The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People (77 page)

LOVE LIFE:
By his own admission, he was a somewhat introverted youth, and several times he endured periods of sexual abstinence while concentrating on political problems, but he appears to have been a wholly heterosexual male who appreciated beauty, femininity, and intelligence in his women. His first adult relationship with a female was an odd one which contributed greatly to the shaping of his political thought. By the time he was 14, he had alienated his taskmaster father with his idling and dreamy devotion to romantic literature. To jar the boy out of his indolence, Mao’s father arranged a marriage for him with an older girl. Though appalled by the situation, Mao went through the traditional wedding ceremonies (perhaps the only time he did so in his four marriages) but then refused to live with his bride. Later he claimed that he had never touched her. This act of rebellion inaugurated his lifelong fight against Chinese traditions.

A decade of spasmodic education and odd jobs followed, after which Mao settled down to serious journalism and incipient revolutionary work in Peking. He said of his early life, “I was not interested in women,” but he seems to have had a few romantic involvements. Still, he probably remained a virgin until he met Yang K’ai-hui, a beautiful fellow revolutionary. According to Edgar Snow, an American journalist who interviewed Mao extensively during the late 1930s, Mao and Yang joined in a “trial marriage” before formalizing their bonds around 1921 in a wedding whose exact date no one bothered to remember. By freely choosing each other, they flouted tradition. Their radical peers thought them the ideal revolutionary couple. During the fighting with Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang forces in 1927, Mao left Yang and his children in Changsha for safety. Three years later the Kuomintang captured Yang there and publicly executed her for refusing to renounce Mao, who was by then a major Communist leader. Many other members of Mao’s family were killed over the next 20 years, and he lost track of most of his children (whose number is not known) in the upheaval of the times.

Although Yang had never disavowed Mao, by the time of her death he was already living with another beautiful corevolutionary, Ho Tzu-chen, a girl about half his age. They married soon after Yang’s death. When the Long March started in 1934, she had two children and was pregnant with a third. She was severely wounded, and the rigors of the march also destroyed her mental balance. Ho was sent to Moscow for psychiatric treatment, but her condition only worsened.

Eventually she was placed in a mental hospital in Shanghai.

Before breaking completely from Ho, who he divorced in 1937, Mao flirted with several presumably promiscuous women. Lily Wu, a graceful actress and interpreter, captivated him and was charged by Ho with alienating Mao’s affections. In 1938 he shocked the Chinese Communist party leadership by taking up with a movie actress whose reputation was even less savory and whose commitment to the revolution was suspect. This was Lan Ping (“Blue Apple”), who soon changed her name to Chiang Ch’ing (“Azure River”). She was a poor but ambitious actress who had resorted to Shanghai’s casting couches to get better parts. Rumors spread that she had been the mistress of Chang Keng, a director and Communist party official, and the wife of Tang Na, an actor and film critic. When she jilted Tang Na, leaving their two children with him, he threatened to kill himself. After marrying Mao in 1939, Chiang became an obscure housewife—a role said to have been ordained by the party leaders. Chiang later revealed something of her relationship with Mao in a famous epigram: “Sex is engaging in the first round, but what sustains interest in the long run is power.”

Chiang Ch’ing’s quest for power began during the 1960s, when she resurfaced as the driving force behind the Cultural Revolution. By the 1970s Mao was clearly estranged from her (she had to apply in writing to see him), but kept up.

Mao’s personal physician from 1954 until his death in 1976, Dr. Li Zhisui, brooke long-suppressed information in his 1994 memoir, The Private Life of Chairman Mao, about the leader’s occasional concerns of impotence and his use of his personal bodyguards in a similar way to rock stars use roadies: rounding up potential bedmates among young, beautiful and sometimes married starry-eyed fans. Dr. Zhisui mentions how cuckholded husbands often considered it “an honor to offer his wife to the Chairman,” a carrier of
Trichomonas vaginalis
.

Writes Dr. Zhisui, “the young women were proud to be infected.”

“I suggested that he should at least allow himself to be washed and cleaned.

Mao still received only nightly rubdowns with hot towels. He never actually bathed. His genitals were never cleaned. But Mao refused to bathe. ‘I wash myself inside the bodies of my women,’ he retorted.”

MAO AND WOMEN’S LIBERATION:
Paradoxically, Mao, who one way or another abandoned four wives, was always a crusader against the oppression of women. The essence of Mao’s ideas about woman’s liberation was that the “double standard” had to be eliminated in order to give women the same freedom that was enjoyed by men. Further, Mao recognized that while all Chinese peasants had been exploited, women had suffered the additional exploitation imposed upon them by men, making them an even more potent revolutionary force.

HIS THOUGHTS:
In one of his poems, Mao referred to his second wife, Yang K’ai-hui, as a proud woman. When a friend wondered why he had described her as proud, Mao replied: “A woman got her head cut off for the revolution. Isn’t that something to be proud of?”

—R.K.R./A.P.

XI

Make Love

Not War

The Agreeable Sea-Wolf

JOHN PAUL JONES (July 6, 1747–July 18, 1792)

HIS FAME:
John Paul Jones is best

known as the naval hero of the American

War of Independence.

HIS PERSON:
“He was,” wrote Samuel

Eliot Morison, “one of the most paradoxical and fascinating figures in all

American history.” His real name was

simply John Paul. Born to a gardener and

his wife in Kirkcudbright, Scotland, he

left home at the age of 13 to become an

apprentice seaman. After several years as

a mate on slave ships, he commanded a

merchant vessel to Tobago in 1773.

While in port, when he postponed paying the crew, they mutinied and he killed

their leader. Convinced that he could not get a fair trial on the island, he fled to Fredericksburg, Va., and changed his name to John Jones.

When the Revolutionary War broke out, John Paul Jones, Esq., as he then called himself, was commissioned as a first lieutenant in the Continental Navy.

By 1776 he was the captain of his own ship and on Sept. 23, 1779, Jones’

Bonhomme Richard
engaged the British
Serapis
off the east coast of Yorkshire.

During a 3 1/2-hour engagement at close quarters Jones answered an enemy question about the sad condition of the
Richard
with the memorable “I have not yet begun to fight!” and proceeded to win a stunning victory. He was a hero to the colonists, a pirate to the British, and “Vindicator of the Freedom of the Seas”

to Louis XVI. Nonetheless, after the war, Jones couldn’t find a suitable job. This led him to become
Kontradmiral Pavel Ivanovich Jones
in Catherine the Great’s Russian navy during her war against the Turks. After a few engagements and an incredible scandal, he returned to Paris, sick and embittered, “like a wineskin from which the wine is all drawn,” as Thomas Carlyle later wrote. He died in 1792 at the age of 45 of a kidney ailment and pneumonia and was buried in a Paris cemetery. More than a century later, bones believed to be his remains were shifted to the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md.

SEX LIFE:
“I love women, I confess,” Jones—a confirmed bachelor—wrote Prince Grigori Potëmkin, “and the pleasures which one enjoys only with their sex.” Short and a little homely, his “stature” increased miraculously after his naval exploits earned him friendship with Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and the Marquis de Lafayette. Jones offset a fierce visage and towering temper with a sentimental nature that produced some fine verse. “A poet as well as a hero,” one admiring woman wrote of him. With his men he was a haughty tyrant who displayed an enormous ego and what he termed “infinite” ambition, but the meticulous Jones was almost too tender with the women who flocked around him. Abigail Adams clearly found him to be a “dandy” who understood “all the etiquette of a lady’s toilette as perfectly as he does the mast and sails and rigging of his ship.” She was impressed by the fact that he knew “how often the ladies use the baths, what color best suits a lady’s complexion, what cosmetics are most favorable to the skin.” Because of his charms he had an active sex life, usually with married and, whenever possible, titled women. That he never wed can be attributed to his rival passion—the sea.

SEX PARTNERS:
Although he visited the high-class prostitutes of Soho during his youthful years, his first love was Dorothea Dandridge, a cousin of Martha Washington’s who dashed Jones’ “prospects of domestic happiness” when she married someone of her own class—Gov. Patrick Henry. But Jones had no trouble getting over her; in Holland he flirted with Anna Dumas, a 13-year-old he dubbed “the Virgin Muse,” and in France took up with Madame Le Ray de Chaumont, the wife of an influential businessman. (Ben Franklin had advised him that the fastest way to learn French was to find a “sleeping dictionary.”) During the spring of 1780 he was toasted wherever he went in Paris. “The men of France I esteem,” Jones wrote in his journal. “But the women of France! what words can I find to express my homage, my worship, my devotion!” He reveled with the beautiful friends of Ben Franklin, and at the salon of the famed courtesan Madame d’Ormoy (known as Madame la Présidente), and also with the ladies of the court of Louis XVI. In June of 1780 he spent five love-filled days at a secret rendezvous with the married Countess de Nicolson—“Delia” in his many passionate letters. But while Delia was sure that the “tender Jones is as faithful [a] lover as [he is a] valiant warrior,” he was also courting another married lady, Madame Charlotte de Lowendahl, a woman of royal birth, who called him “the most agreeable sea-wolf one could wish to meet with.” (Her portrait of him now hangs in the U.S. Naval Academy.) Though he pursued Charlotte assiduously, she shied away from his sexual maneuvers; in order to remain in her good graces, he was forced to assure her that “Friendship has nothing to do with sex.” But if one woman could be called the “love of his life,”

it would be “Madame T.” Shrouded in history, she has now been identified as a widow named Thérèse Townsend, who claimed to be the daughter of Louis XV.

From 1784 to 1790 they maintained contact through letters, often carried by Thomas Jefferson, and it is thought that she had a son by Jones.

They finally broke off their correspondence—perhaps because he discovered she had no royal blood, after all—and Jones then became involved in a scandal in Russia, when a 10-year-old girl accused him of rape. Jones offered at least three versions of the event, the most plausible of which held that while the child had “lent herself to do all that a man would want of her,” Jones had
not
“deflowered” her. Catherine the Great eventually cleared him of the charge but hastened his departure from Russia. Jones believed there had been a “complot”

against him devised by Potëmkin or his other rivals in the Russian navy. Another explanation, based on one of Catherine’s diaries, held that the jealous empress had turned on Jones when she learned of his affair with a blue-eyed, golden-haired lady-in-waiting, Princess Anna Kourakina, who supposedly bore Jones a son (and later died in a convent). This tale is now regarded as untrue.

Following his retreat from Russia, Jones returned to France, where he died a lonely man. A decade earlier, when asked if he’d ever been wounded, Jones had replied: “Never on the sea but on the land I have been bled by arrows which were never launched by the English.”