The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People (95 page)

LOVE LIFE:
The only serious romantic love of Marx’s life was green-eyed, auburnhaired Jenny, four years his senior and daughter of a baron. Gentle and scholarly, she also had style and a streak of vanity. Named “Queen of the Ball”

one year in Trier, she was pursued by suitors but chose Karl, whom she called pet names, like
Schwärzwildchen
(“little black wild one”). Both families were against their marriage. In her extravagant and well-written love letters to him, she talked of “all the bliss that was and will be,” though their passion for each other was not consummated until after their marriage. Once she spoke of how she would “lay down” her head for him, “sacrificing it to my naughty boy,” and she called him a “wicked rascal” for flirting with a certain Madame Hermann while on a steamer.

On June 19, 1843, Karl and Jenny were married in a Protestant church. The couple honeymooned in Switzerland, a trip financed by Jenny’s mother. They carried their spending money in a two-handled strongbox, which they purposely left open in hotel rooms so that anyone could take from it.

Their first child was born in Paris. Jenny took the baby girl home to show her off and wrote to Karl that she was afraid to return to Paris for fear that they would make more babies, which, of course, they did. Fear of pregnancy—and another mouth to feed—haunted their marriage.

Marx was a family man. Though he referred to Jenny as “mercurial” and complained in letters of her “floods of tears,” he also said, to Engels, “When I see the sufferings of my wife and my own powerlessness, I could rush into the devil’s jaws.” They faced evictions for nonpayment of rent and even had to borrow the money to pay for a coffin when one-year-old Francizka died. In happier moments, on Sundays, the whole family went for picnics in London parks, and Marx told stories as they walked along. In a graphic account of the Marx ménage, a Prussian police spy once told of an oilcloth-covered table littered with sewing, manuscripts, toys, and chipped cups, and of how he was offered a chair from which “the children’s cooking [playthings]” was not removed.

The only known scandal that touched the family was Karl’s affair with the family servant, Helene “Lenchen” Demuth, a delicately beautiful peasant girl who had joined the Von Westphalen family as a maid at age 11 or 12 and was

“given” to Jenny in 1845 by her mother. Lenchen ruled the family with an iron hand and could beat Marx at chess. In 1851 she gave birth to a child, Henry Frederick, fathered by Marx. The child was raised by a foster family and never acknowledged by Marx—perhaps out of fear that it would destroy his marriage.

Marx met the boy only once, in 1882. Lenchen worked for the Marx family until Karl’s death, in 1883, two years after Jenny died. Then she went to work for Engels.

Marx had at least two minor flirtations—one with 33-year-old Frau Tenge, a cultured Italian married to a wealthy landowner, and another with his cousin, Antoinette Philips, 19 years younger than Marx, who in 1863 nursed him through a painful bout with boils. During his recovery, Marx wrote of Antoinette’s “dark eyes shining dangerously as she pampers me.”

He was paternal, and the practice of wife-beating so enraged him that he would have flogged a wife-beater “to the point of death,” he claimed. Politically, he was against bourgeois marriage (though he had such a marriage himself ) because it kept women in a state of slavery. Ironically, he deeply disapproved of Engels’ mistress because she was of the lower classes.

The reverse side of Marx shows a corresponding vulgarity. He was fond of erotic French poetry of the 16th century, used words like
cock
and
toss-off
, and enjoyed telling dirty jokes, though never in mixed company.

HIS THOUGHTS:
In 1856 Marx wrote to Jenny, “I have the living image of you in front of me, I hold you in my arms, kiss you from head to foot, fall before you on my knees and sigh, ‘Madam, I love you.’ … But love—… not of the proletariat, but love of one’s darling, namely you, makes a man into a man again. In fact there are many women in the world, and some of them are beautiful. But where can I find another face in which every trait, even every wrinkle, brings back the greatest and sweetest memories of my life?”

—A.E.

The Objectivist

AYN RAND (Feb. 2, 1905–March 6, 1982)

HER FAME:
Philosopher and novelist, Ayn Rand was the founder of the individualist, a quasi-libertarian school of thought she dubbed “Objectivism.” She summed up her system thusly: “My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.” Rand is probably best remembered as the author of novels
The
Fountainhead
(greatly popularized by the movie—with Rand’s script—starring Gary Cooper and Patricia O’Neal) and
Atlas Shrugged
.

HER PERSON:
Born Alisa Zinov’yevna

Rosenbaum in Saint Petersburg to an

agnostic Jewish family, Rand filled her

young life with an early-developing

love of literature, writing novels and

screenplays from the age of seven and

immersing herself in the works of Victor

Hugo, Alexandre Dumas and other

writers of the Romantic period. The

when Rand was 12, financially crippled

her family—they were forced to flee to

Crimea—and left Rand with a permanent hatred for Communism. After

returning to St. Petersburg to complete a

university education, Rand gained an

American visa to visit relatives at the age of 21. She never looked back, seeing in America the pinnacle of man’s moral development and the antithesis of everything she had despised about the Soviet system. Taking the name Ayn Rand after stepping off the boat to New York, she made her way to Los Angeles, and, after a chance meeting with Cecil B. DeMille, broke into Hollywood as a script reader and, subsequently, as head of RKO Studio’s costume department. There she met her future husband, actor Frank O’Connor, whose quiet dignity and exceptional good looks caused her to fall in love at first sight. After early successes with screenplays, Rand turned to writing novels—her early works,
We the Living
and
Anthem
, are still cherished by her fans if less known to the wider public. However, it was the 1943 publication of
The Fountainhead
, which champions the uncompromising character of its young architect hero, Howard Roark, who refuses to compromise his artistic vision despite having to languish in obscurity, and who ultimately destroys one of his own buildings, which made Rand’s name. The follow-up publication of her masterwork
Atlas Shrugged
(which depicts a worldwide strike by the industrialists and innovators of America), in 1957, cemented her reputation. Her novels were universally panned by the literati and remain virtually blackballed by the academic world, but she remains one of the most influential authors and thinkers in print, especially with the young. After a decade’s battle with lung cancer, Rand died of heart failure in March 1982 in her New York home. A dollar-shaped floral arrangement was placed by her coffin, because to Rand, the dollar sign represented the heroism of capitalism.

LOVE AND SEX LIFE:
Essential to Rand’s philosophy was the idea that sexuality is an expression of a human being’s highest values; she depicted characters who were attracted to those who embody their highest values (it is an idea similar to ones advanced in Plato’s
Symposium
). She summarized her views succinctly in a
Playboy
interview—“I say that sex is one of the most important aspects of man’s life and, therefore, must never be approached lightly or casually.

A sexual relationship is proper only on the ground of the highest values one can find in a human being. Sex must not be anything other than a response to values. And that is why I consider promiscuity immoral. Not because sex is evil, but because sex is too good and too important.” Some of her views on sex, however, were more controversial—she believed that women’s attitude toward men should be one of hero worship; homosexuality she viewed as an aberration and moral failure. Yet, she defended the rights of the individual to practice as they saw fit. Meanwhile, Rand’s own marriage to Frank O’Connor was a largely unfulfilled one. An intensely focused and powerful woman, Rand found herself dominant in every aspect of the relationship, much in contrary to her ideal that men should be the subject of female worship; she also found O’Connor far from being her intellectual equal. Barbara Branden, one of her young students and, later, biographer, wrote of the split between Rand’s theory and practice: “[Rand’s theory of sex was] potentially a dangerous one, which already had had explosive effects on Ayn’s life. It had led her to wildly aggrandize the men who were
her
sexual choices... and it would continue to do so in the future; if the men to whom she was attracted were not heroes, then what would her choices say about
her
?” Ironically, it would be Barbara Branden’s husband Nathaniel, a Rand obsessive since his teens and longterm acolyte—her junior by two and a half decades—who would become her next lover in early 1955.

The affair was reluctantly “approved” by both Branden and Rand’s respective spouses, though in truth the rejected spouses were in agony. While Nathaniel wanted to have sex with Rand in a hotel, she insisted on her apartment. Thus husband and lover often passed politely in the elevator. Frank and Barbara took to sharing their troubles in bars, and Frank eventually developed a serious drinking problem. Barbara Branden later wrote that the affair was “agonizingly painful” for both her and O’Connor.

Nathaniel Branden later recalled of his mistress, “What she wanted was a man whose esteem would take the form of reducing her to a sex object. This seemed so simple and natural to me.” Ayn favored having sex with Nathaniel on the mink coat her husband had bought her (with the money from her successes).

Like the aggressive and violent nigh-on-rapes that Rand made of her hero and heroines’ sexual encounters in her novels, Ayn liked it rough and demeaning.

Wrote Nathaniel Branden: “‘What’s happening to me?’ Ayn would say. ‘You’re turning me into an animal.’ And I would grin mockingly and answer, ‘Really?

What were you before?’ ‘A mind,’ she would say. And I would reply, ‘Really? Do you have a mind? Who ever told you that?’” After the release of
Atlas
, Rand fell into deep post-partum depression.

Her sexual affair with Branden ended histrionically. Brandon had fallen in love with a new woman, and hid the truth from Rand. Finally he revealed his secret, and confessed to Rand that he was no longer attracted to her because of her age. In front of a roomful of people, Rand furiously slapped Nathaniel and spat out a curse that he be impotent for the rest of his life. (Apparently the curse was ineffectual.) She stated that Branden had betrayed his highest value, Rand,

and expunged him from her life, removing her dedication to him in
Atlas
Shrugged
. They never spoke again. Branden then divorced Barbara and married the young actress Patrecia Gullison Scott. He remains a pariah in the Objectivist community but has gone on to a successful career as a writer of Objectivist self-help books on relationships.

HER THOUGHTS:
“Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life. Show me the woman he sleeps with and I will tell you his valuation of himself.”

—J.L.

The Man Who Confessed Everything

JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU (June 28, 1712–July 2, 1778)

HIS FAME:
The Swiss-born French

philosopher, novelist, and political theorist authored such works as
Julie, or The

New Héloïse
;
Émile, or A Treatise on

Education
;
The Social Contract
; and his autobiographical
Confessions
. His writings