The Book of the Dead (22 page)

Marie continued as an analyst until her death in 1962. One of her last public duties was to represent her nephew, King Paul of Greece, at the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953. She struck up a conversation with the gentleman sitting next to her, offering to analyze him. He agreed and they spent the rest of the ceremony in deep conversation. His name was François Mitterrand, the future president of France. It was to Marie that Freud made one of his most famous pronouncements: “The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?’ ” In 1920 the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi produced his own answer. Immortalizing Marie Bonaparte in sculpture, he unveiled his portrait of her at the Paris Salon. Titled
Princess X
, it consisted solely of a giant bronze phallus and testicles.

Brancusi’s sixteen-inch-long artwork would have been of great interest to the American academic
Alfred Kinsey
(1894–1955),
who measured more than five thousand penises in his lifetime. Their dimensions appeared in his painstaking scientific study
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
(1948). Dry and statistical in tone, and based on more than eighteen thousand intimate case histories, the book was distributed by a medical publishing house, which expected around five thousand sales. Instead, the book shot straight to the top of the bestseller list, selling hundreds of thousands of copies. Buried in the text, for those who could be bothered, was every possible bizarre detail of how Americans had sex, how often, with whom or what, and which bits of their bodies were involved.

Kinsey took his inspiration from the pioneering sexologist Henry Havelock Ellis (1859–1939), whose
Studies in the Psychology of Sex
(1921) helped establish sex as an appropriate subject for academic research. Ellis had coined the word
homosexual
and made his own (controversial) stab at answering Freud’s question by stating that “women’s brains are in a certain sense … in their wombs.” But the author himself was spectacularly unqualified in terms of his own experience. He was impotent until he was sixty years old, and it’s doubtful he ever consummated his marriage. His wife Edith used to refer to his penis as “the Holy Ghost” and wrote a novel about a woman married to a man made impotent after a mining accident. She conducted numerous lesbian relationships during their marriage. When Henry finally got the hang of sex (with the help of his younger lover, Françoise Delisle, after the death of his wife), he became quite addicted to it. Until then he much preferred masturbation. The thing he found most arousing was the sight of a woman urinating, something he put down to having seen his mother caught short in a London park as a child.

Kinsey, too, was something of a late starter in the bedroom, and also like Havelock Ellis, bore the scars of a deeply religious upbringing. He hated his childhood. The son of a carpenter, he grew up in extreme poverty, suffering from rickets, which gave him double curvature of the spine. He was frequently ill as a boy, and as well as suffering all the usual childhood diseases, he had rheumatic fever and typhoid. He was bullied at school because his clothes were so heavily darned. Like H. G. Wells, everyone was convinced that Alfred would die young, and because of his frequent absences from school through illness, he made very few friends. The abject poverty of his youth left him with a lifelong horror of debt and a furious hatred for the potato, which had often been the only food available when he was a boy.

His father, Alfred senior, was a religious zealot and a bully. Every Sunday, he dragged the family along to three interminable church services and Sunday school as well. On the Lord’s Day, no entertainment or activities of any kind were permitted, not even reading the paper. The milkman was forbidden to deliver milk and Mrs. Kinsey had to cook all of Sunday’s meals the day before. Alfred’s aunt was turned out of the family home for playing the piano on the Sabbath. Suspecting his neighbors of lax moral standards, Alfred’s father used his son as bait to see if shopkeepers would sell cigarettes to a minor. All references to sex were taboo, no adult was ever seen naked in the house, and Alfred was banned from seeing girls.

Kinsey finally escaped to study biology (against his father’s wishes). For the first twenty years of his scientific career there was nothing to suggest that this polite, shy man was going to unleash a sexual revolution. Instead, he forged a reputation as the world’s
foremost expert on North American gall wasps. After earning a doctorate from Harvard, he traveled across the United States collecting three hundred thousand wasps from thirty-six states and posting them back to Boston. Many of these hatched before he got back, causing chaos in the postal service. Kinsey took twenty-six individual measurements on every single wasp, enabling him to identify seventy new species unknown to science. He always did everything obsessively—he collected irises and planted more than 250 species in his garden; he plaited homemade rugs twice as thick as anyone else’s; even as a Boy Scout he had amassed seven years’ worth of merit badges in just two. His talent for extreme detail and meticulous research stood him in good stead when he began to tire of wasps and take an interest in human beings.

Kinsey followed up his study of male sexual behavior with
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female
(1953), which was also an immediate bestseller. Having grown up in a family where nudity was anathema and sex never mentioned, Kinsey realized many of his undergraduate students were as ill informed about their sexual needs as he was. He also came to see that repressed sexual urges were psychologically damaging. As in everything else he did, Kinsey’s attention to his subject was all-consuming. He regularly worked sixteen hours a day, which prompted his wife to remark dryly: “I hardly ever see Alfred at night anymore, now that he’s taken up sex.”

Kinsey’s crusade to rid the world of sexual ignorance started in his own bedroom. His marriage to Clara McMillen—always known as “Mac”—in 1921 wasn’t consummated for several months. This may have had something to do with his unusually large penis and her short stature, but they hardly gave themselves
the best start. For their honeymoon they went on a grueling climbing expedition, and their first attempts at sex were on a mountainside in the middle of a storm. The gradual release of personal documents by the Kinsey Institute means we now know that the Kinseys’ marriage and sex life were liberated in a way that H. G. Wells could only dream of. They loved nudism and took their clothes off whenever they decently could. They operated a system of interacting open marriages with colleagues at the Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction, which Kinsey had founded in 1947. He had casual affairs with many of his colleagues, male and female. Many of his staff had affairs with Clara. During a research trip to Chicago, he was delighted to find an outlet for his homosexual urges, and frequently went cottaging among the gay community there. Kinsey was particularly keen to get the man-on-man taboo out in the open, and when one of his assistants confessed that he had no experience of homosexuality, Kinsey said he could personally help him “tick that box.”

He also experimented with masochism, inserting objects into his urethra while masturbating, enjoying the pleasure and the pain equally. As this organ became less sensitive over the years, he started putting larger and larger things up it. By 1949 he was able to insert pencils into his penis and even a toothbrush, bristles first. He also tried self-piercing, which culminated with his successfully circumcising himself with a penknife in the bath. Kinsey was proud to call himself “unshockable.” As he was keen to drill into his researchers, the key thing was gathering data: “We are the recorders and reporters of facts—not the judges of the behaviors we describe.” The results were often controversial; he reported that almost half of American men had had a homosexual
experience, that almost half of married men had committed adultery, and that a quarter of married women found their sex life unsatisfactory.

To Kinsey anything was “biologically normal” provided it was performed by a sizable number of people—or animals. He would have found the experiences of Casanova or Cora Pearl interesting but unremarkable. He once said that “the only unnatural sex act is one which you cannot perform.” This was mind-blowing stuff for the 1950s and ushered in attitudinal changes from which our society is still reeling. The modern view of sex—where masturbation isn’t evil or harmful, homosexuality is widespread, and enjoying sex doesn’t mean you are depraved—owes a huge amount to Kinsey’s work. By documenting behavior that many people at the time thought was “abnormal” and showing how widespread it actually was, he helped create a culture where sex could be seen as just another aspect of ordinary life.

Some people didn’t wait for Alfred Kinsey to come along to know they needn’t be ashamed of their sexual desires, among them the actress
Tallulah Bankhead
(1902–68), who bragged that she had more than five hundred lovers. When the Kinsey report was published, she’d seen it all before: “The good doctor’s clinical notes were old hat to me,” she remarked.

As a girl Tallulah was short and plump, weighing almost 150 pounds and just 5 feet 2 inches tall, but by the age of fifteen she had shed enough puppy fat to win a beauty contest in her hometown, Montgomery, Alabama. This encouraged her to head for New York to try her luck as an actress. She went on to appear in more than fifty plays and eighteen films, with her final
appearance as a character called the Black Widow in a 1967 episode of
Batman.
Early on, she got a reputation for partying, and was a regular user of cocaine and marijuana. She was annoyed by what she saw as petit bourgeois fears about drug misuse, but chose humor to confront it: “Cocaine isn’t addictive,” she said, “I should know: I’ve been using it for years.” She was equally blasé about sex. She was once asked if it was true that she had been raped as a twelve-year-old on the drive of her father’s home. “Yes, it was awful, truly awful,” she said. “You see, we had so much gravel.”

Her early career on Broadway was a series of false starts, but in 1923 she came to London to appear in a play called
The Dancers
opposite the suave elder statesman of the West End stage, Gerald du Maurier. Her lustrous hair, husky voice, and exuberant cartwheels turned her into an overnight star. The writer and actor Emlyn Williams wrote that her voice “was steeped as deep in sex as the human voice can go without drowning.” Her most devoted fans were her Gallery Girls, a group of Cockney teenagers who cheered, stamped their feet, and threw flowers onto the stage whenever she said a line. The writer Arnold Bennett was dazzled:

Ordinary stars get “hands.” If Tallulah gets a “hand” it is not heard. What is heard is a terrific, wild, passionate, hysterical roar and shriek. Only the phrase of the Psalmist can describe it: “God is gone up with a shout.”

Winston Churchill was a regular at her shows and before long “to Tallulah” had become a verb. She told an American reporter: “Over here they like me to ‘Tallulah.’ You know—dance and sing and romp and fluff my hair and play reckless parts.” After a triumphant and extravagant eight years, she returned to the
United States to be signed up by Paramount, which planned to make her “the new Dietrich.” They didn’t—they made a string of turkeys. There was something about the nature of film that failed to capture what made her so sexy and delicious in the flesh. She continued to make the occasional movie, but through the 1930s and 1940s, her best work was on Broadway.

Tallulah was bisexual but liked to joke that she couldn’t be a lesbian because “they have no sense of humor,” and she once let slip that she could never have an orgasm with anyone she was in love with. The only man she truly loved was an English aristocrat called Napier Sturt Alington, known as “Naps,” who was also bisexual. He married someone else, became a captain in the Royal Air Force, and died in Cairo on active service in 1940. Tallulah married only once, in 1937, to the bit-part actor John Emery. She told friends that she had chosen him because he was “hung like John Barrymore,” but later confided that “the weapon may be of admirable proportions but the shot is weak.” They never had children and were divorced after four years. When she was thirty, Tallulah had to have a hysterectomy brought on by a bad case of gonorrhea, an infection she blamed on going to bed with Gary Cooper. Leaving hospital in a very weakened condition, and having lost a lot of weight, she barked at her doctor, “Don’t for one minute think this has taught me a lesson!”

She was the mistress of the one-liner. When a former lover came up to her excitedly babbling that he hadn’t seen her for many years, she shot back: “I thought I told you to wait in the car.” Arranging an assignation, she scribbled a note: “I’ll come and make love to you at five o’clock. If I’m late start without me.” She talked nonstop: One of her friends followed her around for a
day, timing her with a stopwatch, and estimated that she spoke seventy thousand words, the length of a short novel. As the Hollywood publicist Howard Ditz wearily remarked, “A day away from Tallulah is like a month in the country.” Sometimes her mouth got her into serious trouble. Speaking to a fan magazine in 1932, Tallulah confessed that she hadn’t had an affair for six months, adding, “Six months is a long, long while, I WANT A MAN!” This drew a sharp reprimand from Will Hays, Hollywood’s censor and moral guardian, for allowing a star to indulge in “verbal moral turpitude.”