. 18, 1546)

HIS FAME:
A strong-willed monk, Luther challenged the Roman Catholic Church and inaugurated the 16th-century Protestant Reformation. Following his excommunication, Luther startled theologians by marrying a nun and dedicating his life to the establishment of a religious movement that took a more personal approach to presenting the gospel. Lutheran churches still flourish, using as their foundation the precepts the founder originally laid down in the 100 volumes he wrote.

HIS PERSON:
Dominated by autocratic parents, Luther was often beaten

by his father, a copper miner. As a

result Luther suffered through a sickly

and sad childhood. While growing up,

he joined his impoverished family

members as they slept together naked—

thus providing the impressionable

youngster an opportunity to witness

sexual acts.

Although he found school boring,

Luther readily submitted to his father’s

suggestion that he enter law school.

However, he quickly abandoned his

legal education and entered an Augustinian monastery. Ordained in 1507,

his order sent him to the University of Wittenberg, where, in 1512, he received the degree of Doctor of Theology.

Luther gradually developed hostilities toward the Church. On Oct. 31, 1517, he posted on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg his scandalous 95 Theses. In the theses, Luther denounced the church practice of selling indulgences. (An indulgence was sold to a sinner by the Church to lessen the punishment for a sin.)

Labeled a “drunken German” by Pope Leo X, Luther appeared before an ecclesiastical court and shocked the assembled clergymen by accusing the pope of being “no better than any other stinking sinner.” Luther was excommunicated and faced probable execution, but he escaped and was harbored by German knights who supported his cause. He resurfaced as a folk hero a year later and became the acknowledged leader of the Reformation.

Throughout his life Luther suffered from indigestion, constipation, kidney stones, and hemorrhoids, but his painful ailments didn’t slow his crusade to reform the Catholic Church. He was supported by a vociferous following, and his profound religious impact was still evident even after his death.

SEX LIFE:
As spiritual head of a new church that celebrated but two sacra-ments—baptism and communion—Luther advocated the elimination of clerical celibacy. He believed sex was not sinful, and insisted intercourse was as necessary as eating and drinking.

Luther supported wedlock for the clergy, and he practiced what he preached. Shortly after severing ties with the Catholic Church, he established an underground railroad to help nuns escape their cloisters. One of them, Katharina von Bora, became his wife after another of the other nuns he had aided rejected his offer of marriage. Luther married the reddish-haired runaway nun to spite the pope, to avenge his hatred for the devil, and to please his father, who was concerned that the family name would die out. The excommunicated monk insisted nothing could cure his lust, not even marriage.

Luther learned to live with this lust, and apparently he was never unfaithful to Katharina. Reflecting on his marriage, he once said: “Man has strange thoughts the first year of marriage. When sitting at the table he thinks,

‘Before I was alone; now there are two.’ Or in bed, when he wakes up, he sees a pair of pigtails lying beside him which he hadn’t seen there before.”

Prior to marrying Katharina, Luther spoke openly of his “temptations of the flesh” and said that he and many of his fellow monks at the Augustinian monastery in Erfurt, Germany, had experienced “nocturnal pollutions.” Luther frequently waited more than a year to change his bed sheets, permitting them to become saturated with the foul smell of sweat, and after his marriage he often touched “specified parts” of his wife’s body while being tempted by the devil.

The devil lost his greatest battles “right in bed, next to Katie.”

Throughout his life Luther staged a haunting personal battle with Satan, who manifested himself in a variety of disguises. Luther was known to cry out to the devil, “I have shit in the pants, and you can hang them around your neck and wipe your mouth with it,” and he boasted he could drive away the evil spirit “with a single fart.” He had an intimate relationship with his bowel movements and regularly wrote home giving a box score of his defecations.

Although he believed women were emotionally weaker than men, and craved sex more intensely then their male counterparts, Luther confessed in a 1519 sermon that his own sexual desires were overpowering. He considered sex a natural function ordained by God and therefore supported the idea that an impotent man should supply a sexual partner for his wife.

Luther and his wife had six children of their own and raised 11 orphans as well. Their marriage lasted 21 years, from 1525 until Luther died of a stroke in 1546. Despite his religious radicalism, Luther wasn’t ready for a domestic reformation. He believed the man was to rule his wife, and she was to give him not only love but also honor and obedience. In Luther’s eyes women were meant to stay at home. “The way they were created indicates this, for they have broad hips and a wide fundament to sit upon.” He preferred bigamy to divorce and thought that if a married man needed another female companion to satisfy his sexual needs, he should feel free to take a second woman as a mistress. History does not record Katharina’s position on this patriarchal philosophy, but she may have deferred to it to preserve domestic harmony.