The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People (2 page)

The Wallaces put together such bestselling books as the multivolume
The
Book of Lists
,
The People’s Almanac
, and
The Book of Predictions
.
The Intimate Sex
Lives of Famous People
(originally published by Delacorte Press) was one of the most fascinating works by this enterprising, daring and industrious family.

More than 25 years later, Amy Wallace and David Wallechinsky return to
Sex Lives
adding new profiles on Kurt Cobain, Wilt Chamberlain, Nico, Ayn Rand, Aleister Crowley, Jim Morrison, Anna Nicole Smith, Malcolm X, Michael Hutchence, Tupac Shakur and Carlos Castaneda. David and Amy have also added a handy cross-referenced list of Sexual Characteristics held by the many people of influence within the book.

Perhaps the best thing about
The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People
is its rectitude, respect and (yes) fairness. If only the tabloid gossip-mongers had such sophistication. Yes, you can have your cake and eat her too.

— Adam Parfrey

Feral House

I

Sex Symbols

Star of the Folies

JOSEPHINE BAKER (June 3, 1906–Apr. 12, 1975)

HER FAME:
In the 1920s and 1930s,

dancer-singer Josephine Baker became

the first black female entertainer to star

in the Folies Bergère as well as the first

American black woman to achieve

international renown. Dancing the

Charleston, wearing only a blue and red

ring of feathers around her hips, she

took Paris by storm.

HER PERSON:
Her mother, Carrie

Smith, told Josephine that her father

was a Spaniard whose family would not

allow him to marry a black woman. As

an infant, Josephine was sent to live with

her grandmother. She had an affinity

for music and on Saturdays joined in neighborhood jam sessions. By the time Josephine returned to her mother, Carrie had married a man named Baker and had given birth to three more children. They lived in a one-room shack in the poorest section of St. Louis, Mo.

As the oldest child, Josephine was sent out to do domestic work for white families. She never forgot the cruelties that were inflicted on her, but she also remembered the kindness of one family, the Masons, who took her to the theater for the first time and encouraged her to build her own makeshift theater in their basement. When Josephine confided to Mrs. Mason that Mr. Mason had come into her room at night and stood beside her bed breathing heavily, she was sent back to her family.

While job hunting, 13-year-old Baker walked into the Booker T. Washington Theater and applied for work. That evening she left St. Louis employed as singer Bessie Smith’s maid. On Bessie Smith’s advice, Baker became a chorine at New York’s Cotton Club.

In 1925 Baker went to Paris as part of
La Revue Nègre
. Asked to dance at the prestigious Folies Bergère, Baker prepared for opening night by holding bowls of cracked ice against her bosom to make her breasts firm and pointed.

In her initial appearance onstage, she impressed the audience with her satin-like hair and her costume, which consisted of a belt of bananas and nothing else. Her wildly darting image was reflected a thousand times as she danced before a background of mirrors. Improvising, Baker sang and closed her act by leaping into a banana tree, spreading its leaves, crossing her eyes, and waving to the audience, which was applauding thunderously. To the French, this was the epitome of “le jazz hot.” Overnight, Josephine Baker became a sensation and the reigning queen of the Folies.

With the advent of WWII, Baker became a member of the French Resistance, delivering to the Allies the original copy of an Italian-German codebook. Baker’s marriage to a Jewish businessman, Jean Leon, brought her to the attention of the Gestapo. They decided to liquidate her. According to the plan, Hermann Göring invited her to dinner. Her fish course contained cyanide. Forewarned, Baker excused herself from the table as soon as the fish was served, saying she had to go to the powder room. There she intended to drop herself down the laundry chute into the arms of Resistance members below. Before she could leave the table, however, Göring—gun in hand— ordered her to eat the fish. She ate it, complained of dizziness, stumbled to the powder room, and lowered herself into the laundry chute. Resistance members broke her fall and rushed her to an underground clinic, where her stomach was quickly pumped. After lingering between life and death for a month, she slowly recovered. Word was put out that she had died in Morocco. The poisoning episode caused her to lose all her hair (she wore wigs from then on).

Her courage won her the Croix de Guerre, the Rosette of the Resistance, and the Legion of Honor. In the decades following the war, Baker returned to the stage. Also, to prove universal brotherhood was possible, she adopted 11 children of different races and religions from places as diverse as Korea, Algeria, and Israel.

SEX LIFE:
Baker’s serious affairs began when she moved to Paris at the age of 19. She fell in love with a fair-haired, handsome Frenchman named Marcel, who set her up in a luxurious apartment on the Champs Élysées which she called her “marble palace.” Marcel appeared every evening and brought live gifts with him—white mice, a parrot, a miniature monkey. At last Baker asked him when they would be married. He said marriage was impossible because she was black and a public dancer. The next day she walked out on her palace and her menagerie.

Baker’s first distinguished admirer was a Moroccan she called “the Sheik of Araby.” He sent her a tame panther wearing a diamond necklace, and took both Baker and the panther to dinner. However, she decided that having sex with him was impossible. He was short and chubby, and she was tall. “The problem,” she said, “was that when I was young I used to like to do it standing up, and if I had ever done it with him, he would have been jabbing me in the knees.”

In 1929 Crown Prince Adolf (future King Gustavus VI) of Sweden, entranced by Baker, visited her dressing room and invited her to his country.

Although Baker knew the prince was married, she sent him a one-word telegram later that night: “When?” The following morning she had his reply:

“Tonight.” That evening Baker boarded the prince’s private railroad car with its gold interior and Aubusson carpets. In her sleeping quarters was a swan-shaped

bed covered with satin sheets to highlight the shapely contours of her dusky body. After she had settled into bed, the Prince arrived. When she complained of being cold, he warmed her heart by fastening a three-strand diamond bracelet on her arm. While grateful, she told him that her other arm was still cold. He roared with laughter and gave her another bracelet. Undressing, he pulled down the sheets and joined her, kissing her softly. They maneuvered their bodies together and allowed the undulating movements of the railroad car to set the tempo of their lovemaking. “He was a real fox,” Baker said afterward. “He was my cream and I was his coffee, and when you poured us together, it was something!”

They spent a warm winter month together in his isolated summer palace, making love when indoors and playing like children in the snow outdoors.

The last night of their idyll he draped a floor-length sable coat around her, took her in his arms, and they danced a silent waltz. They never met again.

At a cabaret, Josephine Baker was introduced to Count “Pepito” Abatino, an Italian administrator. They danced a tango, which led to a night of lovemaking. Before long Abatino had become her lover and manager. They never married, but Baker always presented him as her husband. He was a jealous lover as well as a tough manager, sometimes locking her in her room to force her to work on dance routines. The affair lasted 10 years and ended in New York when Baker decided she wanted to be free of his domination.

On Nov. 30, 1937, Baker married French industrialist Jean Leon. He wanted children and a home in the country. Together they leased Les Milandes, a château that became her dream house. When Baker became pregnant but miscarried, she lost not only the baby but Leon as well. The judge who dissolved their marriage in 1939 said, “They were two strangers who never really met.”

It was five years before Baker fell in love again. In 1933 she had met Jo Bouillon, a French orchestra leader, when he came backstage at the Folies to ask her for an autographed picture. They met again in October of 1944 when she asked Bouillon to donate his services to the cause of Free France. They began seeing each other. On June 3, 1947, they were married. During their marriage Baker purchased the château she had once leased, Les Milandes, and had it renovated into a resort. She incurred huge debts, placing tremendous pressure on the relationship with her husband. Her marriage to Bouillon lasted 13 years.

In her last years Josephine Baker gave more and more time to her adopted children and to her growing struggle against racism, especially in the U.S., where many of her bookings had been canceled. Ironically, it was following a triumphant tour of the U.S. that Baker died of a heart attack in Paris at the age of 68.

— F.C.

The Girl Who Had It

CLARA BOW (Aug. 6, 1905–Sept. 27, 1965)

HER FAME:
As F. Scott Fitzgerald

embodied the Roaring Twenties in literature, she embodied it on film, having 48

films to her credit by the age of 25. In 1927

she was receiving 40,000 fan letters a week.

HER PERSON:
Clara’s was the classic

Hollywood story—up from obscurity at

age 19 to become the reigning sex goddess of her time, collecting the obligatory

emotional scars all along the way. Father

Robert was often either unemployed or

footloose; Mother Sarah was bitter. She’d

stick Clara in the closet of their Brooklyn

tenement while she turned tricks for

food and rent money. Once, when she

learned that Clara and her father were submitting a picture of Clara for a magazine beauty contest, she crept into Clara’s bedroom with a knife, vowing that her daughter wouldn’t live to be one of those whores who primps before cameras for the pleasure of men. Luckily Clara escaped into the bathroom that night, with her life and her career. She won the contest and an initial stab at Hollywood, which eventually led to her signing with Paramount.

She became one of the studio’s biggest stars, earning $7,500 a week. And thanks to the insomnia which resulted from her mother’s late-night threat on her life, she was able to live in a manner that embellished her on-screen image.

She’d speed up and down Sunset Boulevard in an open convertible accompanied by a couple of chows who matched her hennaed hair. She’d run up fabulous gambling tabs in Las Vegas. And she was perfectly scandalous in her personal affairs. In 1931 those affairs brought her down when she sued Daisy DeVoe, her private secretary, for embezzling $16,000 from her. During the trial, the judge would not permit Daisy to discuss Clara Bow’s sexual escapades, so Daisy sold her exposé to Bernarr Macfadden’s New York
Evening Graphic
(incidentally, the authors of this book scoured the U.S. for a copy of the exposé issue, but no copy was available anywhere). Daisy was found guilty and sent to jail for a year. Word got out about Clara’s private life and damaged her career.

SEX LIFE:
In her heyday Clara reputedly made love to Gilbert Roland, Victor Fleming, Gary Cooper, John Gilbert, Eddie Cantor, Bela Lugosi, and the entire University of Southern California football team.

She met Roland, Paramount’s Latin lover, during their filming of
The Plastic Age
. He was the first man she ever cared about, she said, but it wasn’t enough for the temperamental Roland, who went into fits of jealousy at Clara’s continued interest in other men. When he proposed marriage as a remedy for his insecurity, she dismissed the proposal, saying that no man would ever own her.

Thus she set the pattern for most of her relationships with men. She’d love them, but never enough to satisfy their egos. Director Victor Fleming was 20