5 People Who Died During Sex: And 100 Other Terribly Tasteless Lists Paperback (6 page)

It didn’t stop her from cashing in with a best-selling kiss-and-tell book, published in 1927, that detailed clandestine trysts in seedy hotels, in the Senate Office building, and once, memorably, in an Oval Office cupboard. Harding died suddenly at fifty-seven on a speaking tour of Alaska; his last words were, “How do the bull seals control their extensive harems?” The news of the seemingly robustly healthy Harding’s death was a shock, and a rumor attributed his death to a sexually transmitted disease. It was also claimed that he had been poisoned by his wife, Florence, possibly in revenge for twenty years of dedicated infidelity. The poisoning theory could be neither proven nor refuted, as Mrs.

Harding pointedly refused to permit a postmortem examination. It may have shed some light on another, unconnected medical mystery; a White House doctor during the Harding administration once told a reporter that the president had three testicles.

6

FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT (1933–45) Roosevelt lost the use of his legs after being paralyzed by polio in 1921. He lost the use of his wife’s legs three years earlier when she found a pile of love letters linking him to her twenty-two-year-old secretary, Lucy Page Mercer.

Roosevelt promised to break off the relationship but, with his marriage effectively over, lived more or less openly with his personal secretary Marguerite “Missy”

LeHand at his retreats in Florida and Warm Springs, Georgia. In 1945 the world was informed that the sixty-49

[Ten Presidential Peccadilloes]

three-year-old president had died of a brain hemorrhage while having his portrait painted by the artist Elizabeth Shoumatoff, a friend of Lucy Page Mercer, with whom Roosevelt had renewed his affair and was spending the weekend. According to unconfirmed reports, he actually died of a heart attack during oral sex.

7

DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER (1953–61) “Ike” had

an affair with twenty-four-year-old Kay Summersby, who was assigned to be his driver during World War II and later became his personal secretary. Eisenhower told his young mistress he would divorce his wife and marry her as soon as the war was over, but he never followed through on his promise, and after the war the two lovers never saw each other again.

8

JOHN F. KENNEDY (1961–63) Kennedy is famously quoted as saying, “Ich bin ein Berliner”; less famously,

“I’m never through with a girl until I’ve had her three ways.” “Shafty” as he was known in his Navy days, enlisted White House staff to help organize the unending procession of women who participated in

“entertainments” including regular nude swimming parties in the presidential pool. Kennedy attributed his confident and relaxed famous first live televised debate with Richard Nixon to the fact that he had prepared by taking horizontal refreshment with a prostitute in a nearby hotel room minutes before the cameras began to roll: JFK was so pleased with the result that he decided to repeat the trick before all his TV debates. His technique was not, however, the stuff of legend, and he was by
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[Ten Presidential Peccadilloes]

repute a quick and selfish lover, his efforts undermined by stress and recurring ill health; actress Angie Dickinson said her fling with the president “was the best twenty seconds of my life.”

9

LYNDON B. JOHNSON (1963–69) The thirty-sixth U.S. president, by reputation a distant second in the White House adultery stakes behind the man he replaced, was said to have “the instincts of a Turkish Sultan.” LBJ was genuinely aggrieved that John F.

Kennedy’s reputation as a stud was greater than his and complained to friends, “I’ve had more women by accident than he’s had on purpose.” The Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos was once informed by his wife, Imelda, that she was being groped by LBJ on the White House dance floor. Marcos replied, “Ignore it, Meldy. It’s in a good cause.”

10

WILLIAM J. CLINTON (1993–2001) In 1992, a cabaret singer from Little Rock, Arkansas, Gennifer Flowers, became the first of many former lovers to kiss and tell when she revealed intimate details about her twelve-year affair with Clinton in
Penthouse
magazine.

Subsequent allegations of sexual misconduct included affairs with the wife of a judge; a salesclerk from a Little Rock department store cosmetics counter; a prostitute, Bobbie Ann Williams, who claimed that Clinton fathered her child; and a former Miss Arkansas who alleged that her affair with Clinton had ended with the offer of a $40,000-per-year job if she kept quiet and the offer of broken legs if she didn’t. In 1994, Clinton’s private parts
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[Ten Presidential Peccadilloes]

went public when a typist from Arkansas claimed that the president had dropped his trousers and exposed himself to her at a Democratic Party conference.

According to Paula Jones, the First Phallus had a

“distinguishing characteristic.” In 1998, Clinton became the second U.S. president to be impeached, accused of instructing a twenty-four-year-old White House intern named Monica Lewinsky to lie under oath. He was tried in the Senate and found not guilty of the charges brought against him. He apologized to the nation and continued to have unprecedented popular approval ratings.

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10

The Stuff of Fairy Tales:

Ten Royal Marriages

1547: Russian Czar Ivan “the Terrible” marries his first wife, Anastasia, winner of the first “Miss Russia” contest. The Czar’s bride has been selected from his country’s most beautiful maidens, who were summoned to the Kremlin and subjected to
smotrinya
—an intimate examination that was a cross between a beauty pageant and a customs body search. Ivan was consistently unlucky in love. The first three of his eight wives died young, the second just two weeks after the wedding day; the death of his third wife, Martha, according to one account, was brought on by Ivan’s excessively enthusiastic foreplay. His fourth wife, Anna, was married to him by proxy, but “almost died of fright” at the prospect of meeting him and had to be sent to a convent. When he found out that his seventh wife, Maria, had lied to him about her virginity when he married her, he had her drowned the following day. His eighth and final wife, also named Maria, survived him: He died playing chess.

1708: King Frederick I of Prussia marries his mad third wife, Sophia. The House of Hohenzollern, the royal family of Prussia and later of Germany, believes in a family ghost; according to legend, a “white lady” will appear before the head of the household when it is time for him to die.

One evening, the king’s young wife charges headfirst through the glass door to his bedroom and appears before him in her white nightgown splattered in blood.

Frederick took her for the family ghost, had a heart attack, and died a few days later.

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[Ten Royal Marriages]

1733: King Frederick II “the Great” of Prussia marries Princess Elizabeth Christine of Brünswick-Bayern. The wedding has been arranged by his psychopathic father, King Frederick William I, who suspects that his son is gay. Young Frederick, horrified by the prospect of marriage, threatens to commit suicide, but his father sends him a terse note to the effect that suicide will not be necessary, because if he doesn’t do as he is told he will be executed anyway. The couple go their separate ways immediately after the wedding night.

1745: Czar Peter III of Russia marries the German princess Catherine (later Empress Catherine “the Great”). Peter finds his collection of warfare toys a much bigger attraction than his new bride and plays with his wooden soldiers, miniature cannons, and toy fortresses under the bedclothes, taking up the whole bed with war games while his virgin wife lies undisturbed beside him: Catherine draws the line when he starts to rear hunting dogs in his bedroom and she finds herself sharing their bed with ten spaniels. History records that she opts for strangulation instead of marriage guidance: Catherine led a palace revolution in which her husband was deposed and then murdered.

1765: Emperor Joseph II of Austria marries his second wife, Josepha. The Empress suffers from a skin complaint that makes her so physically repulsive to the Emperor that he has the balcony connecting his room to hers sealed off.

“If I could put the tip of my finger on the tiniest point of her body that is not covered with boils,” he noted, “I
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[Ten Royal Marriages]

would try to have children.” There are no children, nor is the marriage ever consummated.

1768: King Ferdinand I of Naples is married to Queen Caroline. When Ferdinand is asked on the morning after his wedding night how he likes his new bride, he replies:

“She sleeps like the dead and sweats like a pig.”

1795: George, Prince of Wales (later King George IV) almost faints when he first lays eyes on his wife-to-be, Princess Caroline of Brünswick-Wolfenbüttel, the day before they are due to be married. On their wedding night he gets himself totally drunk in order to tolerate her “personal nastiness” long enough to sleep with her once, after which the two go their separate ways, never once attempting to disguise their mutual loathing. When Napoleon Bonaparte dies in 1821, a messenger rushes to inform the king, “Your Majesty, your greatest enemy is dead.” George replies, “Is she, by God?”

1831: Emperor Ferdinand I of Austria marries seventeen-year-old Princess Maria Anna of Sardinia. Thanks to centuries of Habsburg royal inbreeding, Ferdinand is severely physically and mentally handicapped and is both epileptic and encephalitic. (His only recorded coherent remark on any subject was “I am the Emperor, and I want dumplings.”) During the wedding night alone he has five epileptic attacks: There are no children.

1846: Queen Isabel II of Spain is pressured into marrying her first cousin Francis, the dwarfish homosexual duke of
55

[Ten Royal Marriages]

Cadiz, although Isabel makes it clear that she finds her new husband repulsive. On the day of the wedding she gets blind drunk in order to face the ceremony. At the moment when they are pronounced man and wife, they burst into tears simultaneously. (When Isabel is asked years later about her wedding night, she replies, “What can I say about a man who wore even more lace than I did?”)

1853: Leopold II, King of the Belgians, marries Queen Marie Henrietta, a teenage Habsburg duchess. Leopold is too ill to attend his own wedding and sends his brother-in-law, Archduke Charles, to stand in for him. Unfortunately for the sexually naïve Marie Henrietta, who had gone to her wedding bed armed only with instructions to submit to her husband’s wishes, Leopold sufficiently recovers to attend the honeymoon. “If God hears my prayers,” she tells a friend after her wedding night,” I shall not go on living much longer.”

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10

History’s

Ten Least Romantic

Honeymoons

1

Attila the Hun (406–53), King of the Huns, or “the Scourge of God” to his friends, was short, squat, and ugly; a Gothic historian described him as having “a large head, a swarthy complexion, small, deep-seated eyes, a flat nose, a few hairs in the place of a beard.” He was also a regular ladies’ man and had a dozen beautiful wives. On his wedding night with his twelfth, Ildico, one of his arteries burst and he died.

2

Eva Braun, married to boyfriend Adolf Hitler on April 29, 1945, celebrated by swallowing poison the following day; the Führer took his own life two minutes later. On Hitler’s orders, both bodies were cremated with gasoline in the Reich Chancellery garden.

3

The wedding night of Cesare Borgia, son of the sixteenth-century Pope Alexander, was wrecked when a practical joker switched his regular medication for a bottle of laxative pills.

4

At the age of twenty-eight, the famous Victorian author and art critic John Ruskin married his cousin Effie Gray, but on his wedding night he found the sight of his bride’s pubic hair so distressing that they never shared a bed again. They spent a sexless honeymoon in Venice, where Ruskin painted, took notes on the local architecture, and mused on such higher matters as the decline of the Venetian empire. He later relented and promised to sleep with Effie again in three years’ time, but he failed to keep his promise and the marriage was annulled.

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[History’s Ten Least Romantic Honeymoons]

5

George Albert Crossman and Ellen Sampson were married in January 1903, but on their wedding night had a marital tiff that resulted in the groom killing his bride by smashing her skull with a hammer. He hid the body in a tin box in an upstairs room at their home in Kensal Rise, London, where it remained for the next fifteen months until a lodger complained about the smells seeping into his room. When the police closed in, Crossman slit his throat with a razor.

6

John Harvey Kellogg, the inventor of the cornflake, spent his wedding night with Ella Eaton writing
Plain
Facts for Old and Young
, a 644-page treatise on the evils of sexual intercourse. This included a ninety-seven-page essay, “Secret Vice (Solitary Vice or Self-Abuse)—Its Symptoms and Results,” listing thirty-nine telltale signs indicating that someone was masturbating, including:

“No. 7. Sleeplessness, No. 11. Love of solitude, No. 13.

Unnatural boldness, No. 14. Confusion of ideas, No. 28.

Use of tobacco, and No. 30. Acne.” The marriage was never consummated.

7

In August 1994, Minnesota newlywed Gregory McCloud broke his back while carrying his 280-pound bride, Helen, over the threshold to their home. Doctors described the 140-pound groom’s injuries as being consistent with those of someone who had been crushed by a car.

8

German bride Amy Weltz went to her wedding in Brisbane in September 1993 ignorant of the Australian
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[History’s Ten Least Romantic Honeymoons]

tradition of smearing wedding cake in the face of one’s spouse. When her new husband Chas rubbed a slice of wedding cake in her face during the reception, she responded by smashing a bottle over his head, killing him almost instantly.

9

Japanese couple Sachi and Tomio Hidaki, married in 1978, did not get around to having sex for some time.