The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People (93 page)

The Frustrated Sex Expert

MARIE STOPES (Oct. 15, 1880–Oct. 2, 1958)

HER FAME:
A contemporary of the

American birth-control crusader Margaret Sanger, Stopes established the first

birth-control clinic in Great Britain,

where, through her numerous writings,

she advocated healthy pleasurable sex

lives for women.

HER PERSON:
She and her younger

sister were the product of an essentially

sexless marriage. Her mother, who was 40

when Marie was born, confused sexual

ignorance with virtue, and because of her

influence Marie went through the first 36

years of her life, including a five-year

marriage, as a virgin. At this unhappy

juncture in her life, Marie turned from botany and coal research, in which fields she was a recognized authority, to write a manual called
Married Love
. In 1918 this book and its companion work, titled
Wise Parenthood
, created an international sensation, mostly for discussing the subject of birth control openly. (Both books were banned by the U.S. postal authorities as “obscene.”) The publication of her books, and the largely positive public response to them, inspired Stopes to found the Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress. She also engaged the religious establishment, especially the Catholic Church, in a vicious battle for the minds of the masses. That battle reached its climax in a prolonged libel suit brought by Stopes against the Catholic doctor Halliday Sutherland. In a book of his own on birth control, he had questioned Marie’s qualifications for dealing with the subject and accused her of “exposing the poor to experiment” in offering them the means to control birth. On a third appeal before the House of Lords, the suit was settled in favor of Sutherland. Stopes was made to pay a modest fine and court costs, but she more than made up for her losses since the publicity surrounding her trial generated an enormous sale of her book.

SEX LIFE:

Q.
—With regards to your husband’s parts, did they ever get rigid at all?

A.
—On hundreds of occasions on which we had what I thought were relations, I only remember three occasions on which it was partially rigid, and then it was never effectively rigid….

Q.—And he never succeeded in penetrating into your private parts?

A.—No.

Stopes was a certified virgin when she gave this testimony in a London divorce court in 1916. A sympathetic court annulled her marriage to Dr. Reginald Gates, who in five years had failed to consummate their marriage.

In truth, most of Marie’s sex life was deserving of sympathy. She didn’t get her first kiss until she was 24, and then it was from a married Japanese who was culturally opposed to kissing and had to be shown how. She’d met Kenjiro Fujii in 1904 while they were both researchers at the University of Munich. She played down her interest in him by ridiculing his shortness in letters written home to her mother, but in private she’d wrap herself tightly in a girdle to simulate the feeling of his arms around her. After five “physically pure” years, the relationship ended when Fujii, who was by then divorced, developed a psychosomatic illness at the thought of marriage to Marie.

Although against lesbianism throughout her career, Marie nonetheless attracted the attention of two older women. Clotilde van Wyss, one of Marie’s teachers at North London Collegiate, and Dr. Helen McMurchy, a Canadian she met in 1908, both took a passionate interest in Marie; however, biographer Ruth Hall doubts that either relationship ever became overtly sexual since Marie was so naive she didn’t even know what masturbation was until she was 29.

Marie finally learned about sex from books and Aylmer Maude, a translator of Tolstoi 22 years her senior. He had come to live with Marie and Reginald Gates a year after their 1911 marriage, and it was he who first pointed out the abnormality of her relationship with Gates. For this observation Maude became Marie’s confidant and platonic lover, until Reginald Gates threw him out of his house.

Marie finally lost her virginity in 1918 to Humphrey Verdon Roe, her second husband and partner in her birth-control campaign. The Roes viewed birth control as a means of purifying their race; Marie at one point even suggested that Britain pass a bill to “ensure the sterility of the hopelessly rotten and racially diseased.” In the latter group she put her daughter-in-law Mary Wallis, who married Marie’s only child, Harry Roe. Mary suffered from nearsightedness, and Marie therefore railed against the marriage as a eugenic disaster.

In reality it was Marie’s second marriage that was the disaster. In 1938, after years of frustration, she demanded and received from Roe a letter in which he confessed his own sexual inadequacy and granted her the right to carry on extramarital affairs. Despite the existence of such a letter and the mutual attraction that existed between Marie and younger men, it seems probable that she lived vicariously, and that the high point of her sexual life may well have been 1918.

QUIRKS:
Even as a septuagenarian, Marie maintained that her real age was 26.

On her 70th birthday, her son wrote to her: “Darling Mummy, Very many happy returns on your 26th birthday. Isn’t it funny that never again will we be the same age, and that from next March on I will be older than you.”

—D.R.

SCIENTISTS

The Devoted Physicist

ALBERT EINSTEIN (Mar. 14, 1879–Apr. 18, 1955)

HIS FAME:
In a succession of scientific

papers authored during the 20th century’s first two decades, Albert Einstein

revolutionized physics. His theories of

special and general relativity rank among

science’s most profound achievements,

and he accordingly is considered to be

among history’s greatest thinkers.

HIS PERSON:
Despite the universal

acclaim for his genius that was to come,

Einstein’s early school years in Germany

proved inauspicious and his parents at

first feared he was a bit below normal in

intelligence. In 1895 his application to

Zurich’s prestigious Polytechnic Academy

was rejected. It took a year of remedial

schooling before Einstein was accepted by that institution. In 1900 he graduated, but his request for an academic appointment was denied and he soon found it necessary to take a job as an examiner in the Swiss patent office in Bern. In 1905

he wrote “A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions,” which was published in a scholarly journal. For this thesis the University of Zurich awarded him a Ph.D. That same year he published a paper on the special theory of relativity, and soon afterward he embarked on his career as a university professor.

A few years after the 1916 publication of his work on the general theory of relativity, Einstein found himself accorded “superstar” status. Universities clamored for him to join their faculties, fellow scientists sought his advice, and political and charitable groups competed for his support. But Einstein, true to his image as the genius lost in thought, restricted his nonscientific involvements to two causes that remained dear to him: pacifism and Zionism.

LOVE LIFE:
Einstein’s love life, what is known of it, starts with his 1903 marriage to Mileva Maric, a mathematics student he met while both were university students in Zurich. Their marriage was ill starred. For Einstein, physics came first; the

demands made by a wife ranked a distant second. Yet Einstein soon fathered two sons—Hans Albert and Edward. In many respects the marriage seemed stable. In time, however, Mileva’s moody, introverted personality clashed with Einstein’s vitality and humor. Finally, in April of 1914, Einstein accepted a position at the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin. Mileva and the boys went along to the capital but decided to vacation in Switzerland during the summer. When the eruption of WWI prevented them from rejoining Einstein in Berlin, they stayed in Zurich. Einstein remained in Berlin and, during the war’s course, made only a few trips to visit his family in Switzerland. After a final visit in 1916, Einstein confided to a friend that his decision never again to see Mileva was “irrevocable.”

She interfered, it seems, with his ability to concentrate on physics, his greatest love.

In 1919 they were divorced, and Einstein confidently pledged to Mileva the proceeds of the Nobel Prize he anticipated. That confidence was well placed. He won the prize in 1921 and promptly delivered on his promise. It is not known whether he fulfilled a second, more mysterious, promise: “You will see,” he wrote Mileva,

“that I will always remain true to you—in my way.”

Meanwhile in Berlin, Einstein had been spending increasing amounts of time in the company of the daughter of his father’s cousin, Elsa Lowenthal, the widowed mother of two girls. Elsa and Einstein had known each other as children and had corresponded sporadically over the years. When, in 1917, Einstein fell seriously ill with stomach trouble, he had already moved in with Elsa, who nursed him back to health. After his recovery Einstein stayed on, and within months of divorcing Mileva he married his former “nurse.” Although Einstein accepted Elsa’s children as his own, all accounts point to his relationship with their mother as one rooted not in passion but in convenience. She kept the material aspects of his life in order, taking responsibility for feeding and clothing him and maintaining his home. Once, when asked what he gave in return, Einstein cryptically commented, “My understanding.”

After Elsa’s death in 1936, Einstein—by then a resident of Princeton, N.J.—remained a widower until his own death. He remained close, in those years, to his elder son, Hans Albert, and saw to it that his younger son, Edward, who suffered from serious emotional disorders, received proper care in the institutions where he passed much of his adulthood.

HIS THOUGHTS:
“Don’t have any children. It makes divorce so much more complicated.”

“When women are in their homes, they are attached to their furniture. They run around it all day long and are always fussing with it. But when I am with a woman on a journey, I am the only piece of furniture that she has available, and she cannot refrain from moving around me all day and improving something about me.”

“Falling in love is not at all the most stupid thing that people do—but gravitation cannot be held responsible for it.”

“It is a sad fact that Man does not live for pleasure alone.”

—R.M.

Women Versus The Wireless

GUGLIELMO MARCONI (Apr. 25, 1874–July 20, 1937)

HIS FAME:
The Italian electrical engineer’s invention of wireless transmitters

and receivers pioneered longdistance

wireless telegraphy and opened a new era

in communications.

HIS PERSON:
Marconi struck many

people as a dull, humorless man obsessed

with his work and interested in little else.

While his public presence was usually

formal and preoccupied, there was

another side of his personality, replete

with volatile moods, sudden sunburst

smiles, and paranoiac tantrums. Lionized

for most of his life, he could be surprisingly reckless in his treatment of those

who cared the most for him. The son of well-to-do parents (Irish mother and Italian father), Marconi worked out the technology for his basic achievements by age 21, and the attic of his family’s house in Bologna became the world’s first radio station. Incredible as it seemed, the Italian government showed no interest in his invention, so Marconi traveled to London to continue his experiments.

In 1901 he received the first transatlantic wireless signal at St. John’s, New-foundland. Even though he won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1909, it was the 1912
Titanic
disaster that vividly dramatized the importance of his work. The
Titanic’s
SOS was heard by a rescue ship, and 711 of the passengers were eventually saved. (Marconi had booked passage on the
Titanic
, but had canceled at the last moment.) That same year Marconi lost his right eye in a head-on auto collision in Italy. Fitted with a glass eye, he soon resumed his frenetic pace and after WWI conducted most of his work on the steam yacht
Elettra
, his floating laboratory. Despite his brooding nature and polite taciturnity, Marconi was an honored guest of government officials as well as of the international celebrity set.