The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People (21 page)

It was only during the autumn of her womanhood, as Colette called it, that she was able to reconcile her fierce need for independence with both a desire for possession and a penchant for handsome young men. Colette was 52 when she

met Maurice Goudeket, then 35, who later became her third husband. Whether writing in bed, surrounded by cats and cushions, or basking in the warm sunshine of Saint-Tropez, she enjoyed with Goudeket a loving companionship which renewed her creative energy and enabled her to remain vigorously active well into old age.

HER PHILOSOPHY:
“The seduction emanating from a person of uncertain or dissimulated sex is powerful,” wrote Colette, who refused to distinguish between normal and abnormal sexuality.

—C.D.

The Romantic Feminist

GEORGE SAND (July 1, 1804–June 8, 1876)

HER FAME:
This French feminist

author of more than 90 novels—among

them
Lélia
and
The Devil’s Pool
—was notorious for dressing in men’s clothes,

smoking cigars, taking on frail but

brilliant young lovers, and voicing scandalous opinions.

HER PERSON:
Amandine Aurore Lucie

Dupin was raised by her grandmother on

the family’s country estate at Nohant,

150 mi. south of Paris. Her two years of

formal education at a convent ended

when, after a stint as leader of the
diables

(“bad girls”), she turned pious and talked

of becoming a nun, whereupon her Deist

grandmother yanked her out of school. At the age of 17, Aurore inherited Nohant. After an unsuccessful marriage, which produced two children, she ran off to Paris and began her writing career, taking George Sand as her pen name.

When her first novel,
Indiana
, was published in the spring of 1832, it was a smashing success. Thereafter novels—most of them successful, several still considered masterpieces—flowed from her pen. A champion of woman’s rights, she billed herself as “the Spartacus of women’s slavery.” However, her heroines, often caught in marital traps, nearly always win their freedom through fortuitous turns of fate (e.g., a husband’s accidental death). According to one critic, “In George Sand, when a lady wants to change her lover, God is there to facilitate the transfer.” Unfortunately, in real life, Sand usually had to make the transfer herself.

LOVE AND SEX LIFE:
Interpreters of George Sand have called her fickle and heartless, have labeled her as bisexual or lesbian; have hinted at incest (in view of her enormous love for her son, Maurice) and at a covert maternal instinct that encouraged her to take younger lovers.

The cigar-smoking woman whose sexuality has aroused such interest was once described by Charles Dickens as resembling “the queen’s monthly nurse.”

She was short and swarthy, with heavy features and dark eyes. Her manner was brusque. In her intellect and passion for living lay her sensual appeal.

Her first sexual encounter was probably with neighbor Stéphane de Grandsagne when she was 16 or 17. Grandsagne may have fathered her daughter, Solange, born in 1828. At 18 she married 27-year-old Casimir Dudevant, who proved to be a drunken boor and beat her from time to time.

Although she left him—and their children—in 1831, they were not legally separated until 1836.

It was in Paris, where sexual liberation was in the air, that her love life really began. Her first Paris lover, Jules Sandeau, with whom she briefly collaborated on a book, was typical of the men who attracted her—younger than she by seven years, frail, blond, and artistic. Long after their affair ended, Sandeau, still bitter, described her as a “graveyard.” Bad endings were to become typical of her love affairs.

Sand needed to be in love to enjoy sex. A short experiment in nonromantic copulation with writer Prosper Mérimée was a disaster. Though some of her lovers accused her of frigidity, it seems that in truth she was like many women—

passionate when aroused by romance, indifferent when she was not. She spoke of biting, beating, and kissing Sandeau; and of Michel de Bourges, a married lover whom she adored in spite of his bald ugliness, she confessed he caused her to “tremble with desire.”

When rejected, she suffered—even groveled. As her stormy relationship with the poet-playwright Alfred de Musset drew to a close, she wrote: “I was hoping you would come and waited for your call from 11 o’clock in the morning until midnight. What a day! Every ring of the doorbell made me jump! I have such a headache. I wish I were dead.” She cut off her hair and sent it to him.

With Polish composer Frédéric Chopin—tubercular, aristocratic, an opium smoker, and six years younger than she—Sand ran the gamut. In 1838, at the beginning of their relationship, she compared his attitude toward sex to that of an old woman and wailed, “Can there ever be love without a single kiss, and kisses without sensual pleasure?” Long before the end of their nine years together, he complained that
she
wouldn’t sleep with
him
.

Among her other lovers were engraver Alexandre Damien Manceau, who lived with her in calm serenity from the time he was 32 (she was 45) until he died 15 years later, and painter Charles Marchal, 39 to her 60, whom she called her “fat baby.”

Gossip linked her with others. Gustave Planche, a literary critic with careless personal-hygiene habits, fought a duel to defend her literary honor

against another critic who had attacked her novel
Lélia
(the shots misfired, the sales of
Lélia
shot up); it is not clear whether she ever had sex with him.

Nor is it clear whether she had sex with women, notably with actress Marie Dorval, to whom she wrote letters that would today be considered erotic but were commonplace among women friends at the time. Example: “In the theater or in your bed, I simply must come and kiss you, my lady, or I shall do something crazy!”

And some passionate friendships were nonsexual—those with Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Franz Liszt, Alexandre Dumas
père
, and Gustave Flaubert.

HER THOUGHTS:
“I had no feeling of guilt because I have always felt my infidelities were caused by fate, by a search for an ideal which impelled me to abandon the imperfect in favor of what appeared to be nearer perfection. I have known many kinds of love. I loved like an artist, a woman, a sister, a mother, a nun, a poet. Some loves died the day they were born without ever being revealed to the person who had inspired them. Some made a martyr of me and drove me to despair…. Some kept me shut away for years in a sort of excessive sublima-tion. Every time I was perfectly sincere.”

—A.E.

Salonkeeper

GERTRUDE STEIN (Feb. 3, 1874–July 27, 1946)

HER FAME:
Gertrude Stein was an

American writer whose avant-garde

writing style and odd, masculine appearance helped establish her as an eccentric

in the minds of the American public.

Her permanent home in Paris, which she

shared with her lover, Alice B. Toklas,

served as the gathering place for expatriate

writers and artists during the years

between WWI and WWII.

HER PERSON:
Born in Allegheny, Pa.,

to fairly well-to-do and restless parents,

Stein spent her early years living with her

family in Vienna and Paris before returning to settle in Oakland, Calif., of which

she said, “The thing about Oakland is

that when you get there, there’s no there there.” Critics believe that her early

association with three different languages later influenced her writings, allowing her to use words as sounds, detached from their general meanings.

Her weak-spirited mother died of cancer when Stein was 14, leaving her tyrannical father to browbeat his daughter into the study of medicine. He died three years later, but he was a strong influence on her feelings toward men. Later she would write, “Fathers are depressing.”

At Radcliffe College she studied psychology under William James, whose theory of pragmatism (understanding immediate events without applying past experiences to them) would later influence her writings. She entered Johns Hopkins Medical School for graduate study, only to flunk out four years later, when she became distracted by her first lesbian love affair and her subsequent inner struggle to accept her own sexuality, which was thoroughly at odds with the standard mores of the time.

She moved to Paris, living off the money that was willed to her by her parents. There she shared a home with her brother Leo, an art critic. The two began collecting Cubist paintings, which were new and daring at that time.

Painters like Picasso, Matisse, and Braque became their close friends and began visiting regularly. During this period she wrote three books:
Q.E.D.
, written in 1903 but not published until 1950, a cathartic account of her struggle with lesbianism;
Three Lives
, published in 1909 and well received by the public; and
The Making of Americans
, written between 1903 and 1911 but not published until 1925. Leo moved out after a fight with his sister, and Alice B. Toklas moved in, becoming Stein’s adviser, protector, and lover for the next 38 years.

As her literary reputation grew, so did the number of writers and artists who came to visit, people like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, and Ernest Hemingway. With her short-cropped masculine haircut, thick girth, and loud laugh, Stein seemed an unlikely candidate for the powerful artistic figure she became, one who could make or break reputations by even the most innocuous of comments. Her most popular book was her autobiography, called
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
, published in 1933. Stein died in 1946, leaving her estate to Toklas, who kept possession of her art collection until 1961, when it was appropriated by the Stein family and sold at auction for $6 million.

LOVE LIFE:
Gertrude Stein had problems accepting her lesbian tendencies in her first affair with fellow student May Bookstaver. May’s passionate nature led her to other affairs, leaving Stein to agonize over her own sexuality since it was so opposed to her middle-class upbringing. It wasn’t until later, when she met and “married” Alice B. Toklas, that she came to accept her feelings for women: “Slowly it has come to me that any way of being a loving one is interesting and not unpleasant to me.”

Stein was living in Paris, presiding over a salon populated by Pablo Picasso and other painters of future renown, when Alice B. Toklas came into her life in the autumn of 1907. Toklas had been raised in San Francisco, was well educated, and was on a visit to Europe. She was invited by Stein to see her collection of art and soon dropped by. Toklas was shy and lean, Stein was heavyset (soon to exceed 200 lb.). Mabel Dodge Luhan remembered them both at the outset, saying of the 30-year-old Toklas: “She was slight and dark, with beautiful gray eyes hung with black lashes—and she had a drooping, Jewish nose, and her eye-lids drooped, and the corners of her red mouth and the lobes of her ears drooped under the black folded Hebraic hair, weighed down as they were, with long heavy Oriental earrings.” And of the 33-year-old Stein she wrote: “Gertrude Stein was prodigious. Pounds and pounds and pounds piled up on her skeleton—not the billowing kind, but massive, heavy fat. She wore some covering of corduroy or velvet and her crinkly hair was brushed back and twisted up high behind her jolly, intelligent face.”

It was love at first sight for both of them. Alice Toklas visited again and again, and finally Stein invited her to move in. Toklas proofread one of Stein’s books, then typed 1,000 manuscript pages of another. Eventually, according to Mabel Dodge Luhan, Toklas became Stein’s “hand-maiden … always serving someone … perfect for doing errands … so self-obliterating that no one considered her very much beyond thinking her a silent, picturesque object in the background.” But Stein’s brother, Leo, thought Toklas was more, and told Mabel Dodge Luhan, who wrote of Leo’s complaints: “He had always had a special disgust at seeing how the weaker can enslave the stronger as was happening in their case. Alice was making herself indispensable…. And Gertrude was growing helpless and foolish from it and less and less inclined to do anything herself, Leo said; he had seen trees strangled by vines in the same way.”