The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People

by Sylvia Wallace, Amy Wallace, David Wallechinsky, et al.

Book Overview

"Revealing An encyclopedia of what our celebrated betters do between the sheets."-- TIME "More astonishing and outrageous than most of us would even imagine."-- Forecast "Entirely fascinating. . . .... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 044004152X
• ISBN13: 9780440041528
• Release Date: January 1981
• Publisher: Delacorte Press
• Length: 618 Pages
• Weight: 2.70 lbs.

Customer Reviews

FASCINATING.

I remember purchasing this work via some sort of book club when it was first published. Looking back almost thirty years ago I have trouble remembering the reason why. I suppose that even though the only love lives I have ever been more than mildly interested in are mine and that of my wife. I suppose though, if I am to be truly honest with myself, I suppose I possess a bit of the voyeur in me as most of us do. I love niggle little bits of information and store them away like a squirrel with acorns...saving them for some rainy day I guess. Now that being said... This work by the Wallace family is an absolute hoot! This 618 page book (I have the hard cover here in front of me) covers the sex lives, or in some cases, the lack of sex lives, of around 200 individuals. For the most part these are historical figures, celebrities, actors, artists....well, as the title says "of Famous People." Now keep in mind that for the most part all of these people are dead, but the reader will come upon very familiar names. From Hitler to Gandhi to an unending list of movie stars and sports heroes through artists, writers, poets, scientists, and beyond...they are all here. The author has given us a short biography of each of these individual (like as in why are they famous), what they were like in person, their love lives and finally their quirks, if any. Now don't get the impression that this is some sort of collection of off colored stories that you see in the grocery line. No, this is a pretty well researched piece of work and the authors back it up with documentation. When speculation is made, the author's are the first to point it out. This book is not an erotic peek into the lives of their subjects and the only times the authors delve into this area is when they quote statements or letters from their subjects. All in all, for the subject matter, this is a very dignified book. But dignified dose not make it stuffy, no, no, no...far from that. Like I said, this work is an absolute hoot to read. Was Edna St. Vincent Millay heterosexual, bisexual or lesbian? Do you know? Did Ms. Millay know? How many hours during his life time did Errol Flynn spend making love? (He tells us and apparently kept some sort of log. I can identify with that as I have been keeping log books on my mileage running and biking for years and lists of birds I have seen; I am a habitual record keeper and always have been...I never thought about sex though...hmmm, nothing wrong with a short list I suppose). Was Nikolai Lenin a bigger swinger than Chairman Mai? How about Gen. Douglas MacArthur? Chopin, Debussy, Liszt, Stokowski...did these guys only practice and write their music, or did they have "distractions?" I collect absolutely useless facts like a wool coat collects lint. The useless stuff simply sticks in my head and never leaves. The next time you and I are setting at the local café having coffee and you ask me "Hey don, how did William Gladstone controlled

Fantastically entertaining!

This book is a great anthology of not only the intimate lives of interesting characters, but also a concise survey of the influence of sex on world history. Wonderfully written, and wildly entertaining!

Their Fame, Their Person, Sex Lives & Sex Partners (Bio & Photos)

Contents Include: Foreplay 1 - ACTING IT UP MOVIES: Charlie Chaplin * Gary Cooper * Joan Crawford * James Dean * W.C. Fields * Errol Flynn * Clark Gable * Charles Laughton STAGE: John Barrymore * Sarah Bernhardt * Eleonora Duse * David Garrick * Lillie Langtry * Lillian Russell 2 - PAINTING THE TOWN * Paul Gauguin * Vincent van Gogh * Francisco de Goya * Amedeo Modigliani * Pablo Picasso * Rembrandt van Rijn * Diego Rivera * Peter Paul Rubens * Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec 3 - SEX SCENES * Hans Christian Andersen * Honore de Balzac * James Boswell * Sir Richard Burton * Charles Dickens * Fedor Dostoevski * Alexandre Dumas (pere) * George Eliot * Johan Wolfgang von Goethe * Victor Hugo * Guy de Maupassant * John Ruskin * Marquis de Sade * George Sand * Stendahl * August Strindberg * Leo Tolstoy * Mary Wollstonecraft * Emile Zola 4 - MORE SEX SCENES * J.M. Barrie * Lewis Carroll * Colette * Gabriele D'Annunzio * William Faulkner * F. Scott Fitzgerald * Andre Gide * Ernest Hemingway * Christopher Isherwood * James Joyce * George S. Kaufman * D.H. Lawrence * Jack London * W. Somerset Maugham * Yukio Mishima * William Seabrook * Georges Simenon * Gertrude Stein * Mark Twain * H.G. Wells * Oscar Wilde * Thomas Wolfe * Virginia Woolf 5 - POETIC LICENSE * Rupert Brooke * Robert Burns * Emily Dickinson * Edna St. Vincent Millay * Ezra Pound * Rainer Maria Rilke * Algernon Charles Swinburne * Paul Verlaine 6 - HIGH NOTES CLASSICAL - Maria Callas * Enrico Caruso * Adelina Patti POPULAR - Jimi Hendrix * Billie Holiday * Janis Joplin * Edith Piaf * Elvis Presley * Bessie Smith 7 - LET'S MAKE MUSIC CLASSICAL - Johannes Brahms * Frederic Chopin * Claude Debussy * Franz Liszt * Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart * Leopold Stokowski * Petr Ilich Tchaikovsky * Richard Wagner POPULAR - Duke Ellington * George Gershwin 8 - COMMAND PERFORMANCES EGYPT - Cleopatra * Farouk I FRANCE - Louis XIV * Louis XV * Napoleon Bonaparte * Pauline Bonaparte GREAT BRITAIN - Henry VIII * Elizabeth I * Charles II * Victoria * Edward VII * Edward VIII OTHER - Catherine II of Russia * Maria Louisa of Spain * Mongkut of Siam * Abdul-Aziz IBn-Saud of Saudi Arabia * Carol II of Romania 9 - FOLLOW THE LEADER U.S. LEADERS * Thomas Jefferson * Grover Cleveland * Warren G. Harding * The Coolidge Effect * Franklin Delano Roosevelt * Dwight D. Eisenhower * John F. Kennedy WORLD LEADERS * Benjamin Disraeli * William Gladstone * Mahatma Gandhi * Adolf Hitler * Nikolai Lenin * Benito Mussolini * Mao Tse-tung * Eva Peron 10 - MAKE LOVE, NOT WAR * John Paul Jones * T.E. Lawrence * Gen. Douglas MacArthur * Lord Horatio Nelson * Philippe I, Duc d'Orleans * Pancho Villa * Duke of Wellington 11 - GETTING DOWN TO BUSINESS * Henry Ford * William Randolph Hearst * Howard Hughes * Aristotle Onassis 12 - HOLIER THAN THOU * Pope Alexandr VI * Henry Ward Beecher * Father Divine * Mary Baker Eddy * Martin Luther * Aimee Semple McPherson * Grigori Rasputin * Paul Tillich * Brigham Young 13 - HE

VERY INTERESTING!

Had purchased this book years ago, and read it so many times, it fell apart!! This new book is great and I enjoyed it very much!!

Another excellent Wallace publication

Normally I'd just pass something like this by, but I saw it was done by the same folks who had done the People's Almanac series (Irving Wallace and David Wallachinsky). I grew up reading those massive compendiums of assorted information (including my earliest sex education in a book) and figured that if anyone could cover this topic tastefully, it would be the Wallaces/etc. This is over 500 pages of information on the sex practices of everyone from royalty to actors and actresses, poets and playwrights, the rich and famous and the famous-after-they-died-as-paupers. Ever wondered what Casanova was really like? Or if Babe Ruth was as much a slugger in the sheets as on the baseball field? How about Cleopatra herself? Well-researched, and well-written without being lurid, this is a frank but mature appraisal of the relationships and flings of the famous. While there are a lot of unfaithful folks, as well as some early free love advocates, there are also those who managed successful monogamy. Only the most prudish people could take offense at this excellent approach to S-E-X and the famous.