The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People (51 page)

“You make that dress look so beautiful” or “Does your contract stipulate that you must be this pretty?” Even while he was still living with Edna he had numerous affairs, and according to his son, Mercer, during an argument over one of them Edna slashed his face with a knife, leaving a permanent scar. Duke always loved the attention women paid him, and his son believed that at least part of the reason he went into show business was because it was “a good way to get a girl to sit beside you and admire you as you played the piano.” Ralph Gleason, writer and jazz critic, recalled the time he stood with Ellington in the wings of a theater while his band was playing. A trumpet solo was in progress, and as Duke watched, two of his musicians who had a reputation for using drugs sat in their chairs, heads drooping, nodding off. Duke shook his head and said, “I don’t understand it at all. I’m a cunt man myself.” Another time, Gleason recalled, Duke turned to a script girl working on the documentary
Love You
Madly
and remarked, “Sweetie, I don’t know your name. You must tell me right away because last night when I dreamed about you I could only call you baby.”

But Ellington, according to Mercer, “never seemed to be interested in the perfect woman. If she had a scar, or was slightly misproportioned—big-busted, big-hipped, or a little off balance—then he was more interested.” But women definitely did interest him. At the notorious House of All Nations in Paris, after the spectacle was over and the girls had lined up, he was asked by a friend to take his pick. Ellington replied, “I’ll take the three on this end.” He had so many women that he had to develop tricks to deal with all of them. He got into the habit of giving everybody four kisses, thus making it impossible for anyone to know with whom he was actually involved. When someone would ask about the unusual number of kisses, Duke’s standard reply was “Once for each cheek.” In 1972, during a week-long festival, so many of his women showed up—and stayed in the same hotel that he was at—that he would get a friend to take two of them out to dinner while he took yet another one up to his room.

SEX PARTNERS:
In 1929 his marriage to Edna ended in separation after Duke had a passionate affair with an attractive actress. Although Mercer calls it “one of the most serious relationships of his life,” the anonymous woman left Duke because he refused to divorce Edna and marry her.

Mildred Dixon, who caught Ellington’s eye from the chorus line at the Cotton Club, moved in with Duke in 1930 and stayed for almost a decade.

Personable and intelligent, Mildred was Duke’s “Sweet Bebe,” but her charms paled next to those of Beatrice Ellis, a half-black, half-Spanish show girl who also worked at the Cotton Club. Strikingly beautiful, she spent the next 37

years answering to the name of Evie Ellington and patiently waiting for Duke’s infrequent trips to their lavish New York City apartment. Even when the globe-trotting Ellington breezed in to relieve Evie’s loneliness, they rarely were seen together in public. His sister Ruth was the “official” hostess, and her possessiveness and Evie’s greed were the major reasons that Duke never married Evie. Until Edna died in 1966, he maintained that a divorce would be very expensive, and Evie wanted to keep her deluxe standard of living.

After Edna’s death, when Evie was certain Duke would marry her, he flatly refused, even when she pulled a gun on him. Evie resigned herself to a solitary life without a marriage certificate, and Duke called her daily, wrote her touching notes, and showered her with flowers, candy, and fruit.

In 1959 Duke met nightclub singer Fernanda de Castro Monte, who later became Madame Zajj in “A Drum Is a Woman.” Tall, blond, and fortyish, Fernanda accompanied Ellington on many of his world tours and was introduced as “the Countess.” Mercer remembers the farewell she gave Duke after they met in Last Vegas: “She was very smartly dressed in a mink coat. Just as the train was about to pull out, she opened the coat. She had nothing at all on under it, and she wrapped it around him to give him his good-bye kiss. With that, she left him to cool off.” Fernanda had expensive tastes and introduced Duke to vodka and caviar (which he touted as an aphrodisiac). When she started making demands, Ellington told her that he was legally married to Evie, who was so jealous of Fernanda that she threatened Duke with her gun a second time.

Fernanda de Castro Monte was the final woman of influence in Ellington’s life. He had affairs with many other women (some of whom divorced their husbands for him), but none of them made much of an impact on Duke’s life. To the end he insisted, “Music is my mistress, and she plays second fiddle to no one.”

—C.H.S. and the Eds.

The Music Lover

GEORGE GERSHWIN (Sept. 26, 1898 –July 11, 1937)

HIS FAME:
One of the most significant

and popular American composers, Gershwin wrote the musical score for such

classic musicals as
Funny Face
(1927),
Of
Thee I Sing
(1931), and
Porgy and Bess

(1935). A posthumous film biography,

Rhapsody in Blue
(1945), helped to

cement and preserve his fame.

HIS PERSON:
Born Jacob Gershvin in

a tough Jewish section of Brooklyn,

Gershwin gave no hint of his extraordinary talent during his early years. But at

the age of 10 he happened to hear the

sounds of a violin drifting through an

open window and instantly succumbed

to the charms of music. “It was, to me, a flashing revelation of beauty,” he later said. Enraptured, Gershwin took up the piano. In 1913 he quit school to become a staff pianist with a Tin Pan Alley publishing firm and soon began issuing his prolific stream of compositions. His 1919 hit, “Swanee,” sung by Al Jolson, established his fame and allowed him to pursue more ambitious undertakings, including scoring Broadway shows and Hollywood movies, often with his older brother, Ira, as lyricist.

Despite his successes, Gershwin was plagued by nervous and digestive disorders. He rigidly limited his diet to easily digested foods—cereals and the like.

To combat constipation and chronic depression, he entered psychoanalysis with Dr. Gregory Zilboorg. He saw Zilboorg five times a week for a year, and they got along so well that they even went on vacation to Mexico together.

Gershwin was hardly all gloom and constipation, however. He was the life of many parties and enthusiastically plunged into a variety of projects, from juggling to painting. His vitality remained undiminished until his sudden death, at 38, from an inoperable brain tumor.

SEX LIFE:
Gershwin brought his full enthusiasm to sex. Women by the score were attracted to his dark, athletically trim good looks. He slept with many of them, but, unsated by the flood of women who pursued him, he also indulged in frequent trips to brothels, where he gladly bought more sex. He even asked a friend how one went about “keeping” a woman. When informed of the cost involved, he dropped the subject.

A scorecard of Gershwin’s lovers would list hundreds, even thousands, of partners, and he often bragged of his conquests and his bedtime prowess; for example, he occasionally enjoyed sex with two women at the same time. Aware of his sexual reputation, he once offered to bestow upon a young woman the privilege of sleeping with him before her marriage. She declined. But one trip to a bordello undid his boasting. While having his pleasure in a Parisian brothel, a pair of his friends—unbeknownst to Gershwin—bribed the madam for a look through a peephole which gave a clear view of Gershwin’s performance. What they saw, they reported later, was mechanical sex hastily consummated. Gershwin’s interest in lovemaking, despite a multitude of lovers, was perfunctory. But that is not unexpected. Although he believed that sex stimulated his creativity, Gershwin’s chief interest—always—was music. Once while at a party, for example, Gershwin sat with a pretty girl ensconced on his lap. Invited to play a few tunes on the piano, Gershwin bolted from his chair so rapidly that the young lady tumbled to the floor. He had simply forgotten her presence when music was mentioned. In another instance, after learning a woman he had loved had married another, Gershwin commented, “If I wasn’t so busy, I’d be upset.”

Ironically, despite his vigorous pursuit of sexual pleasures, Gershwin retained some prudishness. His sister Frances discovered that part of his nature when she once said “darn” in public and Gershwin slapped her for uttering the expletive. And he frequently rebuked her for wearing her skirts above her knees.

SEX PARTNERS:
Because of Gershwin’s many lovers, his biographers inevitably seek to identify
the
woman of his life, the one he loved best. Dozens of candidates for
the
woman are championed, including composer Kay Swift, to whom he dedicated his
Song-Book
compositions; actress Paulette Goddard, whom he urged to leave her spouse, Charlie Chaplin; French starlet Simone Simon, who presented Gershwin with a gold key to her Los Angeles home; and dancer Margaret Manners, whose son took the name Alan Gershwin and, in 1959, authored an article for
Confidential
magazine entitled “I Am George Gershwin’s Illegitimate Son.” Was he? The evidence on both sides is unconvincing. But it would still be irrelevant to the issue at hand, since there are no signs Manners played a major role in Gershwin’s life. Only one fact is certain: Gershwin never loved one woman enough to marry her.

With some insight, wit Oscar Levant, a close Gershwin friend, once quipped, “Tell me, George, if you had to do it all over again, would you fall in love with yourself again?” Levant’s sharp tongue perhaps cuts unfairly. Gershwin did love himself. But he loved music even more.

HIS THOUGHTS:
“I think that the reason why I’ve never gotten married is that I’m always looking for a woman like my mother—and there just
isn’t
another like her.”

“Why should I limit myself to only one woman when I can have as many women as I want?”

—R.M.

Lady Day

BILLIE HOLIDAY (Apr. 17, 1915–July 17, 1959)

HER FAME:
“Strange Fruit” was the

first hit record of this black singer of

jazz and blues, who became famous for

her passionate and touching vocal ren—

ditions, which transformed even the

most banal lyrics into sheer poetry. As

her career blossomed, she progressed

from Harlem nightclubs to concert

stages with jazz greats Benny Goodman,

Artie Shaw, and Count Basie, and from

live performances to movie roles.

HER PERSON:
Billie wrote, “Mom

and Pop were just a couple of kids when

they got married. He was 18, she was

16, and I was 3.” Pop was an itinerant

guitarist, and, although they were poor, Mom would feed any musician who drifted through Baltimore. A childhood experience traumatized Billie; her great-grandmother died in her sleep, and her stiffened arm had to be broken in order to release the just-awakened Billie from its grasp.

Eleanora Fagan Holiday was a tomboy, and her father called her Bill. She called herself Billie after her favorite movie actress, Billie Dove. She attended school only through the fifth grade, and she secretly loved comic books as an adult. After a lifetime of tragic heroin addiction, police harassment, and jail terms, she died at age 44 of heart and liver failure.

SEX LIFE:
Ten-year-old Billie was sentenced by a judge to a Catholic reform school. Her crime: being raped by a middle-aged neighbor, Mr. Dick. The event was “bloody and violent,” as was her first voluntary sexual encounter two years later with an older musician on her grandmother’s parlor floor.

Around that time she started running errands for a whorehouse, where she heard her first jazz records. As a teenage prostitute in New York City, she preferred white customers because the blacks took too long. A black man she refused to service tipped off the cops about her, and she was jailed for prostitution. Later she admitted to having had lesbian relations in prison, but claimed she had taken a passive role.