Free The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People by Sylvia Wallace, Irving Wallace, Amy Wallace, David Wallechinsky Page A

he took her in “a perfect act of love.” Valentino preferred sex first and intimate conversation afterward. She found him a very accomplished lover, able to size up a woman and judge exactly the right approach which would maneuver her into bed. One time he decided that strewing rose petals on Pola’s bed would do the trick, and it did. Pola hoped to marry him, though as a form of New Year’s resolution in 1926 he bet that he would still be a bachelor by 1930.
    No one knows whether he would have won. After a brief illness, he died in 1926. Thousands of men and women crushed each other to view the body; some women who never knew him committed suicide, and for years a “Lady in Black” visited his grave on the anniversary of his death.
    HIS THOUGHTS: “To generalize on women is dangerous. To specialize on them is infinitely worse.”
    —W.A.D. and V.S.
    II
    Acting It Up
    MOVIES
    The Great Profile
    JOHN BARRYMORE (Feb. 15, 1882–May 29, 1942)
    HIS FAME: The son of Maurice Barrymore and the brother of Ethel and Lionel
    Barrymore, Jack was a member of the
    most distinguished family of actors to
    appear on the American stage. Although
    he conquered the legitimate theater with
    his good looks, he in turn was conquered
    by a riotous life of dissipation in Hollywood. His career was a duel between his
    awesome talents and his inexorable drive
    toward self-destruction.
    HIS PERSON: Inherently lazy and an
    alcoholic from the age of 14, Jack chose
    the stage as the easiest way of making a
    living. He had been fired from a job as a
    caricaturist on a New York newspaper
    because of his heavy drinking, so he
    joined an acting troupe on its way to Australia. Before departing, he managed to sleep through the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Soldiers pressed him into clearing rubble, causing his uncle to remark, “It took a calamity of nature to get him out of bed and the U.S. Army to make him go to work.”
    He returned to America a polished light comedian and shortly was the toast of Broadway. The young matinee idol was kept busy trying to support his profligate lifestyle, and even though he despised the repetition involved in stage acting, his characterizations of Richard III and Hamlet are still regarded as classics. He made 15 films before following his drinking buddies Ben Hecht, Gene Fowler, and W. C.
    Fields from New York to Hollywood. At his peak in pictures, he was earning a minimum of $76,250 per film and was nationally acclaimed as “the Great Lover.”
    However, he hated his pretty-boy image and never missed an opportunity to act in grotesque makeup, relishing roles like Svengali, Mr. Hyde, and Captain Ahab.
    Barrymore was a notoriously cruel wit. At the funeral of a friend, he was about to depart with the other mourners when he saw a doddering old man lingering behind, staring down into the grave. Barrymore sidled up to the old fellow, leaned over, and whispered, “I guess it hardly pays to go home.” When he met columnist Louella Parsons at a social function, he commented in a voice loud enough to be heard by the entire roomful of people: “She’s a quaint old udder, isn’t she?” He described another woman as looking “exactly like a dental filling.”
    Barrymore was equally well known for his nearly superhuman drinking, which aged him rapidly. In 1935, in an attempt to dry out, he took his daughter Diana on a cruise on his yacht. All liquor was removed from the boat before it sailed. Yet Barrymore was drunk during the entire voyage, for he found a means of siphoning off alcohol from the yacht’s engine-cooling system.
    By the end of his life the once great actor was reduced to a pitiful series of self-mocking roles that reflected his tarnished reputation—that of a lecherous old drunkard. A friend summed up Barrymore’s life by observing, “Nobody can run downhill as fast as a Thoroughbred.” He lived voraciously up to the moment of his death from extreme old age at 60.
    SEX LIFE: At age 15, Jack