The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People (3 page)

years older than Clara and had vast prior experience with women, but neither fact helped him cope with her, especially when he learned that after they’d finish having sex together, she’d climb into her roadster and head off for a session with another, usually younger man.

Most notable amongst those younger men was Gary Cooper, who had a bit part in
It
and was dubbed the “It” boy for his involvement with Clara, the quintessential “It” girl. In later years Coop tried to dismiss his relationship with Clara as just so much publicity, but Clara told delicious stories of his bathing her and her dogs in the morning and making love to her all night.

There was the “Thundering Herd,” the University of Southern California’s football team, which Clara entertained on a regular basis at her Beverly Hills home. Those with a vested interest in the Trojan sports program have always maintained that the post-game get-togethers at Clara’s place were nothing more than good, clean fun, but neighbors and “friends” told tales of nude football games on the front lawn and all-night orgies. The legend grew that Clara introduced the team concept to lovemaking by taking on more than a single player at a time. Whatever the truth to the stories, a sign was eventually posted in the Trojan locker room making Clara Bow off limits.

Clara took a brief fancy to East Coast football in the person of Robert Savage, a millionaire’s son who played for Yale. Unlike most of Clara’s other lovers, who merely went off and brooded when they found out that they weren’t number one in her program and number one in her heart, Savage tried to kill himself by slashing his wrists and letting the blood flow onto an autographed picture of Clara. Clara exclaimed, “Jesus Christ, he’s got to be kidding. Men don’t slash their wrists, they use a gun!”

Harry Richman, top-salaried Broadway singing star in the 1930s, did not become a Hollywood immortal like some of Clara’s other lovers, although he tried to do so by flaunting their relationship. He boasted that she was the only woman who could ever keep up with him sexually. She gave him a $2,000 ring.

He gave her a child (which she had aborted), put detectives on her tail when he was out of town, and even followed her himself to see where she went after their nights together. Needless to say, they did not live happily ever after.

She might have achieved that blissful state with William Earl Pearson, a Texas doctor who performed an emergency appendectomy on her during the filming of
Dangerous Curves
. She loved him enough to try monogamy for a while (gifting him with a $4,000 watch), but when he returned to his wife in Texas, Clara was left with nothing but an alienation-of-affections suit that had been filed against her, which was settled out of court.

There had been actors, ballplayers, stunt men, airmen, and guys off the street, but finally there was Rex Bell, a cowboy actor and staunch Republican who twice became lieutenant governor of Nevada during the 1950s. Clara married Bell in 1931 and he saw her through the Daisy DeVoe trial, a failed comeback in the early 1930s, and a series of emotional breakdowns. Because of her unstable emotional condition, she lived apart from Bell and their two sons, seeking help in various sanitariums. In 1961, the 59-year-old Bell died of a heart attack. Clara succumbed four years later while watching television with a nurse-companion in her Los Angeles home.

HER WORDS:
“Most men want me on their terms. The trouble with men is that they all want to make you over into something else. It burns me up. Especially since it’s me as I am that they fall for. The more I see of men, the more I like dogs.”

—D.R.

Clubfooted Libertine

LORD BYRON (Jan. 22, 1788–Apr. 19, 1824)

HIS FAME:
Considered one of the

great 19th-century poets, George Gordon, Lord Byron, was the incarnate

symbol of romanticism. In his works he

created the “Byronic hero,” a mysterious and lonely young man defiantly

hiding some unspeakable sin committed in his past. Byron’s autobiographical

masterpiece,
Don Juan
—left unfinished

upon the poet’s death—won universal

acclaim for its combination of lyrical

storytelling and satirical realism.

HIS PERSON:
A British lord by age

adversely by an unstable mother and a

Byron at age 26

foot so crippled that he once begged a

doctor to amputate it. Nevertheless, he became an excellent distance swimmer, easily lasting for 5 mi. or more. This exercise did not end his constant battle against obesity, and at 17 he entered Cambridge University carrying 212 lb.

although he was only 5 ft. 8 in. tall. To maintain his weight at a reasonable level in adult life, Byron fasted frequently while taking drugs to reduce, and

kept to a fairly steady diet of hard biscuits plus a little rice, washed down by soda water or diluted wine. An occasional gorging on meat and potatoes when he could no longer resist the temptation triggered an immediate digestive upset and added rolls of fat about his middle. Byron hoped that his lifelong Spartan regimen would also “cool his passions,” but it didn’t. In 1809 he sailed with John Cam Hobhouse for a two-year “grand tour” of Europe. Upon his return, Byron published
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
, a fictionalized narrative of the trip done in Spenserian stanzas, and the poem brought instant fame. He followed the success quickly with a series of Greco-Turkish tales (
The Bride of
Abydos
,
The Corsair
,
The Siege of Corinth
, and others) that enhanced his reputation further. Driven from England by public reaction to his sex life, Byron made his way to Italy. He continued to write brilliantly, producing
Manfred
(1817) and
Beppo
(1818) along with
Don Juan
(1819–1824). Intrigued by Balkan politics, Byron slipped into Greece to fight against its Turkish masters but perished from malaria at Missolonghi before achieving battlefield honors.

His death fulfilled a fortune-teller’s prophecy, made to his mother in 1801, that he would die in his 37th year.

SEX LIFE:
Byron was sexually initiated at age nine by the family nurse, May Gray. The devout, Bible-quoting Scottish girl seized every chance for three years to creep into the child’s bed and “play tricks with his person.” Arousing the boy physically by every variation she could think of, May also allowed him to watch while she made love with her uninhibited lovers. Thus primed, Byron—eager for continued stimulation—moved with ease into sexual activities during four years at Harrow, one of England’s prestigious boarding schools. There he preferred the company of young boys: the Earl of Clare, the Duke of Dorset, among many others. Although he may have been bisexual, the thought of having sex with adult males repelled him. One such proposition from 23-year-old Lord Grey de Ruthyn, tendered while Byron was visiting on holiday from Harrow, sent the future poet fleeing in terror. In 1805, entering Trinity College (Cambridge), Byron fell in love with choirboy John Edleston, who gave him a heart-shaped carnelian to seal their friendship. Byron combined three years of intermittent studies with an orgiastic existence in London, staging bacchanalian revelries that nearly killed him.

Living on laudanum (a tincture of opium), he cavorted nightly with prostitutes while maintaining at least two mistresses, one of whom he dressed in boy’s clothing and passed off as a cousin. The deception ended when “the young gentleman miscarried in a certain family hotel in Bond Street, to the indescribable horror of the chambermaids.”

Leaving England for the Continental tour in 1809, Byron spent almost two years traveling through Greece, Albania, and Asia Minor. In Turkey he was fascinated that the major physical difference seemed to be “that we have foreskins and they none,” and that “in England the vices in fashion are whoring and drinking, in Turkey, sodomy and smoking. We prefer a girl and a bottle, they a pipe and pathic.”

The publication of
Childe Harold
in March, 1812, brought Byron into contact with Lady Caroline Lamb, the uninhibited 27-year-old wife of William Lamb, who later became Lord Melbourne, prime minister of England. Meeting Byron, she confided in her journal that he was “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” Her slender, boyish figure met Byron’s standards and they were soon lovers. A notorious exhibitionist and outspoken eccentric, “Caro”—as Byron fondly called her—proved a unique sex partner. In August, a startled Byron opened an envelope to find a thatch of Caro’s curly black pubic hair and a long note. “I cut the hair too close,” she wrote, “and it bled.

Do you not the same.” She asked for a like gift, admonishing him to be careful when handling the scissors. Amused, Byron complied but soon tired of her constant presence and erratic behavior. With the help of his good friend Lady Melbourne (who was also Caro’s motherin-law) he broke off the affair in December. Caro burned Byron in effigy, vowed revenge, and bided her time.

Fleeing from Caro’s fury, he moved in with Jane Elizabeth Scott, the 40-year-old wife of Edward Harley, the Earl of Oxford. Happily making love to Lady Jane until the following June, Byron was the latest in a series of lovers she had enjoyed during her marriage. (The Oxford children were known as the

“Harleian Miscellany” because of their uncertain paternity.) In July, 1813, Byron broke the ultimate sexual taboo—incest—by seducing his married half sister, Augusta Leigh. Reared separately, the two children born to Capt. John “Mad Jack” Byron rediscovered each other with an intense passion. Nine months and two weeks later, Augusta gave birth to a daughter, Medora, and a proud Byron left little doubt as to the father. Referring to the belief held in the Middle Ages that incestuous intercourse produced monsters, he wrote Lady Melbourne that “it is not an ape, and if it is, that must be my fault.” To silence the malicious gossip that his open affection for Augusta had created, Byron married Annabella Milbanke, a prim and scholarly heiress who believed she could reform him. Their one-year marriage was a total disaster.

Byron became almost psychotic, verbally taunting her for months with embellished stories of his past orgies. He suffered continual nightmares, awakening at the slightest body contact with Annabella, screaming, “Don’t touch me!” or crying out, “Good God, I am surely in hell!” in his dim awareness of the red damask curtains around the huge four-poster and the flickering tapers he kept burning in the bedroom. Since Byron felt “a woman should never be seen eating or drinking,” Annabella took her meals alone. In December, after the birth of their daughter, Augusta Ada, a fearful Lady Byron fled and sued for a legal separation. The ensuing scandal feasted upon rumors about Byron’s sexual perversions: e.g., he’d made love to the aging Lady Melbourne at
her
request; he’d sodomized his terrified wife in the final month of her pregnancy; he’d attempted to rape Lady Oxford’s 13-year-old daughter. The sensational charges, which were viciously helped along by a vengeful Lady Caroline bent on Byron’s ruin, ostracized him so completely that he was forced to leave England for good on Apr. 25, 1816, his reputation in shreds. But in his final month, Byron “put it about” (his adopted term for copulating) one last time, with Claire Clairmont, the plain 17-year-old stepdaughter of free-love advocate William Godwin. Attracted by Byron’s notoriety, Claire brazenly propositioned him in a series of provocative letters. Drawn by her persistent suggestions that he use her body at his earliest convenience, Byron finally gave in a week before departure. Their brief coupling produced Allegra, born the following January.

Once an expatriate in Venice, Byron resumed his sexual excesses in earnest. He found rooms near St. Mark’s Square and immediately took his landlord’s wife, dark-eyed Marianna Segati, as his next mistress. Almost simultaneously, he acquired a second partner, the Junoesque (5 ft. 10 in.) baker’s wife Margarita Cogni. The fiery amazon’s explosive jealousy forced Byron to schedule his other assignations very carefully. Although very religious—she crossed herself every time prayer bells rang, even when making love with Byron—Margarita would have stabbed any rival caught in her lover’s bed. In 1818 Byron broke with Marianna and rented the Palazzo Mocenigo. The palace doubled as a personal brothel for Byron, populated by a harem of mistresses and streetwalkers. For a time his gentle “tigress,” Margarita—secure in her role as the poet’s primary mistress—served as housekeeper, but her temper tantrums proved too much for Byron to accept. When Byron asked her to leave, she threatened him with a knife and stabbed his hand. She then threw herself into the canal. Finally convinced that Byron no longer wanted her, she returned to her husband.

Byron once estimated that almost half of his annual expenses had gone for purchased sex, parceled out to at least 200 women. “Perhaps more,” he wrote,

“for I have not lately kept the count.” The orgies were not without additional cost. Byron was plagued by gonorrhea, the “curse of Venus” having been passed along by his ladies.