The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People by Sylvia Wallace, Irving Wallace, Amy Wallace, David Wallechinsky Read Free Book Online

some say, from a last-ditch attempt by Clunet to save her by claiming to be the father of her unborn child.
    She was shot at the polygon of Vincennes, at her own request without a blindfold. It is not true that she pulled open her coat to reveal her naked body, so astounding the firing squad that not one man could squeeze a trigger. Nor did a playboy aviator boyfriend strafe the field. Nor did another lover—
    inspired by the plot of the opera Tosca —bribe the firing squad to use blanks, put her in a ventilated coffin, and bury her in a shallow grave so that he could spirit her away. The truth? No one claimed her body, so it was contributed to a medical school for dissection. Was she guilty? That’s still a question.
    LOVE AND SEX LIFE: Though she accepted money for sex, she was so infatuated by “the uniform” that she often slept with soldiers for nothing. She may have hated most men, in spite of the fact that she exploited their sexual urges in order to support herself.
    Judging by her letters signed “your loving little wife,” she was intimate with MacLeod before their marriage. Her long string of later lovers included innumerable military men of several nationalities; the crown prince of Germany; the head of a dirigible company; the president of the Dutch council; and two boys, 17 and 18 respectively, when she was close to 40. Her price, when sex was a business deal, was $7,500 a night, or so she claimed. Upon occasion Mata Hari turned a candidate down—an American munitions salesman with bad table manners, for example.
    Her first important lover was Lt. Alfred Kiepert, a rich, married landowner in the German Hussars, who set her up in an apartment in 1906.
    About a year later they parted, and she returned to Paris with the story she had been on a hunting trip in Egypt and India. In 1914 they were back
    together again. A newspaper snidely reported: “When Mata Hari, the beautiful dancer, said good-bye to the rich estate owner Kiepert, who lives just outside Berlin, she took along a few hundred thousand as a farewell present.
    Whether the shine of the money has worn off or whether it is love that brought her back to her former friend, during the last few days they could be seen, apparently happy and closely intimate, in a private dining room of a fashionable restaurant in town.”
    In 1910 she lived in the French region of Touraine as the mistress of Xavier Rousseau, a stockbroker. He spent weekends with her at their hideaway, the Château de la Dorée, where once she rode a horse up and down the outer staircase. After they split up, he became a champagne salesman. His wife claimed that Mata Hari had ruined him.
    After Rousseau came Édouard Willen van der Capellen—rich, married, and a colonel in the Dutch Hussars. But her passion reached full flower with her Russian captain, Vadime de Massloff, whom she visited in 1916 in Vittel, a French resort in the military zone. He was recuperating from a wound; she may have been spying. When she was arrested, several photographs of De Massloff were found in her hotel room. Written on the back of one was: “Vittel, 1916. In memory of some of the most beautiful days of my life, spent with my Vadime, whom I love above everything.” When jailed, she wrote a pathetic letter to an interrogator begging for news of De Massloff. Yet De Massloff claimed their relationship had been a minor affair.
    HER THOUGHTS: “I never could dance well. People came to see me because I was the first who dared to show myself naked to the public.” To an interrogator, while she was jailed: “I love officers. I have loved them all my life.
    I prefer to be the mistress of a poor officer than a rich banker. It is my greatest pleasure to sleep with them without having to think of money. And moreover I like to make comparisons between the various nationalities…. I have said yes to them with all my heart. They left thoroughly satisfied, without ever having mentioned the war, and neither did I ask