Sex Lives of the Great Dictators Read online

  Sex Lives of the Great Dictators

  Nigel Cawthorne

  Prion’s internationally bestselling Sex Lives series presents lighthearted accounts of the sexual escapades of major figures in history, politics, religion, the arts, and film. Irreverent and gossipy, the books are packed with carnal tidbits and eye-opening revelations. Power corrupts—absolute power is even more fun. Sex Lives of the Dictators is a look at the bedroom antics of the most powerful, and some of the most evil, men in history. Napoleon said “Not tonight, Josephine,” but only because he was busy entertaining other women. Lenin returned to Russia in the closed train in 1917 with his wife and two mistresses, and Benito serenaded his conquests with a violin. And Hitler? Well, as you would expect, he was just plain weird. Five of his lovers committed suicide because of his questionable practices.

  Nigel Cawthorne

  SEX LIVES OF THE GREAT DICTATORS

  An irreverent expose of despots, tyrants and other monsters

  Introduction

  Seventies shuttle-diplomat Henry Kissinger explaining his success with women, once said “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.”

  In a letter to a bishop, liberal historian Lord Acton penned the aphorism: “Poker tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

  Between the two, there is a great deal of scope for your average dictator to indulge himself. Some, of course, don’t bother. General Pinochet of Chile has a man of the highest repute — apart, of course, from the obvious human shortcomings. You may say that he headed a ruthless regime that raised the murder, torture and false imprisonment of political opponents to an artform, but, a married man, he never even looked at another woman.

  And Egypt’s rogue president Gamal Abel Nasser? Wonderful family man.

  Look at Generalissimo Franco, dictator of Spain from 1939 to his death in 1975. As a Ruth he took a normal interest in girls, favouring slim brunettes mainly from among his sister’s schoolfriends. He wrote them poems and was mortified when they were shown to his sister.

  After he joined the army and was posted to Morocco, he assiduously courted Sofia Subirán, the beautiful daughter of the High Commissioner, General Luis Aizpuru. For nearly a year, ho bombarded her with love letters. But his inability to dance and his elaborate formality put her off.

  During the Moroccan war, he was injured by a bullet in the lower abdomen. Some people have speculated that this was the reason he showed little interest in sex.

  Posted home to Oviedo, he met a slender, dark-eyed local girl called Maria del Carmen Polo y Martinez Valdes. She was fifteen; he was twenty-four. Despite the opposition of her family, he began writing to her at her convent. When she came of age in 1923, they married.

  For Carmen, it was a dream come true. Five years later she said: “I thought I was dreaming or reading a novel about me.”

  It was a stable, if not passionate, marriage. They had one child, a daughter, Nenuca, horn in 1926. There have been persistent rumours shat Nenuca was not their child, but. the daughter of Franco’s notoriously promiscuous brother, Ramon. Anyway, Franco did not have the usual latin desire for a son, so when he died there was, thankfully, no one to step into his shoes.

  In 1936, he was mocked as “Miss Canary Islands” — but this was because of his hesitation in backing the military coup against the government, rather than a reflection of his sexual proclivities.

  Franco and his wife gradually grew apart. After El Caudillo — the leader — came to power, he seemed morose and inhibited in the company of Doña Carmen. Neither of them seems to have taken any other lovers. He preferred playing cards and fishing They were still married what Franco died fifty-two years later. The life of a dictator can be positively boring.

  And who wants to know what a monster like Pol Pot totalitarian leader of Cambodia who caused the deaths of three million of his own people — got up to in bed?

  Well, actually, not a lot. Pol Pot’s first wife was a teacher eight years older than himself. Her Students called her “the old virgin” behind her back. They met when they were both studying in France. The marriage took friends by surprise. Few Cambodian men marry older women. She was a revolutionary and encouraged him is his murderous scheme to turn Cambodia back to “Year Zero”. After he was forced from power by the Vietnamese, she had a nervous breakdown. With her permission, he took a second wife — this time, true to his ideological commitments, he chose not an intellectual but a peasant. In 1988, she gave birth to his first child. Pol Pot, you will be delighted to hear, is a very affectionate father and was often seen carrying his baby daughter in his arms to cadre training sessions — which only goes to prove, never trust a politician who espouses family values.

  However, the boring ones are the exception. Think about it. You are a dictator. You rule over millions of people. What you say goes. The temptation to use your unlimited power must be overwhelming.

  Look at President Sukarno of Indonesia, the authoritarian president who believed in “guided democracy”. Like many anti-colonial leaders of his era, he spent much of his youth in jail where, presumably, he was sexually deprived. But once in power, he loosened up. Well into his sixties, he was an extraordinary womanizer, making up for lost time. American magazines called him a “skirtchaser” and a “lecher”. French newspapers referred to him as “le grand seducteur” and British reporters claimed that, over and above his eight legitimate children, he had sired a hundred more.

  During his childhood, Sukarno had found security in the beet of Sarinah, the family servant, and spent the rest of his life trying to regain it in the beds of others.

  Much of him early political education came from courting Dutch girls. In his twenties he married his first wife, Inggit. She was eleven years his senior and had to divorce her first husband to many Sukarno. She supported him and gave him confidence during his years of struggle. But after seventeen years of marriage, he decided that she was barren and married a young model named Fatmawati.

  After the revolution, he married Hartini. Once he had consolidated power, his interest in sex became more excessive. He married twice more — Dewi, a highly talented Japanese bar-girl he had met in Tokyo in 1959, and Yurike Sanger, whom he could not formally marry because he had already fulfilled his four-wife Islamic quota.

  His sexual athlethicism won him admiration as well as notoriety. In his fifties, he was a playboy. In his sixties he was a philanderer of the worst kind. However, this brought with it the censure of more conservative elements and helped hasten his downfall. When he finally fell from power, his wives deserted him too.

  Even essentially boring dictators such as the Ceausescus come to life under the sexual microscope. Elena Ceausescu worked in a bar-cum-brothel when she first arrived in Bucharest from the countryside as a teenager. Nicholae Ceausescu’s brother, Nicholae-Andruta, testified that one day in 1943 he had found his wife and Elena naked with two German officers. Nicholae was in prison at the time.

  Elena does seem to have been hotter all round than Nicholae, who never had a girlfriend before he was married. Once they were in power, palace spies say she always initiated sex.

  Nicholae was not above instructing his spies to use sexual entrapment; Nicholae and Elena watched blue movies together — special ones made by the Romanian intelligence service showing Western diplomats in compromising positions. Nicholae was embarrassed, though. He preferred watching Kojak.

  Elena was also obsessed with the sexual peccadilloes of the Politburo wives. She had the Romanian intelligence service bug them so she could listen to the sounds they made when they made love.

  Their son Nicu was a sexual monster. Nicholae Ceausescu praised him for attaining his manhood at fourteen by raping
a classmate. Nicu casually raped his way around Bucharest and no one did anything about it.

  The collapse of Communism put paid to the Ceausescus and the dictators of Eastern Europe. Even in South America, democracy is on the march. In the Middle East though, secular dictators like the Shah of Iran have fallen, only to be replaced by theocratic dictators like the Ayatollah Khomeini. Sadly, they lie beyond the scope of this book; and I can guarantee you now that there will be no Sex Lives of the Mullahs in this series. I don’t like the company of Special Branch that much.

  1. NOT TONIGHT, JOSEPHINE

  Sexual love is “harmful to society and to the individual happiness of men”, wrote the young Napoleon — but then he was kind of mixed up. His first sexual fumblings may not even have been heterosexual ones.

  At military school in Brienne, the fourteen-year-old Napoleon was well known for his inability to make friends. He did, however, become very close to one boy named Pierre Francois Laugier de Bellecour, a pretty aristocrat from Nancy. It was rumoured that Pierre Francois was, in Brienne slang, a “nymph” and Napoleon got rather jealous when Pierre Francois widened his circle. He demanded that Pierre Francois assure him that he was still his best friend.

  The two of them went together to the Ecole Militaire in Paris. As Pierre Francois was quickly sucked into overtly homosexual circles, Napoleon renounced his friendship and told Pierre Francois never to speak to him again. Napoleon wrote to the Minister of War suggesting that the “rigours of Spartan youth” be introduced into military academies, but he was advised to drop the matter.

  During his first posting, to Valence in 1785, the sixteen-year-old Second Lieutenant Bonaparte grew close to a Madame du Colombier. A long way from home, the middle-aged Madame du Colombier provided a comforting mother-figure for him. She also had a pretty daughter named Caroline and, during the summer of 1786, romance blossomed.

  Napoleon recalled the affair from exile in St Helena thirty years later: “no one could have been more innocent than we were. We often used to arrange little assignations and I recollect one in particular, which took place at daybreak one morning in the middle of summer. You may not believe it, but our sole delight on that occasion consisted of eating cherries together.”

  Twenty years after that summer of young love, he wrote to Caroline and they met in Lyons. She could scarcely believe that her lanky boy soldier was now Emperor.

  “She watched his every movement with an attention that seemed to emanate from her very soul,” a courtier recorded.

  But in his eyes, his pretty young love had turned into a fat and boring housewife. He regretted arranging the meeting. Nevertheless, he gave her husband a government post, made her brother a lieutenant and appointed her lady-in-waiting to his mother, or Madame Mere, as she was officially known.

  Napoleon did not lose his virginity until he was eighteen, with a prostitute he picked up in the Palais Royal in Paris. It was a deliberate act — “une experience philosophique” as he wrote in his notebook. The Palais Royal was a well-known centre for prostitution throughout the Revolution. The more expensive prostitutes took rooms on the mezzanine. From the half-moon windows, they would lean out and shout to passersby, or strike suggestive poses. Better-known harlots sent out runners who would hand out leaflets describing their specialities and their prices to the crowd below, while the cheap whores would work the garden outside.

  The young Napoleon had just collected his back pay. As he walked in the Palais Royal gardens he noted that he was “agitated by the vigorous sentiments which characterize it, and it made me forget the cold”. He recorded that he was stopped by a frail young girl to whom he explained the nature of his philosophical quest. Apparently she was used to earnest young men undertaking such arduous research assignments. He asked her how she lost her virginity and why she had turned to prostitution. She told him the usual story — she had been seduced by an officer, kicked out of the house by an angry mother, taken to Paris by a second officer and abandoned there to fend for herself. She then suggested that they go back to his hotel.

  “What shall we do there?” he asked naively.

  “Come on,” she said. “We’ll get warm and you’ll have your fill of pleasure.”

  Napoleon found the experience disappointing and he remained shy around women.

  It is widely rumoured that Napoleon had a tiny penis. The evidence comes from the autopsy report performed by the British and was probably largely propaganda. His pubis was described as feminine in appearance, resembling “the Mons Veneris in women”; his body completely hairless; his skin soft and white; and his breasts plump and round such that “many amongst the fair sex would be proud of it.” The penis was removed and preserved at the time and came to auction at Christie’s in 1969. His member, referred to genteelly by the auctioneers at Christie’s as “Napoleon’s tendon”, was small and unsightly. But who would be at their best after 150 years in brine?

  At twenty-five, he fell in love for the first time. The object of his affections was Desiree Clary, a renowned beauty. He called her Eugenie, finding Desiree too vulgar. She was dark-haired and slender, and had the characteristics that Napoleon most craved in a woman small hands and feet, and a large dowry. His brother had married Eugenie’s older sister and Napoleon hoped this would smooth the way. But when the question of marriage was broached, Eugenie’s wealthy parents said that one penniless Bonaparte in the family was quite enough.

  Napoleon did not give up. He continued the affair, largely through correspondence. She was in Marseilles with her parents, while he was making his way in Paris. His letters were passionate. He even wrote her a flowery love story called Clisson et Eugenie to indicate the depth of his feelings for her. It is the tale of a brilliant young warrior, Clisson, who dies gloriously in battle after learning that his wife, the gentle Eugenie, has fallen in love with his best friend.

  “Sometimes on the banks silvered by the star of love, Clisson would give himself up to the desires and throbbings of his heart,” Napoleon wrote. “He could not tear himself away from the sweet and melancholy spectacle of the night, lit by moonlight. He would remain there until she disappeared, till darkness effaced his reverie. He would spend entire hours meditating in the depths of a wood, and in the evening he would remain until midnight, lost in reveries by the light of the silver star of love.”

  Who says tyrants have no heart. Even from the distance of his exile in St Helena, he recalled Eugenie as his “first love”. However, he suddenly withdrew his offer of marriage. The brush-off was delicately delivered. Napoleon wrote that one day, he knew, her feelings towards him would change. That being the case, he could not hold her to her vow of eternal love. The very day she no longer loved him, she must tell him. And if she fell in love with someone else, she must give way to her emotions. He would understand.

  Eugenie was heartbroken.

  “All that is left to me now is to wish for death,” she wrote.

  But after a while her heart mended and she married another up-and-coming soldier, Jean Baptiste Bernadotte. He went on to become a Marshal of France and, in 1810, ascended to the Swedish throne. Eugenie became the Queen of Sweden and her descendants sit on the Swedish throne to this day.

  Eager to marry, Napoleon shifted his attention to more mature women. He proposed at least five times one of the women, Mademoiselle de Montansier, was sixty — but, shabby and badly dressed, the young Napoleon was not a very savoury prospect. He wore his battered round hat crammed down over his ears while his lank, ill-powdered hair hung down over the collar of his greatcoat. His boots were cheap, shoddy and unpolished, and he never wore gloves, condemning them as a “useless luxury”. In truth, he could not afford any. What’s worse, he was a bore, making frequent outbursts against the iniquities of the rich.

  Madame Permon was one of the few women who allowed Napoleon to attend her salon, and this was largely because she was a fellow Corsican. There he would dance with Madame Permon’s daughter, Laure.

  “At that time,” L
aure wrote, “Bonaparte had a heart capable of devotion.”

  Napoleon’s fortunes improved out of all recognition when he led a detachment that shot down a column of royalists who were marching on the National Assembly. Overnight, Napoleon became the “saviour of the Republic”. He was made a full general with command of the Army of the Interior. He had a brand new uniform and moved out of his shabby hotel and into a house on the Rue des Capucines. He even had his own carriage.

  When Monsieur Permon died, Napoleon visited the house regularly to comfort the widow. On one occasion, finding himself alone with her, he suggested that they united their two families. Her son Albert, Napoleon suggested, should marry his pretty young sister Pauline. But Albert might have plans of his own, Madame Permon said.

  Then her daughter Laure should marry his brother Jerome, Napoleon suggested. They were too young, said Madame Permon. In that case, the two of them should marry, Napoleon proposed. They would, of course, have to wait until a decent period of mourning had been observed.

  Madame Permon took this proposal as a joke. She was forty and much too old for him. But it was no joke and after he was refused, Napoleon never visited the house again.

  Soon after that he met Josephine Tascher Beauharnais. A thirty-two-year-old former vicomtesse from Martinique, she had been imprisoned and her husband guillotined during the Terror. When she was released, like the rest of Paris, she was determined to have some fun.

  The city was in the grip of a dance craze. Over six hundred dance halls opened. Determined to put the excesses of the Revolution behind them, women wore their hair a la guillotine, cropped or pinned up, leaving the neck exposed. To enhance the macabre effect, the fashion was to wear a thin, blood-red ribbon around their necks. There was even a Bal a la Victime, a dance to which only the relatives of those who had been guillotined were invited.