Welcome to:
Babe Bagger
Update I
concerning
romances (etc.) involving an unusual age gap between the two partners
Before reading this page, you are recommended to look at QUIZ
TIME.
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CONTENTS
More famous and passably successful cases of ‘babe bagging’ – guy older than gal – from the past
The items were
basically written in 2002 but subsequently sometimes updated
Before reading
this page, you are recommended to look at QUIZ
TIME.
Ex-‘Beatle’ Sir Paul McCartney, b. 1943 (see QUIZ
TIME), eventually himself bagged a younger babe in ex-stripper
Heather Mills, b. 1969; but his "semi-famous"
(she says) girlfriend, Titian-haired English rose Jane Asher, b. 1946, has now had 32 years of
happiness (including acting, writing, cake-making and three children) thanks to
liaison with a man ten years her senior – the top British cartoonist, Gerald
Scarfe. Jane broke with McCartney on concluding the latter was, by the end of
the Swinging Sixties, an LSD-taking two-timer; and she was relieved to meet
Scarfe in 1970.
Xanthippe, the second wife of Socrates, must also have been more than
twenty years younger than her husband, for there were young children in the
family home when Socrates was seventy.
England's
King Arthur is represented in the film ‘First Knight’ as a 55-year-old
babe-bagger of c. 20-year-old Guinevere. When the young Lancelot
appears on the scene and gradually wins Guinevere's heart, Arthur shows kindly
restraint, forgiving Lancelot though forced to do battle according to his own
code of honour.
In 1221,
at age 14, Saint
Elizabeth of Hungary (as she would become) married her betrothed (since
she was age 4), Ludwig II of Thuringia, 21. Though Elizabeth
was saintly, the couple were idyllically happy: one historian wrote that
"They loved each other with an astonishing passion. " The marriage
only lasted six years because Ludwig was killed by plague while on a Crusade,
but it produced a son and two daughters in that time. Elizabeth was distraught
at her husband’s death, crying out "O Lord my God, the whole world and all that was
joyful in the world is now dead to me! But Thy will be done!" Subsequently
she devoted herself to good works for the poor and the occasional miracle, and
was canonized soon after her death in 1231.
Age 60+,
Arthur Lisle, the Deputy at Calais of England’s King Henry VIII, was some
twenty years older than his wife Honor. He once wrote to Honor: “I do as
much long for you as doth the child for his nurse.” In her turn, she described
herself as “she that doth endure with as little sleep as any woman living, and
so shall continue till your coming.” (From F. Mount, 1982, The Subversive
Family.)
In 1660, the courtesan
Barbara Villiers
(1640-1709) helped England’s King Charles II (1640-1685) enjoy his Restoration
by becoming his top totty. Though actually married to the courtly Roger Palmer,
she went on to bear the king seven children before he succumbed to the fresher
charms of Nell Gwyn (c. 1650-1687). The king paid Barbara off handsomely
(e.g. settling her gambling debts of £30K) and she went on to a string of
affairs with younger men before dying at a splendidly advanced age of dropsy.
Doctor
Samuel Johnson participated enthusiastically in bouncing on his knee and
kissing the "Scottish wench" presented to him on the Isle of
Skye (or possibly Coll) (Tour of the Hebrides).
The BBC gave currency in 2002 to the idea that the great Baroque
composer Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741) had a sixteen-year affair (ending only at
his death) with the mezzo-soprano and actress, Anna Girò (or Giraud),
who was just 15 years old when the pair set up house in 1725. Vivaldi, an
ordained priest in Venice, had come to know Anna, the daughter of a French
wigmaker, while visiting Mantua, and soon took her to become the star at the
Pietà school in Venice where he taught music. The Pietà took in illegitimate
girls and it was famous for its musical productions and its alleged supply of
girls for canoodling with local worthies. The red-haired Vivaldi was fiercely
protective of his scandalous but indispensable prima donna and muse –
and also of Anna's sister Paolina (initially sent along as a chaperone).
Certainly, the three lived and travelled constantly together and Vivaldi
sometimes called Anna from his bedroom to meet visitors to his home. The BBC
subscribed to the theory of an affair (or affairs!) in 'Unmasking
Vivaldi' (directed by the dynamic young British conductor, Charles
Hazlewood). One contemporary
of Vivaldi later recorded: "….[Anna] was elegant, small in stature, with
beautiful eyes and a fascinating mouth. She had a small voice, but many
languages in which to harangue." Another contemporary praised Anna's
voice, hair and charisma. Vivaldi continued the ménage à trois even
after the Inquisition condemned it (on the basis of hearsay evidence) and when
his music declined in popularity. He denied any affair, but virtually no-one in
Venice believed him. After Vivaldi's death (in some poverty, because of his
prodigality), Anna continued with her career as opera singer and harpsichordist
till 1748, when she married a nobleman.
Around 1670, the world’s first experimental scientist, Oxford man
Robert Hooke (1635-1703) took up with his 25-year younger 10-year-old niece.
The liaison was “totally marvellous” according to the (sexually experienced)
Hooke and the pair were finally buried together.
In 1753, the vivacious but illegitimate Anglo-Venetian beauty Giustiniana
Wynne, 16, and noble scion Andrea Memmo, 24, met and fell instantly in
love. Marriage was impossible for the Memmo family because of Giustiniana’s
bastardy and – the last straw -- her mother having previously lost her
virginity to a Greek, but the pair’s affair continued in correspondence (the
envelopes sometimes contained hair and semen), by telescope and with occasional
illicit copulation until 1760 when Giustiniana’s suspicious mother headed her
daughter for London and Paris (where Giustiniana had an involvement with the
11-year-older Casanova).
In 1758, the pretty Louisa Cathcart (older sister to Mary
who was to become, as Mrs Henry Graham, the celebrated sitter for
Gainsborough’s sensational portrait [National Gallery of Scotland]), 18,
married the British Ambassador to France, David Murray, 48.
The great romancer
Giacomo Casanova (1725-1798) had affairs with a number of girls who were 17 when
he met them. In the case of the singer Teresa Imer (also Cornelys,
1723-1797), Casanova was only 15 on meeting her, so the couple’s relationship
blossomed only around 1770 when she had already passed through marriage and on
to high-courtesanship in London and was mismanaging her business affairs
despite Casonova’s largesse (she died in debtors’ prison). Casanova’s
1763 infatuation with the London prostitute, Marie La Charpillon, was
much more intense – but almost drove Casonova to suicide because of Marie’s
failure to commit. However, he had had better luck in 1757, at age 32, with the
radiant Manon Balletti, the 17-year-old daughter of Italian
actors performing in France, and in love with him since she was seven. Manon
wrote Casanova forty-two letters full of love and deep feelings. Hers was the
famous sentence : "My lover, my husband, my friend, whatever you
like". On the terrible evening of 1760 when she told him over dinner she
was leaving him (for what was to prove a sensible and successful marriage to
her cousin, an architect), gourmand Casanova was only capable of sipping a
light consommé.
In eighteenth century England, girls of 11
and 12 were regularly paraded in brothels without provoking the least stirrings
of public outrage (Times, 21 ii 04, Weekend Review). One fashionable
gentleman declared that “no woman past fourteen is worth the trouble of
pursuing.”
In 1763, the beautiful Martha
Ray, 18, was seduced – possibly with the help of spiked champagne -- by
the Earl of Sandwich, 42. She became his mistress and him five children over
the subsequent 16 years till she was shot by an admirer, the Reverend James
Hackman. (Sandwich’s own wife suffered mental illness sufficiently severe for
her to have been made a ward of court.)
In 1794, the 44-year-old James Madison who
was to become President of the USA fell for the charming 27-year-old widow Dolly
Payne Todd. The union was childless but notably happy; and Dolly was
loved and cherished by Americans till her death in 1849
In 1810, the French dictator, Napoleon, 41, divorced the
six-year-older Josephine (with whom he had had many arguments and no surviving
heir) and demanded in marriage Archduchess Marie Louise of Austria, 19.
Despite apprehensions, Marie Louise's first words after pre-nuptial intercourse
were "Do it again"* and the marriage was very happy and produced the
required heir. After the wedding, Marie Louise wrote to her father: "He
loves me very much. I respond to his love sincerely. There is something very
fetching and very eager about him that is impossible to resist." And the Austrian ambassador, Clemens
Fürst Von Metternich, noted of the randy Napoleon "The Emperor is much taken
with his wife; he is so evidently in love with her that all his habits are
subordinated to her wishes."
*Perhaps surprising since one of Napoleon's
mistresses eventually declared the Duke of Wellington much the better lover.
Though possibly the Duke was more capable of acceding to such requests….
Charlotte Bronte's 'Jane Eyre' was much younger than her
lover 'Mr Rochester', who had a previous Caribbean wife who had gone mad.
Eventually the couple married.
1842 saw the American President
John Tyler, 52, widowed. But consolation came within months in the form of
vivacious 22-year-old ‘Rose of Long Island’ Julia
Gardiner (who had just lost her secretary-of-state father in a naval
explosion). The pair soon married secretly so as to circumvent opposition from
Tyler’s four daughters and went on happily amidst a waltz-studded social life
to have seven children. Tyler called Julia “the most lovely of her sex” and she
told him on his 62nd birthday, “Thy ripened charms are all to me –
Wit I prefer to Youth.” Tyler died in 1852 and Julia lived till 1889 despite
having a hard time after the Confederacy lost America’s Civil War.
In 1842, the excitable, vivacious, intelligent and coquettish Mary Ann
Todd, 24, 5’2”, married Abraham Lincoln, 33. She proved a faithful wife
to the President-to-be, bearing him four children before his assassination in
1865. In 1862, President Lincoln said, “My wife is as handsome as when she was
a girl, and I...fell in love with her; and what is more, I have never fallen
out." After the assassination, Mary lived on in ill health (sometimes
diagnosed insane) till 1882 when, at her death, in poverty, her wedding ring
was found to bear the words 'Love is Eternal.'
In 1848,
pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown, 27, buried his first wife and eloped
with Emma Hill, 15 – a working-class London girl
who inspired Brown's social philosophy and bore him one daughter (in 1850,
three years before the pair married). The daughter, Catherine Madox Brown
in due course married Franz Hueffer and fathered writer and poet Ford Madox
Ford. Like father like grandfather? – The mature FMF became for a while the
patron and lover of the 17-year-younger half-Creole writer and Negro-envying
ooops multicultural alcoholic, Jean Rhys
(author of Wild Sargasso Sea [the 'prequel' to Jane Eyre] and
made Commander of the British Empire in 1978).
1862 saw the enchanted English explorer Samuel Baker, 41 (knighted
1866), kidnap a beautiful 14-year-old girl, Florence,
from Transylvania, who – captured by the Turks after the collapse of the
Hungarian Revolution – had been raised a virgin in a harem and then sold to the
highest bidder for her, the Pasha of Viddin. Soon after Florence’s rescue by
the bewhiskered Sam (who himself had a bevy of daughters of around Florence’s
age), the happy couple embarked on a high-risk career of African exploration
and eliminating the Black slave trade on the White Nile, happily married and in
love for life (Sam died in 1893).
In 1863, the 52-year old British poet Robert Browning (author of
‘The Pied Piper of Hamlin’, ‘My Last Duchess’ and ‘Childe Roland to the Dark
Tower Came’ and widowed in 1861 after his wonderful 14-year marriage to the
6-year-older fellow-poet Elizabeth
Barrett) began an intense two-year correspondence (which by its final end in
1870 would leave 73 letters) with the intellectual Julia
Wedgwood, 34 (great-grand-daughter
of potter Josiah Wedgwood and niece of Charles Darwin,
herself mourning
the loss of her brother), until Julia’s family moved in a closed down the
affair. Browning wrote to Julia that no-one would ever be more “precious” to
him, except his dead but still beloved wife.
The painter Paul
Gauguin notoriously enjoyed the charms of barely pubescent chicas
and had many children by the golden girls of Tahiti such as Teha’amana, Pau’ura
and Vairaumati. Gauguin's two Tahitian wives (13 and 14
at marriage) were gladly supplied by their families, for Gauguin paid
handsomely. Regrettably, Gauguin must also have left a legacy of syphilis for
some of the many fourteen-year-olds with whom he had sex at his 'House of
Pleasure' in the Marquesas Islands. (In Paris of 1885, Gauguin, 37, had become
infatuated with the devout but coquettish Madeleine Bernard, 17 – but the provocateuse
had spurned him resulting in his departure for the South Seas and the birth of
modern art. Madeleine went on to engage with a bisexual artist who had himself
been chasing Gauguin, but she died at age 24, before they could marry.)
1889 saw the birth in Braunau, Austria, of Hitler-to-be Adolf
Schickelgruber to his father Alois, 52, a “small town Henry VIII” and Lothario,
and his pretty 23-year-younger third wife Klara
Pölzl (formerly a nursemaid to some of Alois’ other children). From age
seven, Hitler, Klara’s fourth child, was beaten by his father until he finally
stood up to Alois and took 32 strokes of the cane without a whimper. But in
lateer life he loyally said (at least in Mein Kampf) that he had
“honoured” his father and loved his mother. Hitler obtained good results at secondary
school for Gymnastics, Drawing and Moral Conduct – though he received the
lowest possible grades in Maths, Physics and German and eventually became a
draft dodger and fled to Munich.
The Czech composer Leos Janacek (1854-1928) seems to have bagged quite
a few adolescent girls, starting with his wife, Zdenka Schulzova, a former piano student of his
who was 15 when they married in 1881. Sadly, they lost both their son and
daughter in childhood, thus straining their marriage to breaking point by 1903.
Janacek then became infatuated with his idol when a teenager, Kamila
Stosslova, 25, to whom he would write 700 love letters and who – though she
herself had little interest in music -- inspired his music for the last twenty
years of his life (Literary Review, July 2002).
Losing his wife Caroline in 1892 and his presidency of the USA in 1893,
retiring and religious Cincinnati lawyer Benjamin Harrison, 60, took a
professorship in San Francisco and a new wife, Caroline’s niece Mary Dimmock,
c. 30 and herself a widow. The new husband and wife had one daughter, b.
1897, and lived respectively till 1901 and 1948.
Winston Churchill, 34 (and born two months prematurely, seven
months after his mother's hasty and little celebrated wedding), married
Dundee-born closet radical Clementine Hozier, 23, in September, 1908. It
had been a whirlwind romance. Earlier in 1908, Churchill wrote after the
couple's third meeting: "I seize this fleeting hour of leisure to write
and tell you how much I liked our long talk on Sunday and what a comfort and pleasure
it was to me to meet a girl with so much intellectual quality and such strong
reserves of noble sentiment." Winston said later "My
most brilliant achievement was my ability to persuade my wife to marry
me," and recorded simply "we lived happy
ever after." The marriage indeed lasted largely happily (despite both WSC
and Clemmie being descended from highly libertinous mothers, and several
tragedies involving the couple's children) till Sir Winston's death in 1965. In
1994, the couple's one surviving daughter said: "Winston and Clementine’s partnership was not always
equable: both had high mettled natures, but love and loyalty never failed.
Their relationship reminds me of Shakespeare’s lines: "Let me not to the
marriage of true minds admit impediments....""
Sir Winston Churchill
himself came from a lineage involving several age-gapped relationships
(including boy bagging as well as babe bagging).
(1) The primary mistress of King Charles II, aged 30 at the
1660 Restoration, was Barbara Villiers
{see above}, then
age 19. Notoriously voluptuous, passionate, extravagant, fecund and unfaithful,
Barbara took up around age 24 with the eight-year-younger John Churchill
[ancestor of Sir Winston] and bore John a child in the course of an affair
which lasted till 1675. At that
time, John Churchill, by then 25, fell for the radiant and feisty 15-year-old
redhead Sarah Jennings
who was to become his wife in what remained an entirely monogamous union till
John's death (by then Duke of Marlborough, and with two more children) in 1722.
(Picture
shows both women.) BBC History described the marriage as "one of
history's great love stories" (iii 2003, p. 56).
(2) "In 1900, at the age of
forty-six, [the widowed Lady Jennifer Churchill (mother of Winston Churchill, b.
1874, and notorious for her countless affairs)] insisted on marrying George
Cornwallis-West, a Scots Guards subaltern who was twenty years her junior. The
marriage lasted fourteen years [in a rickety way] before ending in
divorce." – Lord Roy JENKINS, 2001, Churchill.
The beautiful top-drawer Chinese radical, Soong Ching-ling,
22, the daughter of Charles James Soong (who gave Ching-ling a university
education in the USA) became the second wife of the successful revolutionary
Sun Yat-sen, 48, in 1914 – though Sun was in exile in Japan at the time. The
pair co-operated with much political success till Sun's death in Peking in
1925. Ching-ling never married again.
In
1917, Lenin’s secretary, the pretty Nadya Aliluieva (aka Nadezhda),
15, fell in love with the dashing and daring Stalin, 38. She went on to become
Stalin’s second wife (his first had died in childbirth), to bear him three
children and finally to stand up bravely to him when friends told her that he
was killing millions of people by his enforced famine in the Ukraine – she
finally committed suicide in 1932 using a small pistol after seeing him flirt
shamelessly in front of her with another woman.
In Dublin on December 7, 1918, civil servant,
Ulsterman and wartime cavalry officer, Hughes Murdoch, 28, married Rene
Richardson, 19, the daughter of a lawyer’s clerk and a trained opera
singer. The couple’s daughter, born in July, 1919, and brought up in London,
was to become the famous Oxford philosopher-novelist, Iris
Murdoch. Iris would describe her family as “a trinity of love.” She herself
became a great romancer of older men -- beginning in 1938 with her first Oxford
tutor, the Jewish refugee and celebrated classicist, Professor Eduard Fraenkel
(aged 50, expelled from his Freiburg chair in 1934), who called her “my shaggy
little pony.”
The cosmically gloomy, handsome and hypochondriacal
novelist Franz Kafka, 41 when he died in 1924 (after a succession of women),
was 15 years older than his last lover, the devoted Dora Diamant – with whom
he had had a year-long affair after meeting her at a holiday camp on the
Baltic. Kafka had never previously lived with a woman; he died in Dora’s arms
of tuberculosis – contracted before he met her -- and left all his royalties to
her. (The redoubtable Dora, who came from a strict Hasidic family in Poland and
shared Kafka’s Zionist aspirations, finally got out of Nazi Germany via
Moscow – where her Communist husband fell victim to Stalin’s purges -- to the
Isle of Man and north London, where she died in 1952. She had one daughter by
her 1931 marriage to Lutz Lask, who remained imprisoned in the Soviet Union
till Stalin’s death in 1953. – Times
Higher, 15 viii 2003; Times Literary Supplement, 25 x 2003.)
From
1924, Jewish intellectual Hannah
Arendt, b. 1906, had a three-year passionate and important affair at
Marburg University with her 17-year-older hyper-academic Ph.D. supervisor,
Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) -- thus giving birth to the blend of anti-Semitism,
socialism, Nazism and ‘idealism’ [the knowable world consists only of ideas]
that eventually became the relativistic and multicultural doctrine of
‘postmodernism.’ (George Steiner says the left-venerated Heidegger kept his
party card till the end, never recanted his Nazi views, lied to the Allies to
minimize his degreee of involvement with the Hitler regime and was generally
“aberrant”, “appalling” and “nauseous.”) (One reason that Heidegger did not
oppose the Nazi conquests of World War II was the long-standing German distrust
of the French. Napoleon I had conquered Germany. As a result, many Germans
considered French culture a threat to the German heritage. Later, many Germans
would with reason view the Soviet Union in the same light – as the USSR sought
and achieved revenge for its massive sufferings from the Wehrmacht. Amusingly,
Heidegger’s Nazism would become the basis of Western ‘postmodernism’ and its
denial of the possibility of scientific and objective truth.)
In
1925, Chinese student Xu Guangping, c. 20, began the
correspondence with her university teacher, the literary genius Lu Xun
(1881-1936), which led on to love, sex, a baby and the publication in 1933 of
their love letters – making them known as China's most literary couple. (In
fact, the heavily edited (indeed re-written) published letters were designed to
quell rumours and draw a veil over the happy couple's transsexual
games.)
During the sale of Picasso's 'Nu au collier' for £16M, in
2002, it emerged that the painting had been inspired by Picasso's secret lover
who had become "his most influential muse" (Times 26 vi 02).
Picasso had met Marie-Therèse Walter in 1927, when he was 46 and she was
just 17. Apparently Picasso had gone up to the adolescent in the street and
announced that the two of them would be seeing a lot of each other. Soon,
Marie-Therèse was pregnant (bearing Picasso a daughter, Maya) and featured in
Picasso's paintings as such – with the apparently jealous wife-figure of Dora
Maar (see QUIZ TIME) looking on. Picasso had many
other young lovers, notably the 40-year-younger Françoise Gilot (see QUIZ
TIME).
Charlie Chaplin, b. 1889, was a dedicated
babe-bagger, beginning his love life with a 15-year-old girl and continuing
by marrying (at 28 and 35) 16-year old wives, the second of which, Lillita
McMurray (described by Chaplin's press agent as possessing "beauty,
talent, charm, innocence, and aristocratic lineage")*, bore him two
children. Chaplin's troubles with the FBI (which was shocked by his Communist
sympathies and hounded him for 'pederasty' and 'white slavery') cost him a U.K.
knighthood till 1975, when he was 86. But All's well that Ends well: in 1942,
the 53-year-old Charlie met dashing and buxom 17-year-old Oona O'Neil
(the estranged daughter of Irish playwright Eugene O’Neill, pictured in a
ballgown in Times (Weekend Review) 22 xi 2003) and promptly fell in
love. The couple married and Oona bore Charlie eight children (the last when
Charlie was 73) and stayed with him in Switzerland until his death in 1977.
Altogether, Charlie was credited with eleven children.
* From EOnline, 24
xi 2003:
Chaplin first met future bride McMurray in 1915 when
he was 26—and she was celebrating her sixth birthday. Six years later, Chaplin
cast the youngster in his 1921 classic The Kid; by 15, McMurray was
carrying the silent screen star's child. Facing a statutory-rape charge, Chaplin
opted for marriage. "I don't intend to be a husband to you," Chaplin
reportedly told McMurray on their honeymoon. "But marrying you is better
than going to the penitentiary!" Two years and two children later, Mrs.
Chaplin filed for divorce, accusing Chaplin of lascivious behavior, including
reading her excerpts from--gasp!--Lady Chatterley's Lover. When her
lawyers threatened to name actresses the Little Tramp had diddled, he coughed
up $625,000--the largest U.S. divorce settlement up to that time. One
interesting side note: The affair purportedly inspired Nabokov's Lolita.
1927 saw penniless
Dada-ist/Surrealist Max Ernst, 37, swoop off with the the beautiful minor (in
France of those days) Marie-Berthe
Aurenche, 22, found in a Parisian art shop. Though hounded through
Europe by M-B’s parents (intent on confining her to a nunnery), the couple
married within the year and M-B became a great favourite with other surrealists
(until Ernst left the movement in 1933 to concentrate on the coming drama of Europe).
M-B was childlike and emotionally dependent – an instantiation of what
fascinated the surrealists, the femme enfant struggling with her erotic
drive.
In 1937,
Max Ernst, 47, left his wife for the talented Leonora Carrington, 20,
who quipped that she was ‘too busy rebelling to have time for art.’ (At 14,
when introduced to a priest, the Catholic-educated had whipped up her dress
exposing her naked pudenda and asked “What do you think of that?”) Sadly, when
war broke out, Ernst was interned in France and this triggered a complete
mental breakdown in Leonora, aggravated by hospitalization and repeated administrations of the
epileptic fit-inducing drug, cardiazol.
Ernst, who escaped to
find Leonora had sold their house for a bottle of brandy, subsequently moved on
to the 7-year-younger millionairess Peggy
Guggenheim, and then in 1942 to the 30-year-old Dorothea
Tanning (who as a painter sometimes explored themes of sexuality in the
world of children*
and as a partner lasted Ernst till his death in 1976); but his surrealism
continued to inspire Leonora (whose own love life also continued to flourish in
her new home in Mexico where she married the Mexican diplomat, poet and friend
of Picasso’s, Renato LeDuc (1898-1986) who had helped her to escape from Nazi-dominated
Europe).
* Tanning made several paintings of girls at an age
of firs sexual explorations, sometimes naked and displaying a hairless vagina,
sometimes semi-undressed showing lack of breast development; some masturbate
each other or give cunnilingus. Sometimes their hair is aroused as if by a
great wind, pulling them out of bed, depicting the turbulence of puberty and
sexual awakening. Sometimes the girls have seen the goings-on in a hotel room –
in one case a pair of lovers in bed is shown and the pre-teen girl is standing
at the door wondering what to make of the proffered service of a stocky,
headless dwarf.
Another surrealist who tried his hand at babe-bagging was the
movement’s leader, André Breton (b. 1896) – but his clairvoyant and chaotic
young Nadja, who called him “Master” and whom he immortalized in his
book Nadja (1928), was not inconsiderably neurotic and soon had to take
up residence in a lunatic asylum. Breton did better by conventional standards
when he met and married the 24-year-old Jacqueline Lamba
as his second wife in 1934 – the marriage produced Mad Love and a
daughter (b. 1935, one of only two children born through the 1930s to
some 25 sex-fired ‘surrealist women’) and lasted till 1943. Breton’s
surrealists were generally fascinated by the sexual and creative energies of
hysterical young girls whom they called femmes enfants they took to
their bosoms (at least metaphorically) Violette Nozières, 15, who had poisoned
her parents (apparently after incest with her father), Gisèle Prassinos, a
14-year-old poet, and the 19-year-old Meret Oppenheim who became the intimate
companion of Max Ernst and Man Ray. Breton wrote that a femme enfant
would ‘complete a man trait for trait’ and that she ‘is brought to life by him
and inspires him’ (W. Chadwick, 1986, Women Artists of the Surrealist
Movement). Breton delighted described the iconically beautiful Frida Kahlo (b.
1907 but playing three years younger) as “young woman endowed with all the
gifts of seduction, one accustomed to the company of men of genius.” (Tiny
Kahlo’s own lifelong love – despite countless lesbian affairs, a fling with
Trotsky and a one-year divorce – was the elephantine Mexican social-realist
muralist, Diego Rivera, b. 1886.) The surrealists stood up for Charlie
Chaplin, who was singularly fond of adolescent girls; Meret Oppenheim, b.
1913, had actually been named by her parents after a child seductress [in
Gottfried Keller’s Little Meret]; and their friend Picasso had several
age-gapped affairs, e.g. with the busty 28-year-younger and dignified painter Dora Maar (more
pictures on the beach in Chadwick, pp. 52, 57). Surrealist girls had a penchant
for stripping off in public – none more so than the stunning Léonor
Fini, b. 1918, the lewdest
of the female surrealist painters, who became the intimate friend of Max Ernst,
Paul Eluard and René Magritte around 1935: she liked to drop her fur coat to
reveal her sensationally full-breasted figure, but in such exercises and at
parties where only the chest-to-thigh area was unclothed she sometimes had the
company of Nusch, Agar, Lee Miller and Carrington (a good friend despite their
both being the playmates of Ernst). One of their exhibitions (sixty years
before Tracy Emin) featured four soiled and unmade beds – with a live actress
cavorting in one of them; and the Czech-born Marie
Toyen, b. 1902, though butch-looking, started her
sex life at 15 with erotic poet Jindrich Styrsky and painted a picture in which a gloved hand
gently milks a penis of its seminal fluid. (She also painted a picture in which
a girl of perhaps 12 years has hung herself upside down, with her knees crooked
round a wall-bar, so that her skirt has fallen over her face, exposing her
white knickers; by her, on the ground, is a riding crop and a hood, as if
perhaps she is waiting to have her pudenda beaten by a man who will remain
anonymous.) In 1937, the 37-year-old
Roland Penrose married the beautiful and non-hysterical
model-turned-photographer Lee Miller,
29, who had been sexually initiated at age seven
(raped by friends of her parents), had several times been expelled from
American private schools, had threatened her parents she would pose nude
publicly in New York for her 35-year-older photographer-lover Arnold Genthe,
and at 22, in Paris, had become the collaborator and lover of mad-about-her Man
Ray, 40. (Penrose’s first wife, surrealist poetess and “benign witch” Valentine
Boué, b. 1903, was once recorded by Penrose as returning to his bed from
an early-morning excursion “a lithe, naked, dew-soaked girl.” After World War
II, Penrose set up with both women in England, and also with a new lover, the
trapeze artist Diane Deriaz, b. 1926 and called “l’amie d’enfance.”
One surrealist of the 1930’s recorded (says Chadwick) ‘it was always orgy time
when Penrose was around.’) Millionairess Kay Sage, 42, married the
balded but actually two-year-younger painter Yves Tanguy in 1940 – the marriage
being so happy that she plunged into depression on her husband’s death and
finally shot herself in the heart. (Sage was also quite a babe for getting
truly bagged, having been sent to Italy by her Connecticut parents because of
an affair with a married man, and having three intense involvements with older
men before she married Tanguy –- with the Italian papal nobleman, Prince
Ranieri of Bourbon Two Sicilies, b. 1883, whom she married at 27
(divorce came ten years later, in 1935); and with her artistic gurus Onorato
Carlandi (b. 1848) and Giorgio de Chirico (b. 1888).) Of the four women closest to the
Surrealists, Gala Eluard/Dali, Nusch, Jacqueline Lambard and Dora Marr, all had
substantially age-gapped romantic relationships (though Dali was younger than Gala). By and large the
gals got pretty thoroughly into the sexual spirit the Surrealists had in mind
and tried to shock while having fun and avoiding having children. – Dali would
finally shock Surrealists themselves by expressing interests in coprophagia and
fascism.
Another remarkable 'babe-bagged' girl was Lady Suzanna
Walton. When she was an innocent 22, in 1948, the English composer William Walton, 46, came
through a crowded sherry party in the Rio de Janeiro, Argentinia (where he had
been lecturing) and said his first-ever words to her: "I am going to marry
you."
Beginning in Paris of 1932, Anais Nin (b.
1903), a married surrealist novelist, became the long-time lover and occasional
benefactor of the American novelist and bohemian, Henry Miller (b.
1891). The pair's friendship is ironically documented by Nin rather than
Miller. Her voluminous diaries list social engagements, the love affair with
Miller and a possibly guilt-driven attachment to Miller's wife, June. Many
critics admired Nin's unique expression of femininity, her lyrical style, and
her psychological insight. Her stories – including the finest erotic
tales ever penned by a woman -- were made famous in the 1992 feature film, Henry
and June (though the film falsely imagined
Nin was bisexual). Nin had an incestuous affair with her estranged
father beginning when she was herself adult. After Miller, she worked with Otto
Rank (b. 1884) as a lay analyst and was his lover; later she boy-bagged
up-and-coming American novelist Gore Vidal (b. 1925). Today, Nin is regarded as
one of the leading women writers of the 20th-century. She has become a source
of inspiration for those who are ready to take risks in their life for the sake
of art and adventure.
Another pretty happily babe-bagged lass was the intellectual Martha
Gellhorn who, in 1935, at age 27 began what she called an "intimate
affair" with novelist and eugenicist H. G. Wells, 69. Wells' claim that
the couple "made love" was sometimes denied by Gellhorn, but the
couple lived in each other's houses for a year and the amitié, as
Gellhorn called it, appears to have been productive for both partners.
1930's Mexico was
witness to the astonishing open marriage of the beautiful and seductive
surrealist painter, Frida
Kahlo (b. 1907 – though she pretended 1910) and muralist Diego Rivera (b. 1886). The pair had married in 1929,
solemnizing a largely happy if turbulent age-gap relationship lasting 27 years
till Frida's death in 1954. Both had been plagued by childhood illness and
accident, but had numerous lovers – Diego beginning his sex life at 9 with an
18-year-old girl. Frida loved to drink tequila and sing off-colour songs to
guests at the many crazy parties she hosted. She loved telling dirty jokes and
shocking everyone around her. Frida amazed people with her beauty and
everywhere she went, people stopped in their tracks to stare in wonder. Frida
was bisexual and made many conquests, including Georgia O'Keeffe and Trotsky.
Frida said: "Being the wife of Diego is the most marvellous thing in the
world...I let him play matrimony with other women. Diego is not anybody's husband
and never will be, but he is a great comrade." In a letter to a close friend,
Frida wrote, "You too know that all my eyes see, all I touch with myself,
from any distance, is Diego." On her death, Diego, who admitted sadistic
tendencies, said, "The most wonderful part of my life was my love for
Frida."
1931 saw the beginning of the great and important love affair
between surrealist poet Paul Eluard, b. 1895, and the pretty and sinuous
travelling acrobat Nusch, b.
Maria Benz in 1906, who would become first his muse and then, in 1935, his
wife. Sadly, Nusch, who herself took up art, had bad health and died in 1946;
but the marriage was a happy one despite Nusch’s ravenous sexual instinct and
her husband’s enthusiasm for her to sleep with all and sundry in the surrealist
set. (Eluard’s relationship with the merely two-year-younger Valentine Hugo had
not worked out.)
In 1933 the parents-to-be of Brigitte
Bardot married, the father, an engineer being fourteen years older than
the mother.
1938 saw the beginning of the 22-year partnership of English
actress Vivien
Leigh and 6-year-older English actor Laurence Oliver, b. 1907
(second marriage for him). For the first twelve years, the liaison was a
much-admired ‘Romeo + Juliet’ affair which plainly helped both of them develop
to their great heights of acting ability. But eventually time, Sir Laurence’s
greater fame in the theatre and Vivien’s many health problems (she finally died
of tuberculosis) led them to divorce in 1960. Olivier promptly married Joan
Plowright, 31, but continued homosexual liaisons with actor Danny Kaye and
comic writer Noel Coward. {Perhaps the 6-year gap was not enough? Or perhaps
Vivien had always been sweeter on Olivier than he on her?}
1939 saw sweet-17-year old Trotskyite actress, model, temptress
and groupie Constance
Webb fall for the amiable, sexy and charismatic 37-year-old Black
fellow-Trot author from Trinidad, C. L. R. James. The couple remained
romantically linked in one way or another (for a few years by marriage, by
which there was one son) till 1953, when James was deported from the U.S.A. and
they divorced. (Constance sometimes worked for the naughty
18-year-older surrealist Dali who once lept on her as she modelled nude and
satisfied himself between her breasts – avoiding penetration, he claimed, ‘so
as to be loyal to Gala’ [his wife].)
In 1940, the British Hollywood star David Niven (30, possessed of
a ‘beer can’ of a member according to biographer Graham Lord, and with a
reputation for priapic swordsmanship) met and married the 8-year younger Primula
Rollo. The marriage was happy (despite Niven’s legendary affairs with
Rita Hayworth and Grace Kelly) and produced two children before Primmie died in
a foolish party game at the house of Tyrone Power. To overcome his apparently
deep grief, Niven soon went on to a second
marriage with the 10-year-younger Swedish model, Hjordis
Tersmeden – a somewhat tempestuous union but producing two children and
surviving till Niven’s death in 1973.
In 1943, the 29-year-old poet Dylan Thomas began what was to be a
four-year-long adulterous affair with draper’s daughter and London firewatcher Pamela
Glendower, 19 (Observer, 17 viii 2003). Pamela was not as irritable
as Thomas’s ravishing but hard-drinking wife Caitlin, loved Thomas’s voice and
didn’t mind his having the DTs in bed – he would die in 1953 after being
incompetently treated with morphine for a drinking bout in the USA.
In 1945, delightful, dashing and independent-minded Peking-born Hong Kong
University graduate Xiangmei Chen, 19, the daughter of a Chinese
Nationalist diplomat, broke from her father and fell for the heroic USAF
general, Claire Lee Chennault, 51, who had been sent to help China in
its struggle with its Japanese invaders.
Marriage for the appropriately named 'fragrant plum flower' [a Chinese symbol of an
iron-willed and unyielding person] followed in 1947 in Taiwan, then two
daughters and a happy life till Claire's death from cancer in 1958. Facing her many difficulties at
that time, Xiangmei Chen always remembered her husband's words: "The only way to get
rid of worries is to increase your knowledge and ability.'' Anna
Chan Chennault went on to a job in Georgetown University, Washington, to move
into politics, and to become a special envoy for the White House on many
occasions (beginning under President John Kennedy), appreciated by mainland
China and Taiwan alike. She has also written 45 books in Mandarin and/or
English, including bestsellers, and served as an aviation vice-president (the
first woman in the US to do so). The Chinese-English bilingual magazine Sinorama
says (2002): "Some people ascribe all of her amazing success to her
marriage with Claire Chennault. But it is likely that contemporary feminists
would not think much of the disdain this shows for the determination and wisdom
exhibited by this courageous woman." Also, she has had a new partner for
the last twenty years, a mainland Chinese businessman. In 2002 she told a journalist
"I am proud
of being the widow of Claire Lee Chennault; I am also proud of creating my own
career."
Also in 1945, famed
conductor Leopold Stokowski, 63, made his third marriage to railway heiress and
fashion designer Gloria
Vanderbilt, 20. The marriage lasted till 1954 and produced two sons.
(In 1937/8, Stokowski had had an affair with screen goddess Greta Garbo, then 32/3.)
An interesting multiply bagged babe from the past was the boyish
but "dazzling", beautiful and much-sought-after Sonia Orwell who at
age 29 linked up, in 1947, with the dying novelist and critic, George Orwell,
44. Sonia provided the model for
Orwell's 'Julia', the saving sex object 'from the Fiction Department' in
Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Sonia was a shapely, deep-breasted and
full-hipped girl. One commentator called her "a blooming Renoir beauty
married to an El Greco saint." Sonia looked after Orwell, married him on
his deathbed in 1950, and, after a long struggle, managed to regain copyright
for Orwell's works (which she had inadvertently signed away) so this could be
passed to Orwell's adoptive son, Richard. The recurring pattern of her life
(after a traumatic childhood, including uncertain parentage) was, according to
her friend and biographer, Hilary Spurling, "the formation of strong and
intimate friendships with men of great charm and natural authority."
Sonia's "transparent
longing", says Spurling, was "to be in the intellectual-aesthetic
swim." After Orwell's death, Sonia had affairs with such intellectuals as
Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, Victor Pasmore and Lucien Freud. (For a nice picture, see
Sunday Telegraph (Review), 19 v 02.)
In 1951, jolly Lady Elizabeth Cavendish, 25 and
lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret (and responsible for introducing the sexy
Princess to Antony Armstrong-Jones), brought love, joy and lifelong happiness
to England's charmingly melancholy poet (Poet Laureate from 1972), John
Betjeman, 45. Betjeman had married a horsy girl, Penelope Chetwode, in 1933 but
the marriage had not exactly worked out: the couple's German maid (with whom
Betjeman often had sex) long thought Betjeman's Christian name was 'Shuttup'
because that was how his wife so often addressed him; and when Penelope got
pregnant she expressed the hope she would deliver a horse. Penelope, who rode a 500cc Norton
motorbike, also irritated Betjeman by converting to Catholicism in 1948.
Betjeman's 33-year devotion to Elizabeth was applauded by his own daughter,
Candida (b. 1943), who called Elizabeth her father's 'beloved second wife.'
1952 saw the 41-year-old U.S. President-to-be Ronald Reagan marry
(as his second wife – his first
had been only three years younger) the 10-year-younger Nancy Davis. A
half century of happiness followed for the couple, including two children. The
ex-President developed Alzheimer’s disease in the late 1990’s and was devotedly
nursed by the ex-First
Lady.
In 1953, John F. Kennedy, 36, married the 12-year-younger Jacqueline
Bouvier – the marriage surviving President Kennedy’s notorious
infidelities till his assassination in 1963.
One of Hollywood's longest-running marriages, 37 years, was that
made in 1954 between the stars Fred MacMurray (b. 1908, 'America's favourite
Dad') and June Haver (an ex-nun and girlfriend of John Wayne), who had
an age gap of 18 years. Like the Waltons, the couple fell in love the moment
they set eyes on each other. They went on to adopt two twin girls.
In 1955, hat maker Brigitte Hesshaimer, 31, struck up a
secret affair with famed blond American aviator Charles Lindbergh, 55, while he
was on a visit to Germany. The affair lasted till Lindbergh’s death in 1974 and
was only revealed (by Brigitte’s three children, as she had asked them) after
the death of Brigitte in 1999. (According to the German magazine Focus (viii
2003), Lindbergh – previously portrayed as a happily married man -- also had
two illegitimate children by Brigitte Hesshaimer’s sister, Marietta, for whom
the aviator had a house built in Switzerland.)
Voluptuous Sophia Loren
(b. 1934) (Clark Gable said "This girl makes you think all the wrong
thoughts") was 15 when she met 37-year-old
film director Carlo Ponti and embarked on what was then a scandalously
age-gapped and under-age relationship. They have been happily married since
1957 – a four-year annulment was only to spare Ponti charges of bigamy. In
2001, Sophia starred in a film made by her son, Eduardo Ponti.
In 1956, actress and beauty Grace Kelly,
27, married Prince Rainier III of Monaco, 33. The couple enjoyed much happiness
and three children though there were also disasters culminating in Grace's
death at the wheel of her car in 1982.
1956 saw French Marxist-existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul
Sartre get involved with his Algerian Jewish student, Arlette Elkaïm,
19, who soon became a mistress* a member of his household. In 1962, Arlette was
adopted by Sartre as his daughter, allowing him to frustrate the wishes of his
official partner, harridan-feminist Simone de Beauvoir, b. 1908, and
leave his estate mainly to Arlette when he died in 1981 (Beauvoir, plagued by
addictions to alcohol and amphetamines and by her battles with Arlette, only
survived till 1986). (According to top Parisian philosophe Bernard
Henri-Levy, Satre all but converted to Judaism by the finish – also employing a
young Jewish male secretary and distancing himself from old friends.)
* Just what this involved for Sartre is a moot
point. Henri-Levy thinks Sartre’s sex life may have been chiefly voyeuristic;
and certainly some girls with whom he kept regular weekly appointments
complained he was not much good in bed.
1957 saw girl-celebratory babe-bagging (of the Judy Abbott, Lolita
I, Lolita
II, Sabrina
and Gigi
types) get a good image as, in the charming film ‘Love in the Afternoon’, the
fresh young glamorous elfin Audrey
Hepburn made a sophisticated but jaded libertine, played by 28-year-older
Gary Cooper, reciprocate her affection –- basically she made him dead jealous
by pretending to a string of affairs which she had actually never had. As the
film ended with Audrey swept up and carried off in fine cowboy style, a
voice-over reassured audiences that the pair were headed for the altar. (In her
real love life, Audrey, b. 1929 did not have so much luck. After a
broken engagement (to pursue her career), she was first well and truly bagged
in 1954 by 11-year-older desperado and actor William Holden; but, madly in
love, was soon dismayed to learn he had had a vasectomy. She went on to two
marriages, five miscarriages two children, and a terminal affair.)
Pablo Cassals, the Spanish composer and conductor, was 80 when he
married for his third and final time, to one of his young cello students, the Puerto
Rican Martita Montañes, 18. His doctor and friends implored him to be
careful on his wedding night, fearing fatal over-exertion by the babe bagger.
Cassals famously waved them away, saying: “If the girl dies, she dies.” (Story
told in Sunday Telegraph, 18 vii 2004.) The couple went on to spend
sixteen happy years together. Martita (becoming the less diminutive Marta) worked
as artistic director for the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. from 1980-1990
and (still handsome at 50+ and re-married to the renowned pianist, Eugene
Istomin, 65+, himself also a former
student under maestro Casals, at whose deathbed he played Bach as requested)
became the president
of the Manhattan School of Music in New York City.
1958 saw the meeting that soon yielded the marriage of Jane
and cheeky, cynical and charismatic Alan Clarke (he to become a Conservative MP
and Government minister under Mrs Thatcher). At the time, Jane was 16 and Alan
was 30. The union produced several children and lasted 41 years till Alan’s
death in 1999 despite many affairs (including one between Alan and a
mother-and-daughter pair).
In 1959, the tiny cheerful and trim French dolly bird, Yvonne
Cloetta, 27, took up discretely with the married (but separated since
1948) English author and multiple babe-bagger Graham Greene, 55. Greene (who
had called himself a “fickle lover”) nicknamed her his HHK, ‘Happy Healthy
Kitten’, and they stayed devoted to each other till his death in Switzerland 32
years later – she herself lived till 2002, delighting in nothing more than
seeing off Greene’s ex-mistresses (“poor woman, she became very fat”),
biographers and kindred rivals.
During his Presidency of the USA (1960-63), the lusty and
notoriously unfaithful John Kennedy, b. 1917, took up
with a 19-year-old
girl who accompanied whenever and wherever he could escape from his wife,
Jacqueline, b. 1929.
In 1966, diminutive hoydenish ethereal hippy Mia Farrow, 21, married her
schoolmate Tina’s father, crooning American icon Frank Sinatra, 51 (also a
bagger of petite [5’ 3”], charismatic,
dark-eyed
and under-age ravishing
beauty,
Natalie
Wood, b. 1939, the
mother-enforced child actress who had her clambering on to directors’ knees
from age 5 and whose wide-ranging
sex life involving dozens of stars began around age 16 with much older men such as Robert Vaughan and John Ireland and who later twice married
8-year-older Hollywood heart-throb Robert J. Wagner). (Sweetly sensational
Natalie
was probably the illicit product of an affair between her manipulative monster
of a mother and a brutal Russian sea captain. But she liked her mother’s
duped husband who believed he was her father, saying, when asked how he died,
“Of my mother.” Forced into constant Hollywood engagements, sex became her
principal act of rebellion, recreation and self-assertion; though she gradually
took to drink and prescription drugs and died mysteriously when falling
drunkenly at night from a boat in which her husband and lover had argued. – Times
Higher, 2 vii 2004.) Sadly, Mia’s marriage to Sinatra lasted only eighteen
months because she wanted to put her career first and to smoke marijuana; and
also perhaps because Sinatra could have any woman he wanted (he even slept with
Marylin Monroe and with Jackie Kennedy and Nancy Regan while they were married
to Presidents of the USA). However, the pair stayed on amicable terms. Mia went
on to intense relationships with father-figures Salvador Dalì and Yul Brynner, to marry conductor André Previn (sixteen years older
than her), then to Woody Allen (ten years older), to adopt nineteen third-world
children, and to lose her daughter Soon-yi to Woody's charms (see QUIZ
TIME) – which she was unable to understand or forgive, so chased
Woody through the courts and media. (The sexy,
vivacious and neurotic Natalie
Wood's many lovers included
Warren Beatty, Raymond Burr, James Dean, Steve McQueen and Elvis Presley. Coming from a hard childhood
– deserted by her father, becoming a cash cow for her ambitious Russian mother
and always prone to depression, Natalie
–- who is often compared to Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor – died when she
mysteriously (perhaps drunkenly, perhaps after scenes of jealousy over her)
fell from a boat off Southern California in 1981. After Natalie’s death, Wagner
went on to marry the 6-year-younger, red-headed and hour-glassed Jill St John. Natalie's
life will be the subject of a three-hour Hollywood epic, starring
Scotland-based Justine
Waddell and the subject of a biography by Gavin Lambert due in 2003). (Frank Sinatra’s last and longest
marriage – from 1976, when he was 61, till his death in 1998
-- was to former
showgirl Barbara
Marx, the widow of Zeppo Marx, 13 years younger than the previously so
promiscuous and mega-rich Sinatra (whose first – tempestuous -- marriage had
been to merely-7-year-younger temptress Ava
Gardner). Barbara’s inheritance from Sinatra was worth at least $10million
and she may have received far more from a confidential trust fund which Sinatra
had set up in 1993.)
Quite the longest of charming London-born child-star
Hayley Mills' love affairs
began in 1966
when Hayley was 20 and producer-director Roy Boulting was 52. When they moved in together, Hayley's
parents, though thespians, were outraged by the age difference, and movie
magazines treated the pairing like a major international scandal. The couple married in 1971, had a son, Crispian, in 1973
and divorced in 1977. (George Dareos, the world-famous psychic, had once
predicted that Hayley Mills would marry a man old enough to be her father.)
In 1968, US Senator Strom Thurmond, 66 and an anti-alcohol
campaigner, took a second wife, Nancy Moore, a 21-year South Carolina beauty
queen. The marriage lasted well (see 1987 picture),
yielding four children and much happiness before the couple separated amicably
in 1991 (so that Nancy could live with what Republicans call her "social
companion", Robert Oldham). Thurmond retired as a Senator when he reached
his 100th birthday in 2002. His first wife, too, had been a South
Carolina beauty queen and substantially younger than him – 23 years younger,
though she died after 13 years of marriage. In his youth, Thurmond had been a
strong segregationist, running for President in 1948 (and winning his home
state of Mississippi) on a ticket opposing "social intermingling of the
races." In 1964 he changed party, from Democrat to Republican. He once
made a filibustering speech lasting 24 hours in the Senate, having an aide hold
a bucket so he could relieve himself though always keeping one foot inside the
debating chamber. His powers of seduction were legendary, reaching to intercourse
in the back seat of a car with a formerly unknown female murderess on her way
to the electric chair. Even in his very old age, the Senator kept a twinkle in
his eye though wheelchair-bound and liked pretty girls to sit in his lap.
In 1968, Russia’s former most successful spy in Britain, George
Blake, 46, had been in Moscow for two years (after being sprung from Wormwood
Scrubs Prison, London) and made a second marriage to Ida, 33, a Russian
girl whom he had met on a boat on the Volga and who would bear him a son,
Mikhail. {Born in Holland, Blake was early recruited into resistance work.
Subsequently he became a British war hero; but he began working for Russia
after harrowing service in the Korean War and possible brainwashing while a
captive in North Korea. In 1961, he was finally sentenced to 42 years
imprisonment (one year for each of the British agents whose torture or
execution he had caused) but escaped with IRA help after five years.}
In 1969, divorced English filmstar and songbird Julie
Andrews, b. 1935, fell for and
married director Blake Edwards, b.
1922. The marriage was extremely happy and, with the addition of two adopted
Vietnamese daughters, continues to this day.
In 1970, top British broadcaster Sir-to-be Jimmy Young, 49, got
together after two failed marriages with Alicia, 17, bringing him "peace,
sanity and understanding" (he later said) and a daughter. The pair married
in 1996 and were still happily together in 2003.
After a ten year courtship, begun when Lord-to-be
Ranulph Fiennes was 19 and his girlfriend Virginia
Pepper 12, the keen explorers got hitched in 1970, beginning a happy
(though sadly childless) and productive (both were awarded the Polar Medal by
the Queen in 1987) 34-year marriage that would only end with Virginia’s death
of cancer at age 56.
In 1971, French President Georges Pompidou, 60, took
the pretty young Micheline Chavelet – a third marriage for
him which apparently lasted happily till his death in 1974.
In 1972, the clever, erotic,
waif-like, lusciously-lipped
and simply
gorgeous German actress, Natassia Kinski,(aka Nastassia, Natassja and Nastassja), 15 (stage
début at 12, sex début at 13 followed by numerous repeat performances as a
minor with older men, school dropout at 16), fell for age-gapped film director Roman Polanski, 42. (Polanski had been married
to beautiful
Sixties sex goddess Sharon
Tate, 13 years his junior, who was brutally murdered in 1969 by the Charles
Manson drug-ravaged 'family' while she was pregnant. In 1977, Polanski fled
America rather than face sentencing for statutory rape of Samantha Geimer, a
13-year-old girl who had lied to him that she was on drugs and had already lost
her virginity.) Polanski did much for his pretty
young lover over the next ten years and Natassia is still amicable and praises
Polanski's care for his daughter by his third wife (herself 33 years younger
than Polanski). In 1981, beauty-lips
Natassia, 5'6", became the dream of male college
undergrads everywhere by posing for a Richard Avedon poster wearing nothing save the large live
python which spiralled around her splendid if small-breasted body. It is the ultimate expression
of her appeal --
the cunning mixture of the untouched and the forbidden. The woman-child
beauty, of mysterious
kissable charm and subtle
sensuality, was the star of Polanski's stunning epic film, Tess. She went on to beguile several of her
leading men, including Gerard Depardieu. After Natassia's affair with Polanski,
she told a journalist "My father did not inspire me or
anything in my career. Polanski was much more influential. He was wonderful to
me. He educated me, taught me many things I should know." Polanski had
told her, "Love stories always end up in tragedies." That is no
reason to avoid love, says beauty-bot
Nastassja. "You must take it to the limits even if it can't end up
well." In the 1980's she had a son and a daughter by an Egyptian film
producer; in the 1990's she made a second marriage to pop-music composer
maestro, three-quarter-Black Quincy Jones (27 years older than her) and had a
daughter by him in 1993. For a while the all-smoking, all-drinking Natassia lost
custody of her kids after she left them 'unattended' while having sex with
Jones. "With
her ageless beauty, touching dignity, sweet sensuality, formidable intellegence
and great sensitivity, she is the kind of rare and precious person that many
men long for, and many women long to be."--Jennifer
Broeker, TV anchorgirl. (In 2003, Holocaust survivor Roman Polanski,
a French citizen so as to escape US 'justice', was much honoured for his
harrowing film 'The Pianist' in Britain's Woofta ooops Bafta awards. These
awards, together with seven French Cesar awards and seven Oscar nominations
were deemed to indicate Polanski's rehabilitation by luvvies. His 'rape'
victim, Samantha Geimer, kindly stepped forward to tell the Los Angeles
Times that she had no
hard feelings and that his films should be judged on their merits. By 2003,
at age 69, he had been married for sixteen years to the 35-year-younger
Emmanuelle Seigneur – with two children resulting. In 2003, the diminutive
Polanski announced he would sue Vanity Fair for claiming he had
propositioned a girl while on the way to Sharon Tate’s funera. Apparently he
would have Catherine de Neuve and Mia Farrow as witnesses.)
In 1973, beautiful,
gutsy and witty British Nivea skincream model Victoria Holdsworth, b.
1951, became involved with then-tragic ex-hippy billionaire John Paul Getty II,
b. 1932. (For nice pictures of the still-youthful-looking Victoria, now Lady
Getty, see Observer or Sunday Telegraph, 20 iv.) Getty had
had a hard life (with a cold and mean father – JPII’s fortune came from his
mother and grandmother- and
repeated drug addiction and even a suicide bid) but Victoria nursed him through
to become Britain’s top philanthropist, became his mistress and inspiration,
married him in 1994 (third marriage for both of them), and inherited much of
his £1.6 billion personal fortune when he died in 2003. Sir John Paul Getty II
was wont to say Victoria had been everything to him, -- everything. In
turn, he gave generously to Britain, notably giving £50 million to London’s
National Gallery and £1 million to donate just a single work, Canova’s ‘Three
Graces’ jointly to the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Scottish National
Gallery.