The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People Read Free Page A

she asked Bouillon to donate his services to the cause of Free France. They began seeing each other. On June 3, 1947, they were married. During their marriage Baker purchased the château she had once leased, Les Milandes, and had it renovated into a resort. She incurred huge debts, placing tremendous pressure on the relationship with her husband. Her marriage to Bouillon lasted 13 years.
    In her last years Josephine Baker gave more and more time to her adopted children and to her growing struggle against racism, especially in the U.S., where many of her bookings had been canceled. Ironically, it was following a triumphant tour of the U.S. that Baker died of a heart attack in Paris at the age of 68.
    — F.C.
    The Girl Who Had It
    CLARA BOW (Aug. 6, 1905–Sept. 27, 1965)
    HER FAME: As F. Scott Fitzgerald
    embodied the Roaring Twenties in literature, she embodied it on film, having 48
    films to her credit by the age of 25. In 1927
    she was receiving 40,000 fan letters a week.
    HER PERSON: Clara’s was the classic
    Hollywood story—up from obscurity at
    age 19 to become the reigning sex goddess of her time, collecting the obligatory
    emotional scars all along the way. Father
    Robert was often either unemployed or
    footloose; Mother Sarah was bitter. She’d
    stick Clara in the closet of their Brooklyn
    tenement while she turned tricks for
    food and rent money. Once, when she
    learned that Clara and her father were submitting a picture of Clara for a magazine beauty contest, she crept into Clara’s bedroom with a knife, vowing that her daughter wouldn’t live to be one of those whores who primps before cameras for the pleasure of men. Luckily Clara escaped into the bathroom that night, with her life and her career. She won the contest and an initial stab at Hollywood, which eventually led to her signing with Paramount.
    She became one of the studio’s biggest stars, earning $7,500 a week. And thanks to the insomnia which resulted from her mother’s late-night threat on her life, she was able to live in a manner that embellished her on-screen image.
    She’d speed up and down Sunset Boulevard in an open convertible accompanied by a couple of chows who matched her hennaed hair. She’d run up fabulous gambling tabs in Las Vegas. And she was perfectly scandalous in her personal affairs. In 1931 those affairs brought her down when she sued Daisy DeVoe, her private secretary, for embezzling $16,000 from her. During the trial, the judge would not permit Daisy to discuss Clara Bow’s sexual escapades, so Daisy sold her exposé to Bernarr Macfadden’s New York Evening Graphic (incidentally, the authors of this book scoured the U.S. for a copy of the exposé issue, but no copy was available anywhere). Daisy was found guilty and sent to jail for a year. Word got out about Clara’s private life and damaged her career.
    SEX LIFE: In her heyday Clara reputedly made love to Gilbert Roland, Victor Fleming, Gary Cooper, John Gilbert, Eddie Cantor, Bela Lugosi, and the entire University of Southern California football team.
    She met Roland, Paramount’s Latin lover, during their filming of The Plastic Age . He was the first man she ever cared about, she said, but it wasn’t enough for the temperamental Roland, who went into fits of jealousy at Clara’s continued interest in other men. When he proposed marriage as a remedy for his insecurity, she dismissed the proposal, saying that no man would ever own her.
    Thus she set the pattern for most of her relationships with men. She’d love them, but never enough to satisfy their egos. Director Victor Fleming was 20
    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