_01:: Frederick’s Hypothesis

To his friends, Frederick von Hohenstaufen was the stupor mundi (“wonder of the world”). To his enemies, he was the Antichrist. Of course, to the people of Sicily (1197–1250), Germany (1212–1250), and the Holy Roman Empire (1220–1250), he was simply the king. As a skilled warlord, Freddy kept power by overwhelming his enemies with his military expertise. As a clever linguist, he wrote scientific tracts in a dozen languages (including one of the first detailed manuals on the anatomy of birds). Not to mention that the guy was also an early advocate of the experimental method and performed some rather interesting (though highly unethical) experiments�such as raising children in silence to see if they would speak a “natural language.” But Fred was best known for his decadent lifestyle�enamored of Islamic culture and philosophy, he kept a harem of nubile young ladies at his beck and call. And why shouldn’t he? It’s good to be the king.

_02:: Swingin’ Ben Franklin

The kite-flying, bifocals-inventing, library- and post office–establishing Renaissance man of the American Revolution was a self-taught meteorologist, printer, inventor…and ladies’ man? That’s right, old Ben Franklin loved to get his groove on. And though he appears to have been faithful to his beloved wife Deborah during the years of their marriage (from 1730 until her death in 1774), historical records show big Ben was quite the man slut both before they married and after her death. In fact, Franklin fathered at least one illegitimate child, William, in 1728. While on diplomatic missions in Europe for the Continental Congress, Franklin developed a reputation that led more than one worried father to lock up his daughters when the American delegation was in town. And even in his old age, Franklin had so many affairs that we wonder if he might not be literally, as well as figuratively, the “Father of Philadelphia.”

_03:: Einstein = Ladies’ Man Squared

While he never had an actual harem like von Hohenstaufen or a gaggle of French mistresses like Franklin, old Al Einstein earns his place in the Horny Scientist Hall of Fame just the same for his work in seducing his colleague, Serbian scientist Mileva Maric. The lewd scientist snared more than just her heart when the two were graduate students working together in a lab. And Maric actually gave birth to an illegitimate daughter, whom the couple gave up for adoption, before marrying Einstein in 1903. Though the two went on to have more children (before divorcing in 1919), some have suggested that Maric made significant contributions to Einstein’s theories. Albert didn’t give up on love, though�he married his second wife, Elsa (not before contemplating marriage with her 20-year-old daughter, Ilse), shortly after his divorce, but maintained numerous affairs with other women throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Whether or not you consider it ethical, of course, remains a matter of relativity.

_04:: Alfred Kinsey Gets Kinky

An entomologist by training, Kinsey’s tastes soon strayed far from insects. In 1947 he founded the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University, single-handedly creating the academic field of sexology. In fact, his well-known Kinsey Reports were among the first scientific studies of human sexual behavior. It’s little wonder that the guy was attacked by traditionalists, who accused him of promoting immoral behavior and sexual perversion. And though the first charge is a matter of opinion, they may have been more accurate on the second than they knew at the time. After Kinsey’s death it became known that he was a masochist and a fan of group sex. Both Kinsey and his wife regularly engaged in sex with other men, but they stayed married for 35 years and remained devoted to each other until his death in 1956. Kinsey was also infamous for encouraging his assistants and grad students to engage in unusual sex acts with one another, which no doubt made for some rather interesting staff meetings.

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Touch of Evil

After the death of her husband, Marie Curie began a scandalous affair with her married lab assistant. Despite her two Nobels and everything she did for science, the tryst ultimately cost her admission into the prestigious Académie des Sciences.

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Biblical Girls Gone Wild:
6 Sinfully Amusing Snippets

_01:: Lot’s Daughters Bark up the Family Tree (Genesis 19)

As they hid in a cave somewhere in the wilderness near the Dead Sea, Lot and his daughters were the only survivors of God’s rampage through the streets of sinful, sinful Sodom (luckily, as the only righteous man in town, Lot was spared). Suspecting that they were the last people left on earth, and unwilling to die alone and childless, Lot’s crafty lot got their father drunk and then had their way with him, making the previously righteous figure his own son-in-law and his two sons’ father also grandfather and uncle at the same time. And while this probably made Lot family reunions a tad more interesting, sadly the details are lost in the mists of time. As for the kids, though, they did pretty all right for themselves. Lot’s sons grew up to be the ancestors of the Moabites and Ammonites, two very powerful tribes of the highland region east of the Jordan River.

_02:: Jacob’s Women (Genesis 29–30)

Need something even more Jerry Springer for your scandal-loving palate? Then get a load of the story of Jacob, grandson of Abraham. Things started off rocky for the kid as Jacob had to flee to his uncle’s place after royally screwing his brother Esau in an inheritance swindle. Safe in the warmth of his uncle’s home, he fell in love with his cousin Rachel, and married her, but not before his uncle Laban duped him into marrying Rachel’s sister Leah as well. (For the privilege of all this cousin-marrying Jacob had to work 14 years, though some might say marriage is hard time enough!) More chaos ensued when Rachel, the beloved wife, was barren while her sister, Leah, (to whom Jacob was presumably relatively indifferent) produced kids with alarming regularity. Not to be outdone, Rachel gave her servant, Bilhah, to Jacob as a concubine, taking the kids produced as her own. Leah upped the ante by giving the probably exhausted Jacob her servant, Zilpah. All told, the competitive fivesome produced 13 children, 12 of which became the ancestors of Israelite tribes and the last of whom (see below) had the poor taste to be born a girl.

_03:: Dinah’s Brothers Get Overprotective (Genesis 34)

Dinah was the only known daughter of the extraordinarily fertile Jacob. One day while her family was camped outside the town of Shechem, Dinah went to get some water and had a run-in with a local prince. Whether she ran off with him willingly (as feminist authors like to claim) or was raped by him (as the text seems to suggest) is unclear, but her 11 older brothers (the 12th, Joseph, was by this time in Egypt) had a rather dim view of such goings-on. After convincing the prince’s buddies that circumcision was a great idea, Dinah’s older brothers slaughtered the lot of them while they were recuperating from their ordeal. Dinah’s ultimate fate has gone unrecorded, but folks who heard the tale were probably careful around girls with that many brothers for some time thereafter.

_04:: Tamar Tricks Judah (Genesis 38)

Another of Jacob’s kids, Judah, married off his oldest son, Er, to a woman named Tamar. Er, who was “wicked in the eyes of the Lord,” ended up dying young. The custom of the time (codified into law later in the Bible) was that his next oldest brother should “go in unto” his widow, and the child from that union would carry on the line of the dead man. Judah’s second son, Onan, wasn’t exactly up to the challenge, however. Unwilling to fulfill his obligation to his brother, Onan instead “spilled his seed on the ground” (hence “onanism,” or masturbation). For the sin of refusing his brotherly obligation (not, as is often stated, for spanking his proverbial monkey), Onan too met an untimely end. So, what was a proud parent (albeit an embarrassed one at this point) to do? Unwilling to risk his youngest son’s life, Judah sent Tamar home to her folks. But Tamar one-upped Jacob. Disguising herself as a prostitute, she tricked her father-in-law into performing the neglected duty himself. In fact, she bore him two sons, one of whom, Perez, was an ancestor of King David.

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Touch of Evil

A 1631 printing of the King James version of the Bible was missing a rather important word. It became known as the Wicked Bible for leaving “not” out of Exodus 20:14, which as a result read “Thou shalt commit adultery.”

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_05:: Jael “Nails” Sisera (Judges 5)

Jael was the wife of Heber, the chieftain of a clan allied with the Israelites. After the Israelite chieftainess Deborah defeated Sisera, who was a general for the king of Hazor, Sisera made a hasty retreat that took him right by Jael’s tent. The clever Jael, went on to play it just right. She invited him in, fed him, and, in a scene reminiscent of bad porn, may even have had sex with him. Once he was sound asleep, though, she took a hammer and drove a tent peg through his skull. Who knew the chieftain’s wife would be so handy with a hammer? Or thoughtful? Jael went on to present Sisera’s carcass as a gift to Deborah’s army when they turned up shortly thereafter.

_06:: Bathsheba Nonchalantly Goes Skinny-dipping…in Plain Sight of the Royal Palace (2 Samuel 11)

One day King David glanced out his window and just happened to see a beautiful, completely naked woman taking a bath on a rooftop. She had no idea that David was going to be watching (and if you believe that, we have a river in Egypt to sell you), but he was immediately smitten. Just one problem: The woman, Bathsheba, was already married to a Hittite mercenary named Uriah. In one of David’s less than stellar moments, he conspired to have Uriah moved too close to enemy lines and, with her husband out of the way, rushed to the altar with Bathsheba. Good thing, too, as it was just in time for her first son by him to be born. In an episode that is part tragic, part comic, and all shocking, the prophet Nathan exposed the adulterous union before the court. And though David and Bathsheba’s first son died, their story takes an upswing as David and Bathsheba’s second son eventually became King Solomon.

Weapons of Mass Seduction:
5 Infamous Female Spies

_01:: Mata Hari

While Margaretha Geertruida Zelle MacLeod (1876–1917) may not have caused World War I, she sure as heck kept it going. Having spent time in Java with her husband, Captain Campbell MacLeod, Margaretha returned to Holland and sued for divorce. To make ends meet she took up exotic dancing and the name Mata Hari (meaning “the light of day” in Malay). With her sensual performances becoming the attraction of the major European cities came the men and the gifts for her favors. Many of these favors came from royalty and high-ranking French and German military officers. As World War I progressed, both sides became suspicious that Mata was spying for the other side. The French eventually put her on trial and, although the charges were never proven, Mata Hari was convicted of espionage and was executed by a firing squad on October 15, 1917. Playing the seductress up until the end, Mata refused a blindfold, smiled, and blew a kiss to the firing squad as the fatal shots were fired.

_02:: Sarah Emma Edmonds (or Was It Frank Thompson?)

Born in 1841 in New Brunswick, Canada, Sarah ran away from home in her early teens. In order to survive she became an itinerant Bible salesman, by calling herself Frank Thompson and dressing like a man. In 1861, Frank (Sarah) enlisted in the Second Michigan Infantry and over the next two years not only fought in a number of Civil War battles, but also served as a spy for the Union Army. Solders in her unit called Frank “our woman” because of his feminine mannerisms and his extremely small boot size. However, none of her comrades ever figured out that Frank was really Sarah. This boded well for her spying, where she dressed as a young boy serving in Confederate camps, as an immigrant Irish peddler and, most interestingly, as a woman. In 1863, Sarah caught malaria and deserted the army out of fear that hospitalization would reveal her true identity. In 1884, though, Sarah applied for and was awarded a veteran’s pension in which the secretary of war acknowledged that Sarah was a female soldier who had rendered faithful services to the ranks.

_03:: Noor Inayat Khan

Khan was born in the Kremlin in 1914 and at a young age moved with her family first to England and then to France. In 1940, Khan, along with her mother and sister, escaped back to England just before France surrendered to Germany. While in England she joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF), but her ability to speak fluent French soon caught the attention of the Special Operations group and Khan agreed to become a spy. Khan was flown to Le Mans, where she teamed up with other female spies and traveled to Paris. There they joined the French Resistance Prosper Network. Soon after their arrival, the network was infiltrated and many were arrested. Khan was ordered to return to England, but instead she stayed on and continued to pass information on to England. Eventually she was arrested again and interrogated by the Gestapo. When she refused to speak, she was sent to a prison in Germany and then to the Dachau concentration camp. On September 13, 1944, Khan and three other female British spies were executed by the Nazi SS. In 1949, Khan was posthumously awarded the George Cross.

_04:: Belle Boyd (aka “La Belle Rebelle”)

Born Isabelle Boyd in Martinsburg, Virginia, in 1844, the beautiful Belle soon became the star attraction in Washington, D.C., social circles prior to the beginning of the Civil War. With the outbreak of the war, she returned to Martinsburg. When the Union soldiers occupied the city, Belle mixed with the officers and soon gathered information on troop movements, which she passed on to the Confederate forces. However, she is probably best known for warning Stonewall Jackson that the Union intended to blow up all the bridges around Martinsburg. With this information, Jackson, with a small number of troops, was able to surprise the Union troops and drive them from the area. In 1864, Confederate president Jefferson Davis asked Belle to carry letters for him to England. The Union Navy captured her ship, but the officer in charge fell in love with Belle and let her escape. The officer, Lieutenant Samuel Harding Jr., after being court-martialed and discharged from the Navy, traveled to England, where he married Belle. After the war, Boyd toured the United States as an actress under the stage name of La Belle Rebelle.

_05:: Elizabeth Van Lew

Crazy Bet, as she was known, was born in Richmond, Virginia, in 1818 but educated at a Quaker school in Philadelphia. After developing a hatred for slavery, Elizabeth returned to Richmond and freed all her family’s slaves. She also went so far as finding where her freed slaves’ relatives were and purchased and freed them also. After the Civil War started, Elizabeth asked to visit Union prisoners being held captive in Richmond. The Union prisoners gave her information, which she then passed on to the North. Among the slaves she freed was Mary Elizabeth Bowser, whom Van Lew got a job as a house servant in the home of Jefferson Davis. This allowed Bowser and Van Lew to collect and pass on information directly from the Confederate president’s mansion. Elizabeth effectively used the Crazy Bet moniker to make the residents of Richmond think she was mentally ill. She would wear old clothes and bonnets and talk to herself. Because of this, most people thought that her Northern sympathies were just a part of her craziness. After the war, President Grant named Elizabeth the postmaster for Richmond. When the citizens of Richmond found out that Crazy Bet was an act, they shunned her. However, at her death, the state of Massachusetts placed a memorial marker on her grave.

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Just the Facts

PORN BY THE NUMBERS

70: Percentage of visits to porn Web sites made between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m.

5.3 billion: Estimated number of dollars U.S. companies lost to recreational Web surfing during business hours in 2000

14 million: Number of porn pages on the Web in 1998

260 million: Number of porn pages on the Web in 2003

68 million: Daily number of pornographic search engine requests on the Web

25: Percentage of total daily Web search engine requests that are related to porn sites 12 billion: Number of dollars in revenues the U.S. porn industry gathered in 2003

33: Percentage of visitors to adult Web sites who are women

253: Number of arrests for pornography/ obscenity violations by the U.S. Postal Service in 2002

11: Average age at which men first see a copy of Playboy or Penthous magazine

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Harem Scarem:
5 Facts on Harems

_01:: The Primer: Just a Couple Harems to Know

Under Islamic law, a man can have as many wives as he can support, with the traditional number topping out at around four. However, concubines are unlimited and many harems grew into the thousands. Following are some of history’s largest recorded harems. At the top of the list is the 6th century BCE’s King Tamba of Banaras, whose harem numbered some 16,000 women. Not to be outdone, the 15th-century Sultan Ghiyas-ud-Din Kilji’s harem numbered 15,000 and required him to build a separate walled city to house them. Next, during the 1800s, King Mongkut of Siam housed his 9,000 women in a totally contained city with its own government, recreational facilities, and a theater. Kublai Khan, the Mongol leader in the 13th century, had four empresses and around 7,000 concubines. Every two years he would get rid of a couple hundred concubines and replace them with a fresh supply. Finally, Emperor Jahangir of India maintained a harem of over 6,300 women during the early years of the 17th century. However, Jahangir also kept close to a thousand young men-in-waiting for those times when his appetite tended toward the other gender.

_02:: Getting Some Order in Your Harem

Contrary to the Hollywood view of scantily dressed beautiful women lounging around pools waiting for their romantic interlude with the sultan, harems were actually very elaborate and complex communities with rigid administrative and disciplinary systems. A harem was under the leadership of the Valide Sultan, or the sultan’s mother. Directly responsible to the mother were the superintendent of the harem and a number of other female officials. Each of these officials had a number of younger harem members under them training for this and other future administrative assignments. Next in the pecking order after the sultan’s mother was the mother of the sultan’s heir apparent. After this came the mothers of the sultan’s other children, who were ranked by the favor they held with the sultan. These female relatives and other officials were responsible for recruiting new harem members and annually presenting them to the sultan, usually on the 15th day of Ramadan.

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Touch of Evil

Nizam Sir Osman Ali Khan Bahadur was perhaps the world’s richest man in the early 20th century. He ruled Hyderabad both independently and as part of India, and his fat wallet helped him collect an enviable 42 concubines for his harem.

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_03:: So You Want to Be a Eunuch?

Sounds like an exciting life being left to live among hundreds, if not thousands, of the most beautiful women in the empire. Let’s look at some of the requirements. The first priority is castration. Most likely you’ll want to have this procedure done during your childhood. Next, expect to be a part of a dowry offered by your master when his daughter is given in marriage. Okay, you’ve passed the entrance exam, now expect to spend years working your way up the ranks of eunuchs. Finally, you gain favor with the sultan and he makes you the chief eunuch. Your sole reason for being is meeting your master’s needs. You need to know the master’s mood and select his appropriate bedmate for the evening. You must also instruct the young lady on the master’s whims and fantasies and have the appropriate aphrodisiacs ready. As the chief black eunuch you have become the sultan’s most trusted servant and the third highest ranking official in his empire. You can enter the harem apartments, command the imperial army, and meet with the sultan. If you are the chief white eunuch, you get to run the bureaucracy and control all petitions, messages, and state documents sent to the sultan, but you cannot enter the harem. Why? Because unlike the black eunuch, who lost everything (anatomically), you still have bits and pieces left and pose a threat.

_04:: How to Furnish Your Harem

The Arabic word harem means “the place of the women.” The most important part of the harem was the zenana, or the inner sanctum where the sultan’s fantasies were played out. The zenana was designed to replicate paradise. Each woman was given her own ornately decorated apartment with its own garden, waterfalls, and running streams. Because the ladies of the harem came from many different cultures, the apartments were furnished to make them feel comfortable and satisfied with their position in life. After all, one must be ready and willing for an unexpected visit from the master. Similarly, the attire was erotic and arousing. The goal was to remain naked while being dressed by wearing translucent muslin and silk garments. The material was so light that many outfits weighed about an ounce. In keeping with the opulence, the garments were adorned with diamonds, gold, rubies, and pearls. Shoes were also covered with precious stones. Finally, the outfit was topped off with an ostrich feather headdress with ruby-covered plumes. Many a sultan spent most of the empire’s treasury keeping the ladies-in-waiting happy.

_05:: Keeping Your Harem Under Control

During the late 1500s, Mehmed III ascended to the throne of the Ottoman Empire. His mother, Safiye, as the Valide Sultan or leader of the harem, became one of his most important advisers. While not allowed to be directly involved in state politics, Safiye was able to influence the sultan’s decisions, sometimes openly and directly. On one occasion, Safiye sat behind a curtain as Mehmed held a heated discussion with a leading mufti (religious cleric) and openly defended her son. As Safiye’s influence increased so did the ire it raised among the vizier, the mufti, the chief black eunuch, and the sultan’s favorite wives and concubines, who saw Safiye’s excessive influence as overstepping her role of Valide Sultan. Mehmed found himself having to restrain his mother and, on at least one occasion, had her removed to another palace. Safiye’s excessive greed, coupled with the ever increasing costs of the harem under her control, helped to bring about riots in Istanbul in 1600 over the devaluation of the empire’s currency.

4 Original Cities of Sin
(None of Which Had Elvis Impersonators)

_01:: Sodom and Gomorrah

Who wouldn’t want to check out the original cities of sin, Sodom and Gomorrah? Located in the beautiful arid wasteland around the Dead Sea (today in central Israel), the twin cities were near valuable mineral deposits, probably the sources of the cities’ renowned wealth. Somehow, though, these locales became a byword for sin and corruption, in spite of the fact that the crime that supposedly led to the cities’ destruction may not have been homosexuality at all, as some have suggested, but inhospitality�the worst of all sins in the ancient world. According to the Bible, God rained fire and brimstone on the region and destroyed the towns after promising Abraham that He would spare them if 10 righteous men could be found in their region. Apparently, only one could be found: Lot. Luckily for him, Lot offered hospitality to angelic visitors and was warned of the catastrophe. Oddly enough, the original sin cities sit on a seismically active gap between tectonic plates (where earthquakes and volcanic activity are possible), and the biblical account could be describing some sort of geological upheaval.

_02:: Pessinos

If you’re looking for a wild night filled with religious ecstasy, you might want to set your time machine for the classical age, and check out Pessinos, in Asia Minor. As the center to a mother/goddess-oriented cult since the Stone Age, Pessinos was known for its worship of Cybyle, an Anatolian goddess dedicated to fertility. So, just how fertile was Cybyle? Well, to give you an idea, her statues are pretty easy to recognize since they feature an inordinately large number of breasts. And while the rites practiced by Cybyle’s worshipers are poorly documented, the records tend to suggest that they included priests who castrated themselves while in a drug-induced trance, while presiding over midnight dances culminating in wild orgies.

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Touch of Evil

The 12,000 citizens of Monaco are denied the right to enter Monte Carlo’s casino rooms; that privilege is only allowed to visitors. Of course, the income helps keep the locals free from paying taxes, so the trade-off isn’t that bad.

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_03:: Münster

If you’re looking for a polygamous good time, you might want to transport yourself back to 1530s Münster, a city in Westphalia, in what is today western Germany, which was a hotbed of Anabaptist agitation. A Christian sect that believed in rebaptizing people once they became adults (their theological descendents today include the Amish), the Anabaptists were persecuted mercilessly elsewhere in Europe both by Catholics and by more conservative Protestants. But in February 1534, the Anabaptists seized Münster in a relatively bloodless coup d’état, and had their way with the city. One of the Anabaptist leaders, Johann Matthys, declared himself a prophet. Unfortunately, he seems to have believed in his own divinity: when the bishop of Münster arrived with an army, Matthys led 30 followers out to fight and, of course, was slaughtered with his men. Then his disciple, Jan Leiden, took over the town’s defense, declared himself the Messiah, and introduced the townsfolk to polygamy (he took 16 wives). The party didn’t last forever, though�after a solid 16 months of multiwife fun the city was taken by the bishop’s army, which killed thousands, and tortured and executed the leaders of the revolt.

_04:: Port Royal

The original capital of British Jamaica, Port Royal, is certainly one town that’s located on the wrong side of the tracks. The area was a hotbed for rascals, including plenty of pirates, and Limey officials who were happy to look the other way…for a piece of the action, of course. In fact, when pirate crews rolled in to town they could enjoy a wide array of vice to whittle down their profit margins, including prostitutes, gambling, liquor, and drugs smuggled from the Orient and the Middle East. If that doesn’t sound like enough fun for you, the streets literally echoed with the sounds of sin: from raucous brawls to the incessant nursery rhyme “Sing a Song of Sixpence” (actually a recruiting jingle for the pirate Blackbeard). And just to prove how corrupt it was, Henry Morgan, an infamous pirate admiral, was actually made lieutenant governor of Jamaica in 1674. Of course, such dens of sin can’t last forever, and Port Royal was destroyed in 1692 by an earthquake that dropped three-quarters of it into the sea. An initial attempt at rebuilding burned to the ground in 1704, hurricanes stopped several attempts at rebuilding in the early 1700s, and finally a 1907 earthquake caused the remaining parts of the city to sink. It seems someone upstairs had a grudge against this humble burg.

4 Self-proclaimed Casanovas

_01:: Clark “the Shark” Gable (1901–1960)

Despite sporting a pair of ears that were potential obstacles in revolving doors, silver screen legend Clark Gable was the leading male sex symbol of his generation. Known as “the King of Hollywood,” Clark the Shark bragged that he had made love to women in a fire escape, a duck blind, a canoe, and a telephone booth. Apparently his choice of locations also said a lot about his technique. “God knows I love Clark,” Gable’s wife, Carole Lombard, once said, “but he’s the worst lay in town. If he had one inch less, he’d be the Queen of Hollywood.” As if Lombard’s press release wasn’t bad enough for his rep, Gable’s Gone With the Wind costar, Vivian Leigh, complained that the “King of Hollywood’s” breath had been atrocious on set. From his dentures, no less!

_02:: Frasier the Sensuous Lion (1951–1972)

This guy didn’t actually do much bragging about his amorous exploits, but then again, he didn’t have to�his proof was walking all around him! Frasier was about 20 years old, ancient for a lion, when he came to a wild animal park in southern California. The Mexican circus refugee was so doddering he could hardly walk, and his keepers figured his demise would occur any day. But that didn’t stop the old lion from tomcatting about. Frasier hung on for 18 months and sired a stunning 35 cubs in his spare time. Amazingly, the press about the fertile feline was so widespread that Frasier fan clubs started sprouting up across the country. Wives even began writing in to find out what park rangers were feeding the beast. In fact, the lion’s fame grew so much that a popular song was written about him, and a film was made. When the old cat’s time finally came, it’s said, Frasier the Sensuous Lion went with a smile on his face.

_03:: Good Wilt’s Hunting (1936–1999)

When it came to basketball, very few people could take it to the hoop any better than Wilt the Stilt. But it’s a wonder he had the stamina. In his 1991 autobiography, Chamberlain claimed to have slept with about 20,000 women over a 38-year period. Of course, Chamberlain was roundly criticized for everything from propagating sexual stereotypes about African American men to having sex with women outside his race to just plain flaunting his conquests. But the lifelong bachelor said that, whatever else he might be doing, he wasn’t bragging. “If you look at it,” he said in a 1997 interview, “you can say that I had so many women because I was such a bad lover, they never came back a second time.”

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Lies Your Mother
Told You

ALL AUTHORS ARE CADS

No matter what your momma (or your swooning lit teacher) told you, not all authors suffer from odd fetishes or omnivorous appetites. D. H. Lawrence, whose Lady Chatterly’s Lover was so scandalous that it was banned in Britain until 1960, was happily and faithfully married (although his wife was, briefly, a bigamist, having failed to divorce her first husband before eloping with Lawrence). And some noted authors barely had sex at all. Most notable among them was the playwright George Bernard Shaw. Shaw didn’t lose his virginity until his 29th birthday ( July 26, 1885), when he slept with a 44-year-old widow. It may have been the only sexual encounter of his life. He married Charlotte Townshend in 1898, not because he loved her but because Shaw thought he was dying and wanted to offer his friend Charlotte the social and financial benefits of widowhood. As it turns out, the two were married�happily, but most likely celibately�for 45 years.

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_04:: Hugh Hefner: Playboy Original (1926–)

When Hugh Hefner was 75 years old, a reporter asked about his recent love life, and Hef replied it was “a natural one�except it involved five people.” The founder of Playboy magazine and patriarch of the Sexual Revolution, Hefner virtually lives in his pajamas, and even a stroke in 1985 didn’t slow him down. In 2001, Hefner told Vanity Fair magazine that thanks to Viagra, which came on the market two months after his second divorce, he was sleeping with seven women between the ages of 18 and 28, usually simultaneously. “And here’s the surprise bit,” Hefner said. “It’s what they want.” Hefner’s mom lived to be 101, and he says his goal is to stay frisky at least that long.

They Did a Bad, Bad Thing:
5 So-called Virtuous Figures Who Got Caught with Their Flies Down (or Skirts Up)

_01:: Aimee Semple McPherson (1890–1944)

By the mid-1920s, evangelist McPherson was packing them in at her Angelus Temple in Los Angeles, preaching hope and warning against the sinful life. But in 1926, she disappeared while swimming at a local beach. She turned up a month later with a fantastic story about being kidnapped and taken to Mexico. Unfortunately, the evidence said otherwise: It appeared li’l Aimee had been shacked up with a married man. The evangelist was charged with perjury, but she stuck to her story and was eventually acquitted. Her popularity waned after the scandal, but you gotta hand it to her for chutzpah: instead of apologizing to her confused flock, McPherson bobbed her hair, bought some short skirts, and began dancing and drinking in public.

_02:: Jim Bakker (1941–)

Simple people with a simple dream, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker started out hosting a children’s religious puppet show. By the mid-1970s, however, the fabulous Bakker duo had become the toast of televangelism. They pulled in millions of dollars in contributions to their PTL (Praise the Lord) ministry, and even built a sort of fundamentalist Disneyland called Heritage USA in South Carolina. But Jim had a couple of dirty little secrets. He had paid a former church secretary named Jessica Hahn to keep quiet about a sexual encounter they had in 1980. But when the scandal broke in 1987, questions began to be raised about Bakker’s financial dealings. In 1989, he was sentenced to 45 years in prison for fleecing his flock of $158 million. In the end he only served five, and moved forward with his life, eventually opening a new ministry in a restaurant in Branson, Missouri.

_03:: Jimmy Swaggart (1935–)

Swaggart was one of Jim Bakker’s fiercest critics when the Bakker scandal broke, telling an interviewer he himself had never even kissed a woman other than his wife. Maybe not. But the bombastic and fantastically successful television preacher�and cousin to rock-and-roll legend Jerry Lee Lewis�was doing something with that prostitute in a cheap New Orleans hotel room in early 1988. Swaggart’s tearful, televised confession kept his $12-million-a-year, 10,000-employee religious empire together�until he got caught with his pants down again. That’s right, swingin’ Jimmy Swaggart was linked to (brace yourself!) another hooker in 1991. A couple of lost lawsuits, an IRS tax lien, and that was the end of the line for Jimmy Swaggart. Well, not exactly. As of mid-2004, he was still hurling rhetorical fire and brimstone on TV, albeit on a much smaller scale.

_04:: Amrit Desai (1932–)

A onetime art student, Amrit Desai came to the United States from India in 1960. He began giving yoga lessons on the side and ended up training several thousand people, who in turn became yoga instructors around the country. With his followers calling him “guru dev,” or “beloved teacher,” one of the things Desai taught at the yoga center he founded in Massachusetts in 1972 was that celibacy was spiritually mandatory for unmarried people. Desai even took a vow of celibacy himself in 1974, despite being married with children. No wonder it was something of a shock (perhaps greatest to his wife) when in 1994, the beloved teacher admitted to having affairs with three of his followers. The scandal forced Desai to resign his $150,000-a-year post. He eventually moved to Florida, but kept up the yoga.

_05:: Paul R. Shanley (1931–)

In the 1970s, Shanley was known as “the hippie priest”; he was a Roman Catholic clergyman whose specialty was ministering to kids struggling with their sexual identity. By 2002, however, Shanley was a central figure in the greatest scandal ever to hit the Catholic Church in the United States. Shanley was accused of molesting more than two dozen boys over a 35-year span. Thrown out of the priesthood, Shanley was still awaiting trial at the end of 2004 on rape and indecent assault charges. Subsequent investigations into other allegations in the Boston archdiocese resulted in the Church paying $85 million in 2003 to 552 people who claimed to have been abused by priests. It also triggered similar probes, and similar results, in other areas of the country.

6 Presidential Affairs (Cigar Not Included)

_01:: The Many Loves of a Founding Father

Known for his extreme intellect and skills at diplomacy, Thomas Jefferson is truly one of America’s founding fathers, but in more ways than just patriotic. Considered a loving and faithful husband to Martha during their 10 years of marriage before her death, Tom Jefferson was actually a bit of a tomcat. In fact, the Virginia statesman had a notorious penchant for other men’s wives. While on a trip to New York in 1768, John Walker asked Tom to look after his wife, and that he did, literally. Later, in 1786, as ambassador to France, Jefferson fell deeply in love with Maria Conway, the wife of portraitist Richard Conway. Legend has it that one day while walking through the countryside, Tom tried to show off for the blushing (Conway) bride and fell while jumping a fence only to break his wrist. But Tom’s best-known relationship was with Sally Hemings, his slave and his late wife’s half sister. Their relationship went on for 35 years and provided Jefferson a number of heirs.

_02:: Grover Cleveland, the Honorable Gentleman from New York?

In 1873, a young, politically aspiring bachelor named Grover Cleveland met Maria Halpin, a 35-year-old widow with two children. Maria’s looks and personality made her the talk of Buffalo and Grover soon found himself among Halpin’s many suitors. Well, more than just a suitor. In 1874, Halpin bore a son and insinuated that old Grover was the pop. Grover, not sure that he actually was the father, and not intending to marry Maria, decided to do the right thing and bear financial responsibility for the child. He also helped Maria get treatment for her alcoholism and actually set her up in her own business. During the 1884 presidential campaign, however, Cleveland’s opposition dug up the old story and printed it in the press. Interestingly, a number of clergy members supporting Cleveland did a study of the case and found that after the “preliminary offense” Cleveland had done the responsible and honorable thing. More important in their minds, he’d shielded many married men in Buffalo (and their families) from public scandal. Oddly enough, because of this, even many of Grover’s opponents supported his run for the presidency.

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Touch of Evil

FDR seemed like a ripe fit for The Jerry Springer Show. Not only did he marry his cousin, but he was involved in multiple affairs, which his wife, Eleanor, countered by having a rumored 30-year lesbian affair with a reporter named Lorena Hickok.

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_03:: Warren G., Carrie P., and Nan B.

Far from the run-of the-mill tales you hear of political ambition, Warren G. Harding was a small-town Ohio newspaper editor who ran for senator because he liked the gentlemen’s club atmosphere and the light workload of the U.S. Senate. However, his wife, Florence, had bigger plans, and Warren somehow found his way to the presidency in 1920. Not at all equipped to run a nation, Harding preferred to let Congress lead while he golfed and had sex with his mistress in closets throughout the White House. But Harding’s philandering began well before his run for president. For 15 years, Warren maintained an active love interest with Carrie Phillips, the wife of his close friend. But when Harding ran for president, the Phillipses threatened to go public. So to secure their silence, the Republican National Party came to the rescue and sent Mr. and Mrs. Phillips on a world trip, plus they threw in $20,000 to boot. But it appears Warren didn’t quite learn his lesson. Soon after winning the White House he began a secret relationship with Nan Britton, 30 years his junior. With the Secret Service ordered not to inform the First Lady, Nan was routinely ushered into the White House and many a West Wing closet became their intimate playground.

_04:: FDR and His Wife’s Secretary

Best known as the president who brought the United States through the Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt is also known for his longtime affair with Lucy Mercer, his wife, Eleanor’s social secretary. In 1918, upon FDR’s return from a trip to Europe as assistant secretary of the Navy, Eleanor confronted Franklin with the love letters she’d found and offered him a divorce. Knowing that a divorce at the time would destroy his political ambitions, Franklin said he’d stop seeing Lucy if Eleanor would agree to remain married. Unfortunately, he didn’t keep to his new deal. Lucy continued to visit the White House with regularity, especially when Eleanor was out of town. Years later, the widowed Lucy even became a frequent visitor to the South Carolina plantation where FDR was recuperating from his bad health. In fact, it was Lucy, not Eleanor, who was with FDR on April 12, 1945, when he was struck with the cerebral hemorrhage that killed him.

_05:: Ike and Kay�Did They or Didn’t They?

Many a book, movie, and television show have portrayed the close relationship during World War II between Dwight Eisenhower and his Irish driver, Kay Summersby. As the Supreme Commander of the Allied forces, Ike found himself responsible for millions of lives, but not having anyone he could share his close thoughts and feelings with. With Ike’s wife Mamie over 3,000 miles away, the young, witty, and attractive Kay capably filled that role. But once the gossip columns got wind of this, talk of their so-called relationship spread on both sides of the Atlantic. With constant reassurances from Ike, Mamie believed that no sexual liaisons ever occurred between Ike and Kay and at the end of the war Ike returned to the States and Kay remained in England. Their lives moved forward, and Ike was elected president in 1952. As the decades proceeded, though, the private lives of the 1940s and ’50s quickly became the public domain of the ’60s, and the rumors of the affair again surfaced though no evidence of a sexual relationship was ever found. Years later, before her death, Summersby wrote that her relationship with Ike had been close, flirtatious, and intimate, but had never been consummated.

_06:: JFK and the Other Mistress

It’s common knowledge that President Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe were an item. Less known, however, is the relationship that John F. had with Judith Campbell Exner, an affair that definitely falls under the category of dangerous liaisons. The extremely beautiful Exner was introduced to Kennedy by Frank Sinatra in 1960. However, Miss Exner was also romantically involved with Sam Giancana, one of the most powerful Mafia bosses of the time. And while their relationship remained secret from the public, it was well known around the White House and by Jackie Kennedy. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, as he’d done with other presidents, had Exner tailed so that he had information to blackmail Kennedy with. In fact, Exner’s affair with JFK remained a secret long after Kennedy’s assassination, until in 1975 a number of Republican members of the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (aka the Church Committee) leaked the information to the press. With the secret out of the bag, it quickly fueled the fires of conspiracy theorists wondering if the relationship in any way had played into JFK’s assassination.

Crackers, Corn Flakes, and Chastity Belts, Oh My!
4 Victorian Tricks for Restraining That Mojo

_01:: Fanning the Flames

In the Victorian age, an eligible Victor couldn’t just cruise up to a Victoria and put the moves on her. No, in the extraordinarily prudish age proper etiquette had to be maintained at all times. A man, for instance, needed to be formally introduced to a woman before he could approach and talk to her. However, that didn’t exactly mean that flirting was off-limits at social events. In fact, it was pretty en vogue. And one of the most subtle ways of demonstrating interest or disinterest was through the use of hand fans. In fact, a whole sign language was created around fan movements and placement. If a young lady let her fan rest on her right cheek, it meant she was interested; if she placed it on the left, however, it meant the guy was being passed over (subtle, but harsh!). Similarly, if she moved the fan slowly it was a signal that she was already engaged or married. If she held the fan in front of her face with her right hand, it was a signal for the young man to follow her. Finally, if she moved the fan across her forehead, it meant they were being watched. Whew! With all the mixed signals, restrictions, and rites of courtship, it’s amazing anyone found time to procreate.

_02:: A Flaky Approach

If in the 19th century Victorians were very concerned about curtailing sexual urges, they were fanatic over masturbation. Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, a lecturer and so-called health “expert,” proclaimed that masturbation caused a whole series of medical problems including enlarged prostate, kidney and bladder infections, piles, nocturnal emissions, and general exhaustion (guess blindness wasn’t added until later). Kellogg actually came up with a list of 39 signs that could be used to spot masturbators running the gamut from sleeplessness to biting one’s fingernails to using obscene language. Like other thinkers of his time, Kellogg saw a connection between one’s bowels and genitals with the proper diet being the answer. So he created a cold breakfast cereal, which he originally called Granola. Unfortunately, another masturbation expert had already used that name so Kellogg changed the cereal’s name to Corn Flakes. However, it should be mentioned that Kellogg never consummated his own marriage, preferring yogurt enemas instead.

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Lies Your Mother
Told You

CHASTITY BELTS

So, about those chastity belts…did they really exist or are they nothing more than a Victorian myth? Well, the fact is, the jury’s still out. Thought to have been invented in Italy during the 14th century, the urban legend of the belts became popular in the rest of Europe. The antithesis of anything PC, the belts were basically used to maintain sexual control over women by covering the private area and keeping it under lock and key. And while many a suspicious husband may have lauded the invention, there’s recent evidence that suggests the chastity belt may have been more of a Victorian myth than a reality. In 1996, two British historians reported that there was no medical evidence from the time of Chaucer through the Victorian period that chastity belts existed or were commonly used. Of course, they had the weight of the British Museum of London behind them. Agreeing with the two historians, the museum removed an alleged chastity belt that had been on exhibit since 1846

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_03:: Trojan Wars of the 19th Century

A number of mechanical methods of birth control were created and used in the 1800s, but they were only affordable for the wealthier Victorian women. Of course, they weren’t exactly effective. The first generation of vaginal diaphragms and cervical caps were developed but the quality of the rubber was poor�that is, until the invention of latex in 1884. However, in keeping with the Victorian ethos, a law, known as the Comstock Law, defining condoms as obscene went quietly into effect in 1873. That didn’t keep prophylactic science from making advances, though. Toward the end of the 19th century, the forerunners of IUDs (intrauterine devices), intracervical stems, or pessaries, became available. However, the devices were unpopular from the start, as they often led to infections. Oddly enough, the courts wised up to the fact that diaphragms and condoms were effective for disease prevention, and made them legal as medical treatment. However, they still weren’t so fond of the idea of birth control, and the courts maintained that using the products as contraceptives should remain illegal.

_04:: Protection au Naturel

While not everyone could afford the premier forms of birth control, it didn’t stop less affluent Victorians from jerry-rigging their own homemade remedies. In fact, one of the most commonly used “natural methods” of birth control was the injection of fruit juices or naturally produced chemicals into the vagina, known today as “douches,” shortly after intercourse. Of course, that wasn’t the only recipe. A variety of mixtures were used, including baking soda, alum, vinegar, and quinine. Other birth-controlling techniques involved using small, natural sea sponges dipped in acidic or naturally spermicidal mixtures with a ribbon or string attached. And there were cheap solutions for the men, too! Condoms made of sheepskin, also known as “French letters,” were particularly popular, and a notorious favorite with men who frequented brothels. After all, the rubbers didn’t just aid in birth control, but also kept the syphilis at bay. In fact, it’s this sordid use for birth control that gave condoms such a bad reputation and made them taboo in the eyes of the general public.

From Wags to Riches:
4 Royal Mistresses Who Made Good

_01:: Diane de Poitiers (1490–1566)

Considered one of the most powerful women of the 16th century, Diane de Poitiers was the mistress to French king Henri II. And what a mistress! Although married to Queen Catherine, Henri basically let Diane run France by his side. In fact, she got all sorts of executive perks, from signing official documents to appointing ministers and handing out titles, to even dabbling in estates and pensions. And as a member of the Privy Council, Diane even routinely gathered money for the royal treasury. But for those skeptical few who want proof of her power in writing, just inspect any one of the numerous official documents the good king and his gal pal literally cosigned: they actually read “HenriDiane!” Of course, this dubious union did not exist without protest. When church officials questioned Diane’s role, she simply had them sent to Rome. When Henri passed away, he was calling out Diane’s name. However, Queen Catherine (pretty understandably) prevented Henri’s mistress from attending the funeral and, in fact, demanded that she return any crown jewels. Strangely, though, Diane was not arrested for treason as expected�mainly because she was popular with the French people for helping Henri rule so well.

_02:: Nell Gwynne (1651–1687)

During the reign of Charles II of England, mistresses weren’t exactly few and far between. In fact, less-than-chaste women were almost as plentiful around the palace as were catfights between them, and Charles was basically an equal opportunity cad. In fact, his favorite mistress was a prostitute from London’s slum known as Kindhearted Nell. Renowned for using her influence with the king to help others, Nell also harbored a wicked sense of humor. For instance, when she heard that Charles planned to bed another mistress, Nell offered the gal a bunch of sweets. Little did the lady know Nell had laced the goodies with a laxative and an evening of bedding quickly turned into an evening of chamber-potting. But while Charles frolicked with Nell he let another mistress, Louise de Keroualle, run the country, and there was no love between the two. During a period of anti-Catholic sentiment, Nell’s coach was surrounded by a mob thinking it contained the Catholic Louise. The quick-thinking Nell exclaimed, “Pray, good people, be civil, I am the Protestant whore.” Amused, the crowd laughingly let her move on.

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Touch of Evil

Camilla Parker-Bowles’s family has been trying to get into the royal pants for decades. Her great-grandmother was reportedly the mistress to King Edward IV, Chuck’s great-great-grandfather.

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_03:: Madame de Pompadour (1721–1764)

Probably the most powerful of all royal mistresses, as King Louis XV’s lady on the side, Madame de Pompadour served as the unofficial French prime minister for 13 years. It worked out well for both parties. Louis, being a ridiculously lazy king, wasn’t all that fond of making decisions, while Pompadour reveled in the power. All messages to the king and all requests for an audience had to go through her. Not just that, the Madame also controlled all titles, court positions, and honors and quickly began replacing high-level officials with her supporters. She even took over as France’s minister of war during the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), and cleverly chose to appoint all the generals more on their social standing than their experience. Pompadour died of a lung disease in her early 40s, but for all her power-tripping she remained faithful to Louis till the end. In fact, court etiquette wouldn’t allow Louis to attend Pompadour’s funeral, but the casket was made to pass by his castle. Upon viewing the cortege, Louis reportedly cried, saying that tears were the only thing he could give her.

_04:: Mary, Countess von Waldersee (1866–1941)

Unlike most royal mistresses, Mary played the role of the matronly adviser. The daughter of a wealthy New York grocer, Mary was married to Colonel Alfred von Waldersee, the quartermaster general of the German army. As such, Mary opened a salon in Berlin and soon found herself entertaining German royalty, including young Prince William. Enamored of the old gal (she was, after all, two years senior to his mother), William decided to make her his private adviser. In 1888, William became Kaiser Wilhelm II, and he started referring all political matters to Mary before making decisions. However, the power went to Mary’s head, and she attempted to get Wilhelm to replace Chancellor Bismarck with her husband. Wilhelm did remove Bismarck, but not for Alfred. Instead, Wilhelm began to view Mary as his biggest competition and to get rid of her he demoted her hubby and moved them both to Hamburg. Without mother Mary’s sage advice, though, Wilhelm was lost, and his weak, egocentric decisions helped bring about World War I.

When Sex Doesn’t Sell:
5 Risqué Ad Campaigns That Got Canned

_01:: Abercrombie and Flesh

It may sound odd for a clothing manufacturer to use nudity to sell clothes, but that’s exactly the strategy campus mainstay Abercrombie & Fitch employed in their catalog/photo magazine A&F Quarterly. Over a series of years, the models somehow got younger and younger and began wearing fewer and fewer clothes. In fact, nudity wasn’t uncommon, and consumers complained of suggestions of pedophilia, sexual irresponsibility, underage drinking, and homoeroticism. But the Winter 2003 edition was the one that went too far. The catalog featured over 100 pages of photos of young men and women frolicking naked in streams and waterfalls (in a winter catalog?), and one spread espoused the joys of group sex in both photos and text. The outcry from angry parents was so loud that sales for November 2003 dropped over 13%, and the company discontinued the A&F Quarterly altogether soon thereafter. Despite the hubbub, though, A&F has been a little slow to learn from their mistakes. Since then, they’ve been criticized for marketing T-shirts with ethnically insensitive slogans and for marketing thong underwear bearing phrases like “Kiss me” and “Eye candy” to teen girls.

_02:: Calvin and Kiddies

Designer Calvin Klein has always used sex to sell his clothes, and it’s usually worked. After all, who can forget the slinky Brooke Shields proudly proclaiming “Nothing comes between me and my Calvins”? But in 1995, CK creeped out just about everyone with its ads for jeans and underwear. The commercials featured teenagers wearing almost nothing, standing in what appeared to be a poorly lit basement in front of cheap wood paneling. What’s more disconcerting than cheap paneling? Well, maybe the fact that the models are being interviewed with eerie questions, like “That’s a nice body. Do you work out?” Or “Why don’t you open that vest up?” Although the resulting controversy did increase sales, it also prompted an investigation by the FBI to see if the ads qualified as child pornography. In fact, the campaign is still referred to in the industry as the “kiddie porn” campaign.

_03:: PETA’s Sex Kittens (Literally)

It seems logical: What better use for sexual imagery than to promote…having your pets fixed? People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, long known for their publicity stunts, tried it in 2001. The ad by industry giant Saatchi & Saatchi depicted animatronic cats “doing it” in all sorts of positions while their owner is away, while the copy reminded us that over 2.4 million unwanted kittens are born every year. It’s actually very funny and effective, and PETA even tried to run it as a paid ad, not as a free public service ad. But MTV rejected it, saying they do not allow the depiction of “fornication” on their networks. Umm, excuse me? Apparently MTV’s (s)executives have never actually watched MTV. And the aforementioned fornication wasn’t even being done by real cats. They were puppets.

_04:: Candie’s Bathroom Humor

Lots of companies use models to sell their shoes. But only Candie’s used models going to the bathroom. A controversial series of ads from the late 1990s showed Playboy model Jenny McCarthy wearing a pair of Candie’s shoes while sitting on a toilet, panties around her calves, reading a newspaper. So, just how racy was the spread? Both Vogue and Cosmopolitan pulled the ads from their pages. Another series featured child-star-turned-sex-symbol Alyssa Milano in a bra and panties, rifling through a lover’s medicine cabinet full of condoms. But she’s stopped by an unexpected find: a bottle of Candie’s perfume. Another has Alyssa about to be mounted by a naked man in the back of a limo. The ads weren’t just suggestive, they were downright obvious. In fact, the ads were considered so risqué that they were banned in several countries, and the TV versions were even rejected by the WB, the network that carried Alyssa’s hit show Charmed.

_05:: Miscellaneous: The DisGraceful Awards

At the height of the late 1990s dot-com boom, Silicon Valley professional Sylvia Paull founded GraceNet, a San Francisco–based networking group for the ever-growing number of women in high-tech fields. Every month GraceNet hands out the DisGraceful Awards for ads that crossed the line into sexism or offensiveness. And back during the boom, with all that ad money flying around, they had plenty to choose from. DisGraceful “winners” include an IBM Lotus ad showing a man using Lotus to learn “discounted cash flow techniques with 40 other analysts,” while a woman uses it to finish her crossword by finding “a five-letter word for ‘bellybutton’”; and an ad for Hong Kong–based games maker Lik-Sang International, featuring a young girl licking her lips over the line “We don’t have young Japanese girls on sale right now, but we do ship more than 300 products directly from Hong Kong!”

Dear Dowry:
6 Crazy Historical Trades for Brides

_01:: Foreskins: David and Michal

If you know where to look, you can find all kinds of crazy stuff in the good book. So grab your King James Version and flip to chapter 18 of the first book of Samuel for the story of David (yes, that David, with the stone and the sling and the Psalms) and Michal. After David smote the heck out of Philistine badass Goliath, he went to live with King Saul of Israel. Saul, afraid of David and troubled by evil spirits, began to plot his murder. When Saul’s daughter Michal revealed her love for David, Saul made her a deal: Have David bring back 100 Philistine foreskins, and he can marry you. Now Saul had no particular affinity for foreskins; he just wanted David to get killed trying. But Dave and his posse, with God’s help, brought back 200 for the good king. Saul couldn’t help but bless his daughter’s marriage to such a go-getter.

_02:: Heads: The Dayak of Indonesia

Journey to the Indonesian island of Borneo and you’ll find an indigenous tribe of people called the Dayak. But try not to overstay your welcome, as the Dayak were historically headhunters and cannibals. In fact, their economy seems to have been predominantly skull based. If, for example, someone wanted to marry a chief’s daughter, the suitor would have to impress the chief by presenting him with three or four enemy skulls. This modern tribe had given up their headhunting ways�that is, until recently, when settlers from the overpopulated Indonesian island of Madura were caught encroaching on the Dayak’s traditional land. The late-1990s ethnic struggle proved that old habits die hard. Thankfully, though, things seem to have simmered down since, as the Dayak have figured out better ways to get a head.

_03:: Political Prisoners: Ramses and the Hittites

In the 13th century BCE, there were two superpowers in the Middle East: the Egyptians and the Hittites. And, as rival superpowers are wont to do, they hated each other. The main bone of their contention? The city of Kadesh, which served as a strategic linchpin located in modern-day Syria. After decades of fighting, King Hattusili III ascended to the Hittite throne, and he saw the wisdom of bargaining with the great Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II. So, he proposed a treaty. Ramses agreed to marry Maat-Hor-Neferu-Re (or Manefrure), Hattusili’s eldest daughter, and in exchange he got an alliance with the Hittites, control of Kadesh, and the release of all political prisoners. Not a bad deal. But what did the blushing bride get out of it? Well, the lucky gal got only what every princess dreams of…to be the primary consort in a harem of more than 200 wives and concubines.

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Touch of Evil

It was suggested that Henry VIII marry Anne of Cleves to help form a bond between England and Germany. After viewing a flattering portrait of Anne he agreed, but upon first meeting her he made it clear that he was disappointed by her looks, saying she resembled “a horse.”

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_04:: 100 Knights and a Table: Guinevere

The story of King Arthur has been told by many, and one of the best-known versions is Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. In his version, the famous Round Table was given by Uther Pendragon, its original owner, to a fella named Leodegrance, who happened to have a daughter by the name of Guinevere. When Guinevere was married off to a certain King Arthur, she brought to the marriage a most unusual dowry: the Round Table and, just for good measure, 100 knights to sit around it. But this was one serious table: it could seat 150. So magician Merlin threw in the rest of the knights to fill it. One hopes the happy couple registered for 150 place settings at Ye Olde Crate & Barrel.

_05:: England: “The Dowry of Mary”

Of all England’s nicknames�Jolly Olde, Blighty, etc.�perhaps one of the most obscure is “the Dowry of Mary.” At first blush, this may seem to refer to some medieval queen who married a king and got England as a wedding present. But it actually refers to the Virgin Mary. The story is linked to England’s pious King Edward the Confessor, who, upon dedicating Westminster Abbey in 1055, allegedly offered England to the Virgin Mary as her “dowry” with the words “Dos tua Virgo pia, haec est, quare rege, Maria” (Thy Dowry this, O Virgin sweet, then rule it, Mary, as is meet). Legend has it that, a few years later, Mary responded to this piety by appearing to Lady Richeldis de Faverches in the tiny village of Walsingham, asking her to build a replica of the House of the Anunciation. This house became a major pilgrimage destination until it was destroyed unceremoniously during the Reformation.

_06:: India and Tea: Catherine of Braganza

In 1661, Catherine of Braganza, the daughter of Portugal’s King John IV, was married off to King Charles II of England. The marriage was meant to cement an alliance between the two countries, and in exchange for taking Catherine’s hand, Charles (and therefore England) received Tangier and Bombay. And while the natural deepwater harbor at Bombay became the headquarters of the British East India Company and a perfect foothold for England’s growing colonial ambitions, the cities themselves might not have been Portugal’s most treasured gifts in the exchange. Aside from the land (and a bride), Charles was also gifted a chest of tea from the far-flung Portuguese colonies. The present quickly turned him into an enthusiastic “tea” totaler, and drinking the steamy beverage soon became all the rage throughout England.

Eight Is Not Enough:
6 Historical Dudes with Lots of
Illegitimate Children

_01:: Louis XV (1710–1774)

When you’re made king of France at the age of five, you tend to grow accustomed to having your way. And Louis XV had his way whenever he could, eventually fathering dozens of illegitimate children. Two of his mistresses, Madame de Pompadour and ex-prostitute Madame du Barry, became famous in their own right as the Monica Lewinskis of their day. He also carried on with five sisters of a prominent family and kept several young concubines at a house used expressly for the purpose called the Deer Park. By the time of his death, he had a new nickname: Louis the Well Hated. Aside from all the bastard children, Louis’ selfish lifestyle planted another seed: the French Revolution, which would commence just 15 years after his death.

_02:: Ramses II (ruled 1304–1237 BCE)

Of all the pharaohs of ancient Egypt, Ramses II is one of the biggies. When he wasn’t commissioning statues of himself, or (as legend goes) forcing enslaved Israelites to build temples, or battling the hated Hittites, he was making babies. Estimates of his brood go as high as 96 sons and 60 daughters. Now, to be fair, many of these were born to the pharaoh’s many wives, so they weren’t all technically illegitimate. But, since he had a harem of around 200 wives and concubines, it’s hard to keep track. So hard, in fact, that three of his wives�Bit Anoth, Maryamum, and Nebettawy�were also his daughters. And one was�wait for it�his sister. All together now: Eeeeuuuw!

_03:: Henry IV (1553–1610)

The French are world-renowned for romance, so it would make sense that they would revere a king whose many love affairs inspired the nickname le Vert Galant (“the Gay Old Spark”). Henry IV was one of France’s greatest kings; he re-created Paris as a center of the arts, expanded France’s presence in the New World, and soothed the bloody conflicts between France’s Catholics and Huguenot Protestants. But he was quite the ladies’ man as well. He fathered six children by his second wife, but only after he’d had three by a mistress named Gabrielle d’Estrée, the true love of his life. He also had five children by his three other principal mistresses. Henry is said to have had as many as 50 lovers over the course of his life, several of whom were his baby-mamas. Unlike many, though, he avoided the accompanying baby-mama drama by providing for his bastard offspring, making sure they were all given lands and titles and were well cared for.

_04:: King Augustus II (1670–1733)

How many Polish kings does it take to father an estimated 365 illegitimate children? Answer: one, and that one is Frederick Augustus of Saxony, better known as Augustus II (“the Strong”), king of Poland. Famous as a man of immense physical strength, unquenchable lust, and, apparently, considerable stamina, old Augustus wasn’t called “the Strong” for nothin’. The first of his 300-plus love children was Hermann Maurice, comte de Saxe, a military genius who himself had several illegitimate children. The great female French novelist George Sand is descended from both these men. However, with that many children between them, we probably all are.

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Scandalicious

POPE AND DAUGHTER CAUGHT GROPING AT SAME ORGY!

Not many women can claim the pope as her baby’s daddy, but Vanozza dei Cattanei could. The mistress of Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia, she bore him four children before he became Pope Alexander VI in 1492. The most famous were Cesare and Lucrezia. Cesare was a ruthless general and politician, known for poisoning his enemies and conquering the cities of Romagna one by one in a three-year campaign (he also served as the model for Machiavelli’s The Prince). His sister Lucrezia was married off to one noble after another as a pawn in her father’s system of alliances. A little too fond of wealth, power, and luxurious decadence, Alexander VI was also accustomed to treating himself well by throwing notorious parties at the Vatican. The most infamous of his galas was the Ballet of the Chestnuts on October 30, 1501. Naked, painted men and women allegedly greeted guests as “living statues,” and beautiful prostitutes danced nude, after which the party progressed into an orgy. Lucrezia’s attendance reinforced rumors of incest. The pope supposedly lusted after his daughter as his sons Cesare and Juan fought over her as well. Some even claim Cesare murdered his brother Juan out of jealousy.

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_05:: Genghis Khan (ca. 1162–1227)

Nobody knows how many illegitimate children the great Mongol conqueror actually had. But modern genetic science has proven that he must have had an awful lot, a result of the Mongols’ ample raping and harem collecting among their many conquered peoples. By tracing the lineage of modern populations of the former Mongol Empire (stretching from China to the Caucasus) through analysis of the Y chromosome, scientists have determined that roughly 16 million men, or about 0.05% of the earth’s male population, are descended from Genghis Khan or his brothers. Genghis’s eldest son, Tushi, alone had 40 sons. In fact, by the year 1260, less than 40 years after Genghis’s death, a Persian historian estimated that he already had 20,000 descendants. Now that’s what you call a conquest!

_06:: Alexandre Dumas (1802–1870)

One of France’s greatest literary figures, Alexandre Dumas brought the world adventures like The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Man in the Iron Mask, and many others. Turns out he was prolific at more than just writing. Dumas lived as colorful and adventurous a life as any of his characters, taking numerous mistresses and frittering away great gobs of money. He was purported to have fathered dozens of illegitimate children, but he acknowledged only three (by different women). Oddly enough, the one he named after himself went on to renown of his own. So to distinguish him from his son, Alexandre senior is known to the French as Dumas père (Dumas the Father). Well deserved, don’t you think?

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Touch of Evil

England’s king John battled his father, his brothers, and the pope, and was forced to sign the Magna Carta. He still had time, however, to connect with several mistresses and father illegitimate children, including Bartholomew, Eudes, Geoffrey, Joan, John, Maud, Oliver, Osbert, and Richard.

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He Never Wants to Cuddle:
5 Famous People Who Died in the Act

_01:: The Pope

Actually, that’s “popes,” plural. Apparently papal infallibility only gets you so far. First we have Pope Leo VII (d. 939 CE), who died of a heart attack during the act. Then there’s Pope John XII (d. 964 CE), who was reportedly bludgeoned to death, naked in bed, by the jealous husband of his sex partner. And who could forget Pope John XIII (d. 972 CE), who remarkably enough departed this earthly existence in exactly the same way as John XII. Then, of course, there’s good ol’ Pope Paul II (d. 1471 CE), who for variety’s sake had a heart attack while being sodomized by a page boy.

_02:: The Duke of Orléans (1674–1723)

In 1723, after serving as prince regent and temporary ruler of France for eight years, Philippe II, the duke of Orléans and nephew of Louis XIV, “the Sun King,” yielded the throne to Louis XV, who had finally come of age. And not a moment too soon�on December 23, 1723 ( just two days before Christmas), Philippe had a stroke after a particularly strenuous night with his mistress, who was 30 years his junior. His only notable accomplishment had been allowing the mass-printing of paper money, which, by the way, bankrupted France.

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Touch of Evil

According to a medical study published by the University Hospital of Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Germany: “Over a period of 21 years (1972–1992), roughly 21,000 forensic autopsies revealed 39 cases (0.19%) of natural deaths occurring during sexual activity…. In most cases sudden death occurred during the sexual act with a prostitute.”

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_03:: Félix Faure (1841–1899)

Having served as president of France from 1895, Félix Faure seems to have experienced the “little death” and the “big death” simultaneously in 1899 while receiving oral sex from his mistress at the Elysee Palace. The woman’s terrified screams alerted the president’s aides, who broke down the door and found her still kneeling in front of the sofa where the president’s corpse was seated, holding her head in his lap with the strength of a death grip. The aides freed the woman, made the president’s corpse decent, and laid it out on a bed piously holding a crucifix. Typically, having caught wind of the truth, French newspapers were having none of this. They dutifully ran drawings of this Christian scene, but with the mocking caption “Death of Faure (Official Version).”

_04:: Lord Palmerston (1784–1865)

After a series of accomplishments that won the admiration of the whole world�including helping Belgium achieve independence, supporting the seizure of the French throne by Napoléon III, establishing friendly relations with France, winning the Crimean War, and criticizing the sale of opium in China�what would be the most dignified way for an English elder statesman to end his long life of public service? How about a heart attack as he diddles a parlor maid on a pool table in 1865? Nuff said.

_05:: Nelson Rockefeller (1908–1979)

Grandson of oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller, former governor of New York and vice president of the United States, Nelson Rockefeller left this world doing what he loved best�engaging in lively intercourse with America’s free press. Seventy-one years of age, Rockefeller died while having sex with his mistress, a “thirty-one-year-old former news reporter who was working as his research assistant,” according to the New York Times. The Times treated the sticky subject of just how Rockefeller died rather delicately, saying only that he died as he lived, “with an enthusiasm for life in all its public and private passions.” Ahem.

Can I Get Flies with That?
World’s 8 Strangest Aphrodisiacs

_01:: Basil

If you’re desperate for a quick trick to jumpstart an ailing love life, just look to the sweetest herb on your spice rack for the remedy. That’s right! According to practitioners of the voodoo belief system in Haiti, good ol’ basil is the Spanish fly of your kitchen cabinet. Said to be sacred to the Haitian goddess of love, Erzulie, basil is added as an aphrodisiac to a special incense burned to invoke her spirit in voodoo love ceremonies�obviously, for romantic purposes. The Old World herb is also sprinkled liberally on food and eaten to stimulate that tingling feeling.

_02:: Antlers

Perhaps because they resemble erect phalluses, antlers have been considered aphrodisiacs in traditional Asian medical folklore for over 2,000 years. Practitioners of traditional medicine recommend grinding up the soft, velvety skin that covers deer antlers and sprinkling it on food or mixing it into a beverage. In fact, the bony outgrowths are so prized that one species, the Tibet red deer, has actually been hunted to near extinction. Luckily, scientists recently discovered a small herd of 200 of these animals near Lhasa, Tibet, we hope none of which will die in the name of love. Or lust.

_03:: Xanat

The flower of the vanilla orchid was reputed by the native cultures of Central America to be an aphrodisiac, and vanilla still carries this association in Mexico. In native folklore, Xanat, the youngest daughter of the fertility goddess, suffered from unrequited love for a young man of the Totonac tribe. In fact, she was forbidden to marry him because she was divine and he a mortal. Since she couldn’t marry a human, however, the benevolent Xanat turned herself into a flower with aphrodisiacal qualities so she could help the human race do its thing.

_04:: Frog Legs

Sometimes you can have too much of a wood�er, good�thing. In the case of an unfortunate group of French Foreign Legion soldiers in North Africa, frog legs proved to be such an effective enhancer of “erectile function” that priapism�a prolonged, painful erection that will not go away�ensued. Subsequently, researchers from American universities found that the frog legs contained enormous amounts of cantharidin, better known as Spanish fly. It turned out the frogs had been eating meloid beetles, one of the main sources of the legendary aphrodisiac, eventually making things hard for the soldiers.

_05:: Nutmeg

Another salacious spice lurking in your pantry, nutmeg has long been thought of as an aphrodisiac by a variety of cultures. The ancient Greeks, Romans, and Hindus ate it for that purpose, and the tradition continued into both the Arab and Chinese civilizations. In fact, in contemporary India, couples eat a mix made of nutmeg, honey, and a half-boiled egg before sex to increase their endurance and make intercourse last longer. However, nutmeg may also have unpredictable hallucinogenic effects, and in large quantities can be fatal.

_06:: Sweet Potatoes

Shortly after Columbus made landfall in 1492, the natives of Hispaniola introduced him to the sweet potato, a member of the morning glory family. Spanish colonizers soon spread the sweet potato lovin’ to Asia and Europe, the popularity to cultivate it driven in part by its reputation as an aphrodisiac. In Health’s Improvement, a medical guide from 1595, Dr. Thomas Muffet wrote that sweet potatoes increase not only libido, but apparently also the incidence of flatulence, claiming that they “nourish mightily…engendering much flesh, blood, and seed, but withal encreasing wind and lust.”

_07:: Tiger

Today tigers are one of the most endangered species on earth, with the main population in Asia all but wiped out by poachers. Sadly, this is due in large part to a widespread belief in East Asian cultures that tiger flesh is medicinal for a variety of ailments and complaints. Tiger penis, bone, liver, fat, and whiskers are all reputed to stimulate sexual desire in men, driving the illicit trade and pushing the rare animals ever closer to extinction. Even worse? Despite the fact that its illegal, you can probably find a tiger parts dealer near you: tiger is commonly sold under the table in American cities that are home to large numbers of East Asian immigrants.

_08:: Unagi, Unagi

Served raw in sushi or cooked as part of an udon (noodle) dish, sea eel, or unagi, is reputed in Japan to be an aphrodisiac. The association likely springs from a rather obvious similarity between the shape of the eel and, as usual, an erect penis. Of course, there might be some science behind the belief as well. Unagi is high in vitamin A, which may help sexual function. Although unagi is an increasingly popular item on American sushi menus, most diners are unaware of its erotic associations in Japanese cuisine.

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Our Parents?
4 Historical Eloping Tales

_01:: Peter Abelard and Héloïse Leonard de Selva

In 12th-century France, Fulbert, a priest of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, hired Abelard, a gifted but contrary theologian and Aristotelian philosopher, to tutor his brainy young niece, Héloïse. As you might have predicted, Abelard and Héloïse fell in love. What wasn’t predicted, however, was that young Abelard would impregnate her. Understandably, Héloïse’s uncle was enraged, shipping her off to Normandy for the duration of her pregnancy. After giving birth to a son, she returned to Paris, where, again defying uncle’s wishes, Héloïse and Abelard slipped off for a secret wedding. What’s an overprotective uncle to do? Fulbert organized his male relatives into a posse, ambushed Abelard, and castrated him, which effectively stopped history from repeating itself. Abelard became a monk and Héloïse reluctantly entered a convent. All wasn’t lost, however, and their love affair continued in the form of letters, later collected in book form. In what can be considered a moderately happy ending (given the circumstances, not to mention the uncle), Héloïse ended her life as abbess of the Paraclete, an abbey that Abelard had founded, and was buried next to him.

_02:: John Scott and Bessy Surtees

John Scott was a graduate student at Oxford in 1722, but banker Aubone Surtees wanted more for his daughter Bessy than a merchant’s son�especially one who’d been a notorious scamp as a boy. Yet, as songwriter Bob Dylan would put it more than 250 years later, “Love and only love, it can’t be denied.” Against the wishes of her father and his own (who thought John would imperil his academic career), Scott used a ladder to snatch young Bessy from an upstairs window, and they ran away to Scotland to marry. (It was easier for English couples to get hitched north of the border in those days.) Luckily for the couple, however, neither daddy knew best. John Scott bettered his father’s and father-in-law’s predictions by becoming the longtime lord chancellor of England. In fact, today, the once mischievous rascal is better remembered as the first earl of Eldon.

_03:: Henry Fitch and Josefa Carrillo

When sea captain Henry Delano Fitch�later a prominent California landowner�fell for 14-year-old Josefa Carillo in 1826, he fell hard. By the laws of Mexican California, however, the San Diego girl couldn’t marry a Protestant foreigner, so the Nantucket-born Yankee converted to Catholicism and had himself rechristened Enrique Domingo Fitch. Josefa’s father, after some persuading, agreed to the match. During the wedding, however, before the couple could say their vows, Josefa’s uncle arrived with an order from the California governor to stop the ceremony. (She later claimed that the governor wanted her for himself.) At the bride-to-be’s urging, Fitch took his gal aboard ship and they sailed off to Chile, where they wed. After they returned to California, Fitch was charged with kidnapping and jailed for three months until the governor could verify the legality of the nuptials.

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Touch of Evil

Sixteen-year-old Konrad Falkowski eloped with Joan Kenlay in 1952. But to avoid being tracked down by their parents, the young man changed his name, and it’s this moniker we still use to refer to the famous actor: Robert Conrad.

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_04:: James Joyce and Nora Barnacle

Budding Irish writer James Joyce convinced his Dublin sweetheart, Nora Barnacle, to run away with him to Austria-Hungary in 1904. It wasn’t exactly an elopement, though, because Joyce objected to the institution of marriage on philosophical grounds. So, they skipped the ceremony and dove straight into the happily-ever-after bit, living together and raising two children. Joyce, who had by now achieved fame and notoriety, especially for his complex masterpiece Ulysses, only agreed to marry his longtime love when the nagging got to be too much. We’re not talking about Nora’s whining here, but rather her daughter Lucia’s. The young woman’s incessant complaints about her parents’ domestic arrangement drove them to the altar. In 1931, the couple finally legalized their union during a trip from their home in Paris to London. (So, in the end, they ran away to get married after all.)

5 Greatest Syphilitics of All Time

_01:: The Syphilitic Explorer

The long-held view was that Columbus’s crew picked up syphilis in the Caribbean in 1492 and brought it back to Europe, where the “new” disease turned epidemic. But what about Columbus himself? He returned from his third voyage west in 1504 partially paralyzed, suffering edema, and mentally deranged. But can anybody be sure what caused those symptoms without examining Columbus’s bones? Well, no. He could have had typhus or rheumatic fever, but syphilis can’t be ruled out.

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The Evil How-to

HOW TO SPOT “THE SIGNS” (OTHER THAN JUST HAIRY PALMS)

Active physician, health innovator, and, yes, the founder of a cereal company, John Harvey Kellogg wrote a handbook for sexual behavior in 1877 (while on his honeymoon) called “Plain Facts for Old and Young, A Warning on the Evils of Sex.” A key focus of this piece was a section containing 39 signs for parents to use to tell whether their children were masturbating or “performing the solitary vice,” as it was called. The following are some of the signs that, according to Kellogg, all good parents should be on the lookout for: emaciation, paleness, colorless lips and gums, exhaustion, coughing, shortness of breath, chest pains, disobedience, irritability, a dislike for activity and play, sleeplessness, failure to get lessons done, forgetfulness, inattention, and liking to be alone. Kellogg went on to identify some other telltale signs, including bashfulness, boldness, mock piety, rounded shoulders, weak backs, pain in the limbs, lack of breast development in females, bad positions while sleeping, large appetites and the use of large amounts of spices, sunken and red eyes, and epileptic fits. Finally, especially be on the lookout for acne, bitten fingernails, moist, cold hands, bedwetting, the use of tobacco, and fondness for using bad language and listening to obscene stories. It’s a good thing Kellogg was so specific; otherwise we might have started accusing everyone.

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_02:: The Syphilitic King

A wound on Henry VIII’s leg became a festering sore that wouldn’t heal. Ulcers spread over his legs and feet. And as he grew hugely obese, the English king’s toes turned gangrenous. Not exactly a thing of beauty, Old Hal had something going on. The latter-day diagnosis: advanced diabetes. So what’s with the notion that Henry’s late-life dementia came from syphilis? Some say first wife Catherine of Aragon’s several miscarriages suggest a sexually transmitted disease. And then there’s the sad case of Henry’s son Edward VI, the boy king with the terrible skin rash whose hair and nails fell out. Tradition says Eddie died at age 15 of tuberculosis. Many, however, argue that he and his half sister Queen Mary I had congenital syphilis passed on from Henry. Of course, it’s all unconfirmed. None of Henry’s children, including Elizabeth I (another suspected but unconfirmed syphilitic), produced offspring.

_03:: The Syphilitic Philosopher

On a winter day when Friedrich Nietzsche was 54, the German-Swiss philosopher, clad in only his underwear, ran weeping into a street in Turin, Italy, where he tearfully embraced a horse. Stricken with diphtheria and bacterial dysentery during his service in the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871), Nietzsche never fully recovered his health. His late-life dementia, however, more likely stemmed from tertiary syphilis. In other words, he had probably picked up the disease in his youth and it had run its course for decades. Nietzsche, a philosopher later admired (and grossly misunderstood) by Adolf Hitler, spent the last 11 years of his life totally mad.

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Touch of Evil

One radical cure for syphilitic patients was to give them malaria. The high fever worked to kill the syphilis, after which the malaria was easily cured with quinine.

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_04:: The Syphilitic Painter

Born in Paris, Paul Gauguin spent his early childhood in Peru before moving back to France. As a young man Gauguin signed on as a merchant sailor to see and sample the sensual riches of the world. Later, after he’d supposedly settled down, Gauguin and his wife moved from France to her native Denmark, where they raised their family and Gauguin had a career as a stockbroker. But then Gauguin chucked his family and his career to live a new life as a bohemian painter in Tahiti. So where did he pick up the syphilis that plagued him in his later years? It could have been in the South Seas, although it’s more likely that a Parisian prostitute gave him the pox. Nearly blind, barely able to walk, and in terrible pain, this forefather of modern art died alone in his Maison du Jouir (House of Pleasure) in the village of Atuona in the Marquesas Islands.

_05:: The Syphilitic Gangster

When New York tough guy Alphonse “Scarface” Capone arrived in Chicago in 1919, one of his first jobs in the town where he would become America’s most famous gangster was looking after mobster Big Jim Colosimo’s string of brothels. So, did old Al sample the service? Well, a gentleman gangster never tells. What we will say, however, is that wherever he picked up the “goods,” years later, he was discovered to be suffering from paresis�a psychosis that follows after the late-stage disease eats away a significant part of the brain. Released from Alcatraz Federal Prison in 1939, Capone entered a Baltimore hospital and spent his last years deep in syphilitic dementia.

The Cost of Free Love:
4 Not-So-Straitlaced Reformers of
Victorian Times

_01:: John Humphrey Noyes (1811–1886)

As a theology student at Yale, John Humphrey Noyes declared himself sin free and in a state of perfection. Not surprisingly, Johnny the Pure was denied a license to preach, so he organized fellow perfectionists into a “Bible Communist” community in Putney, Vermont. There Noyes taught a doctrine of free love. In 1846 the Putney group adopted what their leader called “complex marriage,” such that all the women were “married” to all the men and vice versa. Arrested for adultery, Noyes jumped bail and fled to New York, where he founded a new community in Oneida. There, the Oneida Community practiced complex marriage up until 1879, when Noyes finally gave in to pressure from outside moralists and abandoned the practice. Oneida, once an agricultural-religious utopian community, reorganized as a joint-stock manufacturer of silver flatware. As for John Noyes? He fled again, this time for Canada.

_02:: Ezra H. Heywood (1829–1893)

Massachusetts liberal Ezra Heywood founded his publication The Word in 1872 as a voice for labor reform and other egalitarian causes. Heywood and his wife, Angela Tilton, also a writer for The Word, shared four daughters and a belief that traditional marriage amounted to slavery of women�both of the economic and sexual variety. So what did the couple do? They decided to pen their own emancipation proclamations, using The Word to advocate free love. “Sexuality is a divine ordinance elegantly natural from an eye-glance to the vital action of the penis and womb, in personal exhilaration or for reproductive uses,” Tilton wrote. Of course, such salacious language was bound to offend a few Victorians, and Anthony Comstock, a smut-fighting special agent of the U.S. Post Office, was certainly one of them. Comstock took special offense to Heywood’s pamphlet “Cupid’s Yokes,” which advocated birth control, and arrested Ezra in Boston in 1877. Many argued that Angela, known for her frank vocabulary (she used the “f” word in print) should have been jailed, too, but Ezra’s the one who spent time in the slammer.

_03:: Moses Hull (1836–1907)

A gifted Seventh-day Adventist preacher, Moses Hull left the church and began lecturing instead on spiritualism in 1863. Well known for his eloquence, he was considered highly respectable. That is, until 1873, when old Moses printed a letter in Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly (copublished by Victoria Woodhull, see next item) unapologetically confessing that he’d strayed from his marriage. But he didn’t stop there. Hull actually went on to praise sexual variety, claiming: “Many think they are improved…by a change of climate and scene, when their principal improvement is caused by a separation from their old sexual mate, and sometimes by the substitution of a new one.” Hull and wife, Elvira, dissolved their marriage “by a law higher than man’s” and Hull subsequently entered a “contract marriage” (no clergy, no license) with fellow spiritualist Mattie Sawyer. Luckily, the “contract” held until his death.

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Touch of Evil

Despite having the Victorian era named after her, Queen Victoria didn’t always act so Victorian. In fact, she was notorious for having a long-term out-of-wedlock relationship with her “personal attendant,” John Brown�lavishing him with expensive gifts and constant affection�after her husband, Prince Albert, passed away.

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_04:: Victoria Woodhull (1838–1927)

Believe it or not, the first woman to run for U.S. president actually spent her childhood as a fortune-teller in her family’s traveling medicine show. Luckily for Victoria Woodhull, she abandoned the psychic act for loftier goals, including stints as a stockbroker, magazine publisher, women’s rights advocate, and, most notoriously, lecturer. Woodhull’s talks on free love drew thousands�supporters and scandalized alike. Though few details about her own sex life are known (aside from the fact that she lived for a while with two husbands), Woodhull didn’t argue in favor of promiscuity. In fact, she pushed sexual self-determination as essential to women’s rights, condemning any copulation without love, inside or outside of marriage. In 1872, while seeking the White House on the Equal Rights ticket, Woodhull smeared clergyman Henry Ward Beecher, probably a former lover, who refused to publicly support her. Unfortunately, the first amendment didn’t work in her favor in the Victorian climate. Woodhull’s published account of Beecher’s adultery with a married parishioner landed her in jail on obscenity charges.

Naked Lust:
5 Artists Who Did More Than
Portray Their Models

_01:: Anselm Feuerbach and Nanna Risi

The 19th-century painter Anselm Feuerbach, nephew of philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, admired and tried to emulate the art of the High Renaissance. That’s a big part of the reason why he migrated from his native Germany to Italy. Yet Feuerbach also possessed a cool, northern European sensibility, which he brought with him to Rome when he moved there in 1856. In fact, his neoclassical scenes took on a bit of heat only after Italian model Nanna Risi (also seen in works by Frederick Leighton) began posing for him in 1860. It wasn’t just his artwork that heated up, though. The chemistry between artist and model grew, and Risi eventually left her shoemaker husband and her child for Feuerbach. The affair didn’t last, however, and she later abandoned the artist. Brokenhearted, Feuerbach tried to replace Risi with another model and lover, but he had little luck. After some time spent teaching art in Vienna, Feurbach moved to Venice, where he died poor and alone in 1880.

_02:: Suzanne Valadon and half of France…

Before 1892, when she became a painter, Suzanne Valadon was a teenage circus acrobat and then one of the most popular models in Paris�popular in more than one sense. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir were among the many artists who depicted her. Toulouse-Lautrec’s The Hangover, for example, is a portrait of Valadon. Usually, however, this model’s relationships went well beyond the depicting stage. Valadon had numerous love affairs with Parisian artists, and perhaps the best documented is that with Renoir. Composer Eric Satie was also an intense lover of hers. More intriguing than a listing of the lovers she kept: Valadon never revealed which man fathered her son, painter Maurice Utrillo. Further, at age 44, Valadon was still on the prowl. She left a wealthy husband for the considerably younger artist André Utter, 23.

_03:: Pablo Picasso and Marie-Thérèse Walter

Picasso met Marie-Thérèse Walter either in 1925, when she was 15 and he was 43, or in 1927. In either case, they seemed to be lovers from early in their relationship, as Picasso’s marriage to the former dancer Olga Koklova quickly deteriorated. Although Picasso first approached Walter to comment on her interesting face and his eagerness to paint her, Walter’s likeness doesn’t show up in Picasso’s work until 1935, which is the same year she bore him a daughter. In any case, the reliably unreliable Picasso left Marie in 1936 for photographer Dora Maar, who turned the tables and used Picasso as a model. Sadly, Walter hanged herself in 1977. Even more unfortunate, she wasn’t the only one of Picasso’s former lovers to commit suicide.

_04:: Man Ray and Lee Miller

In 1929 Lee Miller, a 19-year-old art student from Poughkeepsie, New York, walked into innovative painter-collagist-photographer Man Ray’s photo studio in Paris and introduced herself as his new assistant. Ray, who’d made his reputation as a surrealist and a pioneer of the Dada movement, said he didn’t need an assistant but she persisted. Miller, already a top model who had adorned the cover of Vogue in 1927, was pretty persuasive (or persuasively pretty). The affair lasted for a bit. Lee and Ray were together as lovers and collaborators for three years before she went on to a photo career ranging from studio fashion shoots for Vogue to feature spreads in Life to wrenching World War II battlefield coverage for the U.S. military.

_05:: Jeff Koons and Ilona Staller

In 1991, stockbroker-turned-controversial-artist Jeff Koons�earlier known for works depicting basketballs floating in aquariums and brand-new vacuum cleaners displayed under glass�took a turn toward the graphically sexual in 1991. The series of pieces included photographic tableaux and small glass sculptures depicting him engaged in sex acts with Italian porn star Ilona “Cicciolina” Staller. Oddly enough, there was nothing left to the imagination in these works�some of them barely distinguishable from the porn that was Cicciolina’s career mainstay. Nonetheless, it was “art,” just as a basketball in an aquarium was “art,” because Koons pronounced it so. The pair married that year and produced a son (perhaps conceived on camera), but they separated in 1992.

Out of Order:
5 Divinity School Dropouts

_01:: Tom Cruise (1962–)

In 1976, a deeply religious child named Thomas Cruise Mapother IV enrolled in a Franciscan seminary in New Jersey. Within five years, he’d ditched the church, dropped the Mapother, and landed a part in Endless Love. And in spite of his diminutive height (5 feet 7 inches) the man who might have been a priest became one of Hollywood’s top leading men. Around 1986, though, he abandoned Catholicism altogether, embracing the Church of Scientology, which he once credited with helping him overcome dyslexia. Wildly popular with celebrities, Scientology is the path of choice to “clarity” for everyone from John Travolta to the guy who played Parker Lewis in Parker Lewis Can’t Lose. Incidentally, Scientology does have ministers�but while Cruise remains an active member and apologist for the group, he has yet to seek ordination.

_02:: Casanova (1725–1798)

Everyone’s favorite 18th-century libertine began his scandalous escapades at the seminary of St. Cyprion, from which he was expelled under cloudy circumstances (we’re guessing he slept with someone). And as you well know, his postseminary life was as ungodly as it gets. By the age of 30 he was sentenced to prison for engaging in “magic,” but he escaped after only a year to Paris. There, he made a fortune by introducing the lottery to France. But before settling down to write his ribald, self-aggrandizing autobiography, Casanova was expelled from more European countries than most of us ever visit. Along the way, he slept with tons of women, dueled with many of their husbands, and generally sinned his way to the top of European culture, befriending such figures as Madame du Pompadour and Jean-Jacques Rousseau along the way.

_03:: Joseph Stalin (1879–1953)

Lasting longer than the vast majority of divinity school dropouts, noted mass murderer Joseph Stalin studied at a Georgian Orthodox seminary in Tiflis (now Tbilisi) for five years, between 1894 and 1899. He left the seminary either because of poor health (his mom’s story) or revolutionary activity (Stalin’s story). Either way, Stalin clearly didn’t take much of what he learned to heart (assuming he had one). After he became the Soviet leader in 1922, he was responsible for the deaths of thousands of religious leaders, and Stalin did more than any other premier to eliminate the role of Christianity in Soviet life. But his seminary wasn’t exactly a study in Christian love, either. Prior to Stalin’s arrival, a rector was murdered there�possibly by unruly seminarians.

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Touch of Evil

When Charles Darwin hesitated to obtain a degree in medicine, his dad enrolled him in the University of Cambridge to study divinity. It wasn’t long, though, before the “father of evolution” quit school (in 1831) to begin taking part in scientific expeditions around the world.

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_04:: Michael Moore (1954–)

Controversial documentary filmmaker Michael Moore began studying at a seminary in his hometown of Flint, Michigan, as an eighth grader in 1967. Brought up a devout Catholic, Moore aspired to a career as a priest, but he left the seminary the next year for thoroughly secular reasons. When the Detroit Tigers made it to the World Series in 1968, the seminary refused to let him watch the games�so he quit. Before his successful filmmaking career, in fact, Moore was something of a serial dropout. He dropped out of the University of Michigan because he arrived at school one morning and couldn’t find a parking place, and he once got a job at an automobile factory in Flint�but called in sick on his first day and never returned.

_05:: Al Gore (1948–)

Believe it or not, the winner of the popular vote in the U.S. presidential election of 2000 was actually a devoutly religious divinity school dropout. It’s true! Al Gore graduated from Harvard cum laude in 1969 (although he earned several Cs and a D during his time in Cambridge), but he’d always been interested in theology, so he decided to continue his studies. It’s no wonder, then, that he enrolled in Vanderbilt’s prestigious divinity school, where, over the course of three semesters, he failed five of his eight classes! Gore’s allies claim that the birth of his first child and his duties as a reporter at the Tennessean newspaper kept him from his studies. For the record, though, Gore also later dropped out of Vanderbilt’s law school (in 1976), but this time for a truly higher purpose�to run for Congress.

6 Portraits of Artists as Young Perverts

_01:: Rousseau (1712–1778)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, an 18th-century Swiss writer and philosopher, believed that humans were basically good but had been corrupted by the social order. And boy, did he know a thing or two about being corrupted. While you wouldn’t know it from the dry prose of Émile or The Social Contract, Rousseau enjoyed the naughty�so long as he got spanked for his transgressions. “To lie at the feet of an imperious mistress,” he once remarked, “was for me a sweet enjoyment.” Yikes! In fact, he liked it so much that as a young man, Rousseau would drop trou and moon women in dark alleyways, hoping to get a spanking for his trouble. Surprisingly, the great philosopher’s greatest impact might not have been made by his quill, but rather by his quirk. The phrase psychologists use to describe young men who get aroused when disciplined by older women: “the Rousseau effect.”

_02:: Lewis Carroll (1832–1898)

The most famous sexual deviant in the annals of literature may, in fact, not have been: Lewis Carroll, children’s book author and noted fan of taking little girls’ pictures. Carroll, who spent most of his career teaching math, spoke with a terrible stammer around adults, but found it easy to talk to children (kind of like Michael Jackson). In fact, the sputtering author found it remarkably easy to engage his child friends in fantastic stories, which culminated with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Published in 1865, Alice is certainly a study in Freudian sublimation: there’s a fair bit of squeezing through tiny holes, for instance. And then there are the pictures: Carroll photographed both adults and children, and also took several nude pictures of kids (he even sent a letter to a colleague at Oxford asking if he could photograph his girls nude without chaperones). Still, no evidence has ever surfaced that Carroll abused anyone�incapable of mature relationships, sure, but probably not an active pedophile.

_03:: René Descartes (1596–1650)

Perhaps the only example of a sexual eccentricity changing the history of Western thought can be found in the life story of the father of modern philosophy, René “I think therefore I am” Descartes. You see, Descartes had a fetish for cross-eyed women�due, he believed, to his childhood fascination with a cross-eyed playmate. As he describes it in the Principles of Philosophy, Descartes was eventually able to condition his body to find straight-eyed women attractive (good for Descartes, maybe, but a disaster for the hard-up cross-eyed ladies of Europe). It was largely this experience that led Descartes to his belief in free will and to his assertion that the mind can control the impulses of the body.

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Scandalicious

RUSSIAN CZARINA AND PEASANT SEEN SMOOCHING
BY PALACE STEPS (PHOTOS INSIDE!)

How did an illiterate, raggedly dressed peasant with a well-known reputation for sexual debauchery become a trusted friend to Czar Nicholas II and Czarina Alexandra of Russia? Well, it may have been Rasputin’s remarkable ability to heal their hemophiliac son, Aleksei. Or maybe, as many have thought, Alexandra was in love with him. When Czar Nicholas went to the front during World War I, Alexandra stayed behind to run the country, and the sex-crazed holy man Rasputin became her most trusted adviser. Meanwhile, she probably became the most prominent of his many mistresses. Though not the best-looking fellow you’d ever meet, Rasputin did have certain, uh, assets�his penis was supposedly more than a foot long. It’s unlikely that Alexandra and Rasputin ever consummated their bizarre friendship, but by December 1916, the mere rumor of peasant-on-czarina loving was simply too much to bear for a group of Russian aristocrats, who finally decided to put Rasputin out of their misery. It wasn’t easy. He survived poisoning and two gunshot wounds before finally being drowned in the icy Neva River.

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Touch of Evil

Before Horatio Alger’s rags-to-riches stories inspired a generation of youngsters, he was quietly dismissed as minister of the First Unitarian Church in Brewster, Massachusetts, for allegedly molesting two young boys who were members of the congregation

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_04:: James Joyce (1882–1941)

When an admirer once asked if he could “kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses,” James Joyce replied, “No. It has done a lot of other things, too.” Indeed it had. Ulysses, the exemplar of 20th-century literature, was banned in much of the world for its purported obscenity. (For the greatest literary accomplishment of its time, Ulysses does feature a lot of smut.) In America, Judge John M. Woolsey lifted the ban on Ulysses in December of 1933 (the same month Prohibition ended), and Joyce’s sprawling, brilliant tale of one day in Dublin became an instant sensation. Ulysses may not be obscene, but Joyce himself was a bit of a perv. He admitted to finding women’s unwashed underwear erotic�perhaps not coincidentally, panties and petticoats pop up in Ulysses rather frequently.

_05:: Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950)

Many writers have been unfaithful to their spouses, but few can match Edna St. Vincent Millay. The first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, Millay was married for 26 years to Eugene Boissevain. In a reversal of traditional gender roles, Boissevain did most of the housework and Millay most of the philandering. She took many lovers, both male and female, and one biographer described her as having a “megawatt libido.” True enough, but so did a lot of male poets (like Lord Byron), and they didn’t catch much flak for it. Millay was open, and funny, about her trysts. When she complained of headaches to a psychologist at a party, he wondered whether Millay might have a subconscious attraction to women. “Oh, you mean I’m a homosexual!” Millay replied. “Of course I am, and a heterosexual, too. But what’s that got to do with my headache?”

_06:: F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)

Another great modernist, F. Scott Fitzgerald, had his own quirks. Like many authors (Dostoyevsky and Thomas Hardy, among others), Fitzgerald may have had a foot fetish, at least according to biographer Jeffrey Meyers. In 1917, Fitzgerald became acquainted with the great love of his life, Zelda Sayre, outside of Montgomery, Alabama. They married in 1920, the same year his first novel, This Side of Paradise, was published. Then, five years later, his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, hit the shelves. Shortly thereafter, Zelda lost her tenuous grip on sanity�she eventually landed in a sanitarium after she began practicing ballet day and night. All those hours en pointe couldn’t have been good for her feet. But Fitzgerald might not have cared: most critics think he was only kidding when he made references to a “pedentia complex,” which just goes to show you, be careful what you joke about.

A Pain in the Royal Horse:
5 Sex Rumors About Royalty

_01:: Catherine the Great (1729–1796)

The reign of Catherine II, the German-born czarina of Russia, began when she overthrew her alcoholic, incompetent, and purportedly impotent husband, Frederick (the not so Great), in 1762. If there was one thing Catherine the Great would not stand for, it was impotence. Although grossly overweight, Catherine loved men�a great many of them, in fact�over the course of her 34-year reign. And then, it was rumored, she died during a botched attempt to make love (if it can be called such a thing) to a horse. The rumor may have been spread by Catherine’s Polish enemies, who resented her for annexing much of Poland. (On the list of European royalty’s leisure activities, “overrunning Poland” has historically been a close second to “sex.”) At any rate, Catherine never had sex with a horse, and one wonders why anyone felt compelled to make up such a story, since her actual death was plenty humiliating. While straining on the toilet, she had a stroke.

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Touch of Evil

Supposedly, a priest attending Napoléon’s autopsy ended up “saving” certain body parts, including the Bonaparte penis. Later bought by a collector and displayed in a New York museum, the organ was said to resemble “a shriveled sea horse.”

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_02:: A Tale of Two Georges

In what seems to be an outlandish coincidence, England’s king George II (1683–1760) also died of a stroke while on the commode. Some sources say that although he was quite happily married to his wife, Queen Caroline, George took mistresses so as to maintain his reputation. After all, a mistressless king could be seen as weak or, worse still, impotent. His son, George III, however, broke that streak of monarchial infidelity when he married the notoriously homely Princess Sophia Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz in 1761. Seeing her for the first time on their wedding day, George is said to have winced in disgust, but the two came to love one another immensely (and frequently�they had 15 kids), and George III was never unfaithful.

_03:: Another Royal Horse

The Roman emperor Caligula (12–41 CE) redefined sexual debauchery during his reign. Aside from fancying himself a god and having an altogether creepy sexual fascination with his sister Drusilla, Caligula supposedly engaged in many orgies (which inspired a famous adult film). Plus, he had a suspiciously intimate relationship with his favorite horse, Incitatus. Some Roman historians claimed that Caligula intended to make his horse consul, but that appears to have been kind of a Roman urban legend. Roman historians despised Caligula so intensely that it’s difficult to sort out the actual facts of his reign. And while Caligula did like his horse (he apparently built Incitatus a house), there’s no reason to believe he “liked him” liked him.

_04:: Jaha¯ngir (1569–1627)

Though there are plenty of excellent candidates for most sexually insatiable king ever, including Hal the Horny (the oft-married Henry VIII of England), our vote has to go to Jaha¯ngir, the fourth Mughal emperor of India. Jaha¯ngir had little to do with the day-to-day running of the empire�that work was accomplished by his favorite wife, Nu¯r Jaha¯n. (The Taj Mahal was built for Jaha¯n’s niece, Mumtaz Mahal.) While Jaha¯n became one of the most powerful women of the 17th century, Jaha¯ngir busied himself with loving. He supposedly had 300 wives (296 more than allowed by the religion, Islam, he supposedly followed), 5,000 female concubines, and 1,000 male concubines. Jaha¯ngir also kept a massive herd of 12,000 elephants, but we won’t speculate.

_05:: And, of Course, Prince Charles! (1948–)

Of all the recent sex rumors about the British royal family, none has been kept quite so quiet as that of Prince Charles’s supposed bisexual affair. For weeks in late 2003, the British press printed banner headlines about a royal sex scandal but, conscious of Britain’s strict libel laws, never came out and openly revealed the accusations. Instead, they engaged in all manner of hints and innuendo. This led to the strange phenomenon of the royal family issuing a statement denying allegations that had never publicly been made. The rumor: Prince Charles had a love affair with his adviser Michael Fawcett. Scandalous, sure, but unlikely�it seems the prince only has eyes for Camilla. After decades of courtship, they finally wed in 2005.