The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People Read Free Page B

“It” boy for his involvement with Clara, the quintessential “It” girl. In later years Coop tried to dismiss his relationship with Clara as just so much publicity, but Clara told delicious stories of his bathing her and her dogs in the morning and making love to her all night.
    There was the “Thundering Herd,” the University of Southern California’s football team, which Clara entertained on a regular basis at her Beverly Hills home. Those with a vested interest in the Trojan sports program have always maintained that the post-game get-togethers at Clara’s place were nothing more than good, clean fun, but neighbors and “friends” told tales of nude football games on the front lawn and all-night orgies. The legend grew that Clara introduced the team concept to lovemaking by taking on more than a single player at a time. Whatever the truth to the stories, a sign was eventually posted in the Trojan locker room making Clara Bow off limits.
    Clara took a brief fancy to East Coast football in the person of Robert Savage, a millionaire’s son who played for Yale. Unlike most of Clara’s other lovers, who merely went off and brooded when they found out that they weren’t number one in her program and number one in her heart, Savage tried to kill himself by slashing his wrists and letting the blood flow onto an autographed picture of Clara. Clara exclaimed, “Jesus Christ, he’s got to be kidding. Men don’t slash their wrists, they use a gun!”
    Harry Richman, top-salaried Broadway singing star in the 1930s, did not become a Hollywood immortal like some of Clara’s other lovers, although he tried to do so by flaunting their relationship. He boasted that she was the only woman who could ever keep up with him sexually. She gave him a $2,000 ring.
    He gave her a child (which she had aborted), put detectives on her tail when he was out of town, and even followed her himself to see where she went after their nights together. Needless to say, they did not live happily ever after.
    She might have achieved that blissful state with William Earl Pearson, a Texas doctor who performed an emergency appendectomy on her during the filming of Dangerous Curves . She loved him enough to try monogamy for a while (gifting him with a $4,000 watch), but when he returned to his wife in Texas, Clara was left with nothing but an alienation-of-affections suit that had been filed against her, which was settled out of court.
    There had been actors, ballplayers, stunt men, airmen, and guys off the street, but finally there was Rex Bell, a cowboy actor and staunch Republican who twice became lieutenant governor of Nevada during the 1950s. Clara married Bell in 1931 and he saw her through the Daisy DeVoe trial, a failed comeback in the early 1930s, and a series of emotional breakdowns. Because of her unstable emotional condition, she lived apart from Bell and their two sons, seeking help in various sanitariums. In 1961, the 59-year-old Bell died of a heart attack. Clara succumbed four years later while watching television with a nurse-companion in her Los Angeles home.
    HER WORDS: “Most men want me on their terms. The trouble with men is that they all want to make you over into something else. It burns me up. Especially since it’s me as I am that they fall for. The more I see of men, the more I like dogs.”
    —D.R.
    Clubfooted Libertine
    LORD BYRON (Jan. 22, 1788–Apr. 19, 1824)
    HIS FAME: Considered one of the
    great 19th-century poets, George Gordon, Lord Byron, was the incarnate
    symbol of romanticism. In his works he
    created the “Byronic hero,” a mysterious and lonely young man defiantly
    hiding some unspeakable sin committed in his past. Byron’s autobiographical
    masterpiece, Don Juan —left unfinished
    upon the poet’s death—won universal
    acclaim for its combination of lyrical
    storytelling and satirical realism.
    HIS PERSON: A British lord by age

10, young Byron was influenced
    adversely by an unstable mother and