5 People Who Died During Sex: And 100 Other Terribly Tasteless Lists Paperback (5 page)

36

Ten10

Aphrodisiacs

a.d. 900: Sheep’s eyelid marinated in hot tea. Chinese emperors were required to keep twenty-one wives, a precise number thought to have magical properties, and the emperor was expected to make love to ten of them every night. A Taoist manual advised that this could be made possible by applying the mixture to the imperial penis.

1400:

Pigeon dung and snail excrement
[England]

1690:

Toad excrement
[France]
. This method had the royal seal of approval; it was the one successfully employed by King Louis XIV’s mistress Madame

de Montespan.

1700:

Menstrual blood as a food or drink additive
[Germany]

1830:

Lion testicles or arsenic
[London]

1850:

Penis and scrotum of a vanquished enemy warrior

[Brazilian Cubeo tribe]

1900:

Live monkey brains
[Malaysia]
. The live monkey was forced into a tight container with a bowl fitted to its head, the skull was cut open and peeled back to reveal the exposed brain, which was then scooped out with a spoon or sucked through a straw.

1943:

Animal hormone. To restore Adolf Hitler’s impaired virility, his personal physician, Dr.

Theodore Morell, injected the Führer with a compound containing hormones from crushed animal genitalia.

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[Ten Aphrodisiacs]

1950:

Chili and other hot spices. These are banned as prison food in some South and Central American countries, as they are feared likely to arouse passions “unseemly in a single-sex environment.”

2005:

Dolphins’ testicles
[Japan]
. Chicken testicles are preferred in Taiwan.

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Gr 40

eat Balls of Fire:

Forty Syphilitics*

Pope Alexander VI

Francisco Goya

Thomas Aquinas

Heinrich Heine

Johann Sebastian Bach

King Henry VIII

of England

Charles Baudelaire

King Herod of Judea

Al Capone

Adolf Hitler

Randolph Churchill

Emperor Commodus

Czar Ivan “the Terrible”

Captain James Cook

Julius Caesar

Hernán Cortez

John Keats

Frederick Delius

Pope Leo X

Albrecht Dürer

Ferdinand Magellan

Desiderius Erasmus

Guy de Maupassant

King Francis I of France

John Milton

King Frederick “the Great”

Edouard Monet

of Prussia

Benito Mussolini

Paul Gauguin

Friedrich Nietzsche

King George I

of Great Britain

Czar Paul I

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Arthur Schopenhauer

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[Forty Syphilitics]

Franz Schubert

Henri Toulouse-Lautrec

Jonathan Swift

Voltaire

Emperor Tiberius

Oscar Wilde

. . . . . . . . . . . .

* Syphilis was long thought to have originated in the Americas and to have begun its spread around the world after Columbus’s voyage in 1492. The disease may have been in Europe before Columbus, but it became commonplace after the arrival of new strains from the New World. The first European epidemic broke out in 1494, spread in part by retreating French troops after the siege of Naples. Whatever its origins, the disease swept through the European population in the sixteenth century. At its peak in the nineteenth century, syphilis affected as much as 15 percent of the adult population of Europe and North America, but it has largely died out since the development of penicillin in the 1940s. While it is impossible to retrospectively diagnose with complete accuracy, there is evidence that syphilis afflicted everyone on this list.

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10

This Old Heart of Mine:

Ten Horny Senior Citizens

1

KING LOUIS XIV OF FRANCE The tiny “Sun King”

was renowned for his phenomenal sexual appetite: His second wife and former mistress Madame de Montespan complained to her priest that she found the effort of making love to her seventy-year-old husband twice a day very tiring.

2

VICTOR HUGO The French author of
The Three
Musketeers, The Hunchback of Notre Dame
, and
Les
Miserables
required only four hours of sleep per night—

bad news for his wife, who was required to accommodate him nine times on her wedding night alone. He had a twenty-two-year-old girlfriend when he was seventy and was still sexually active when he died at eighty-three. His family tried to keep the frisky old poet from escaping into the streets in search of prostitutes, but they were not entirely successful: His diary records that he had sex four times in the final four months of his life.

3

EMPRESS CATHERINE “THE GREAT” OF

RUSSIA She was both insomniac and nymphomaniac, which meant trouble for the dozens of handsome young soldiers she continued to bed well into her late sixties.

She had twenty-one “official” lovers, of whom the last, Platon Zubov, was twenty-two years old when they met: She was sixty-four. Catherine’s astonishing sex life, coupled with her ability to ride a horse like a man—

considered shocking at a time when all women rode side-saddle—gave rise to the myth that she had sex with a horse. Catherine’s frolics were eventually terminated
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[Ten Horny Senior Citizens]

when she had a massive stroke and fell off her toilet seat in her sixty-seventh year.

4

THOMAS HARDY The English poet and novelist, author of
Far from the Madding Crowd, Tess of the
D’Urbervilles
, and
Jude the Obscure
, married his thirty-five-year-old secretary Florence Dugdale when he was seventy-three. Hardy boasted to a friend that he was still capable of “full sexual intercourse” at the age of eighty-four.

5

W. B. YEATS Success came to the poet late in his life, and he suddenly found himself surrounded by adoring young women, but he was also plagued with impotence and writer’s block. In an effort to revive both his flagging creative inspiration and his sex drive, he experimented with a number of quack impotence cures including a vasectomy procedure known as “Steinaching”—

performed by the Viennese doctor Eugene Steinach: Six months later, Yeats got lucky with a beautiful young actress, Margot Ruddock, twenty-seven to his sixty-nine.

The Dublin newspapers dubbed Yeats “the gland old man of poetry.”

6

KING LUDWIG I OF BAVARIA The grandfather of

“Mad” King Ludwig II achieved international notoriety at the age of sixty-one by stepping out with a notorious courtesan, twenty-eight-year-old Lola Montez: She introduced herself to the elderly monarch by ripping open her bodice and revealing her breasts. Ludwig pledged his undying love to Lola in reams of
42

[Ten Horny Senior Citizens]

outstandingly bad verse, but he was eventually forced by pressure from a popular uprising and his ministers to banish her from the country. Some suggested that she went willingly to escape another burst of the king’s poetry.

7

LORD PALMERSTON In spite of his ill-fitting false teeth, Britain’s prime minister was irresistible to women during the Crimean War. “Old Pam” or “Lord Cupid,” as he was known in Parliament, fathered seven illegitimate children and once tried to rape one of Queen Victoria’s ladies-in-waiting while he was visiting Windsor Castle (he later claimed he was drunk and had entered the wrong bedroom). In 1862, aged seventy-nine, he was cited as the correspondent in a divorce case. The story considerably enhanced his popularity; it was rumored that Palmerston even encouraged the gossip because he was hoping to call a general election.

8

H. G. WELLS The author of
The Time Machine, The
Invisible Man
, and
The War of the Worlds
, Wells was an unlikely lothario, being a short, fat, balding diabetic with an overly large head and a high-pitched squeaky voice, but according to one lover his body “smelled of honey,”

which may have helped him have affairs into his seventies with women up to forty years younger than himself. He was still at it until his death, a month before his eightieth birthday.

9

MAO ZEDONG The Communist leader believed that he could achieve longevity by increasing the number of
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[Ten Horny Senior Citizens]

his sexual partners, and well into his seventies he was still shedding his drab military uniform to bed several young women at a time. Temporary bouts of impotence were treated with injections of ground deer antlers and a secret formula called H3.

10

BERTRAND RUSSELL A Nobel prize winner and one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century, he had a string of high-profile affairs with married women in his seventies and enjoyed his fourth honeymoon at the age of eighty—and all this despite a childhood accident that damaged his penis when he fell out of a moving carriage. On a lecture tour of America, the elderly philosopher was asked by the dean of a respectable girls’

college, “Why did you give up philosophy?” Russell replied: “Because I discovered fucking.”

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10

Ten Milestones

in Contraception

1300 b.c.: Egyptian women use pessaries made from crocodile dung.

900 b.c.: Chinese birth-control experts advise women to swallow sixteen tadpoles fried in quicksilver immediately after intercourse.

200 b.c.: Arabians eat mashed pomegranate mixed with rock salt and alum.

1100:

The Dominican Church advises women to spit three times into the mouth of a frog, or to eat bees, immediately after intercourse.

1400:

Italians attempt to avoid pregnancy by drinking raw onion juice.

1600:

The French swear by cabbage, taken orally after intercourse.

1650:

German women smear their private parts with tobacco juice.

1700:

Islamic women are advised to jump backward seven or nine times immediately after sex.

1750:

Europeans wear condoms made from animal offal.

The original condoms are made from sausage skins by slaughterhouse workers. Casanova, who hates using condoms, places his faith in three gold balls, purchased from a Genoese goldsmith for about $90, which he places inside his partner. He claims that this method has served him well for fifteen years. A
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[Ten Milestones in Contraception]

more likely explanation for his run of luck is that he is infertile.

1843:

Mr. Goodyear vulcanizes rubber. The Japanese, however, continue to wear sheaths made from leather or tortoiseshell.

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Ten Pr

10

esidential Peccadilloes

1

GEORGE WASHINGTON (1789–97) The original

“philanderer-in-chief.” Among the women with whom Washington was known or suspected to have had adulterous relationships were Kitty Greene, Lucy Flucker Knox, Elizabeth Gates, Theodosia Prevost Burr, Kitty Duer, Phoebe Fraunces, Eliza Powell, Mrs. William Bingham, and Mrs. Perez Morton. Officially, Washington died of a chill that he caught, according to the official version, riding his horse in the snow. According to a more likely interpretation, he caught his death when he jumped out of a window trouserless after an assignation with an employee’s wife at Mount Vernon.

2

THOMAS JEFFERSON (1801–9) He lectured his fellow men on the dangers of associating with women and “the depravation of morals and ambiguity of issue,”

but the effect was slightly undermined by the fact that he slept with slave girls. Jefferson had a twenty-year sexual relationship with a slave called Sally Hemmings who was thirty years his junior. She bore him six children who were also kept as slaves. Jefferson also had adulterous affairs with Elizabeth Walker while her husband, General John Walker, was away fighting in one of the Indian Wars, and with Maria Cosway, wife of the famous English painter of miniatures Richard Cosway.

3

JAMES GARFIELD (1881) President Garfield said his marriage to his wife Lucretia was “a great mistake” and vowed to spend as much of his time far away from her on business trips as he possibly could. In 1862, he was caught in an affair with an eighteen-year-old reporter
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[Ten Presidential Peccadilloes]

from the
New York Times
, Lucia Calhoun. Mrs. Garfield made him choose between staying married and faithful or getting a divorce and damaging his career. Garfield chose the former, but during the 1880 election the press reported his frequent visits to a New Orleans brothel.

4

GROVER CLEVELAND (1885–89, 1893–97)

Cleveland was one of the very few presidents to enter the White House a bachelor. In 1884, just as his first presidential campaign was getting under way, he was exposed as the father of an illegitimate son by a thirty-three-year-old widow, Mrs. Maria Crofts Halpin. His campaign team urged him to “lie like a gentleman,”

but Cleveland ignored their advice and owned up. His supporters, taunted throughout the campaign by the Republican chant “Ma, Ma, Where’s My Pa,” responded with “Gone to the White House, ha ha ha!” In the 1893

election, Cleveland’s political enemies circulated a leaflet accusing him of bestiality, wife-beating, and “habitual immoralities with women.” He was reelected with a healthy majority.

5

WARREN G. HARDING (1921–23) Ruggedly

handsome and immensely popular, Harding won the presidency by the biggest popular vote margin ever, then spent his time in office conducting random adulterous affairs, including a fifteen-year relationship with Mrs.

Carrie Phillips, the wife of a friend. He began an affair with a seventeen-year-old, Nan Britton, when he was fifty-three, passing her off in public as his niece. When she gave birth to his daughter, Harding tried to buy her
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[Ten Presidential Peccadilloes]

silence by paying her $20,000 plus a monthly allowance.