damaging. As in everything else he did, Kinsey’s attention to his subject was all-consuming. He regularly worked sixteen hours a day, which prompted his wife to remark dryly: “I hardly ever see Alfred at night anymore, now that he’s taken up sex.”
Kinsey’s crusade to rid the world of sexual ignorance started in his own bedroom. His marriage to Clara McMillen—always known as “Mac”—in 1921 wasn’t consummated for several months. This may have had something to do with his unusually large penis and her short stature, but they hardly gave themselves the best start. For their honeymoon they went on a grueling climbing expedition, and their first attempts at sex were on a mountainside in the middle of a storm. The gradual release of personal documents by the Kinsey Institute means we now know that the Kinseys’ marriage and sex life were liberated in a way that H. G. Wells could only dream of. They loved nudism and took their clothes off whenever they decently could. They operated a system of interacting open marriages with colleagues at the Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction, which Kinsey had founded in 1947. He had casual affairs with many of his colleagues, male and female. Many of his staff had affairs with Clara. During a research trip to Chicago, he was delighted to find an outlet for his homosexual urges, and frequently went cottaging among the gay community there. Kinsey was particularly keen to get the man-on-man taboo out in the open, and when one of his assistants confessed that he had no experience of homosexuality, Kinsey said he could personally help him “tick that box.”
He also experimented with masochism, inserting objects into his urethra while masturbating, enjoying the pleasure and the pain equally. As this organ became less sensitive over the years, he started putting larger and larger things up it. By 1949 he was able to insert pencils into his penis and even a toothbrush, bristles first. He also tried self-piercing, which culminated with his successfully circumcising himself with a penknife in the bath. Kinsey was proud to call himself “unshockable.” As he was keen to drill into his researchers, the key thing was gathering data: “We are the recorders and reporters of facts—not the judges of the behaviors we describe.” The results were often controversial; he reported that almost half of American men had had a homosexual experience, that almost half of married men had committed adultery, and that a quarter of married women found their sex life unsatisfactory.
To Kinsey anything was “biologically normal” provided it was performed by a sizable number of people—or animals. He would have found the experiences of Casanova or Cora Pearl interesting but unremarkable. He once said that “the only unnatural sex act is one which you cannot perform.” This was mind-blowing stuff for the 1950s and ushered in attitudinal changes from which our society is still reeling. The modern view of sex—where masturbation isn’t evil or harmful, homosexuality is widespread, and enjoying sex doesn’t mean you are depraved —owes a huge amount to Kinsey’s work. By documenting behavior that many people at the time thought was “abnormal” and showing how widespread it actually was, he helped create a culture where sex could be seen as just another aspect of ordinary life.
Some people didn’t wait for Alfred Kinsey to come along to know they needn’t be ashamed of their sexual desires, among them the actress Tallulah Bankhead (1902–68), who bragged that she had more than five hundred lovers. When the Kinsey report was published, she’d seen it all before: “The good doctor’s clinical notes were old hat to me,” she remarked.
As a girl Tallulah was short and plump, weighing almost 150 pounds and just 5 feet 2 inches tall, but by the age of fifteen she had shed enough puppy fat to win a beauty contest in her hometown, Montgomery, Alabama. This encouraged her to head for New York to try her luck as an actress. She went on to appear in more than fifty plays and eighteen films, with her final appearance as a character called the Black Widow in a 1967 episode of
Her early career on Broadway was a series of false starts, but in 1923 she came to London to appear in a play called
Ordinary stars get “hands.” If Tallulah gets a “hand” it is not heard. What is heard is a terrific, wild, passionate, hysterical roar and shriek. Only the phrase of the Psalmist can describe it: “God is gone up with a shout.”
Winston Churchill was a regular at her shows and before long “to Tallulah” had become a verb. She told an American reporter: “Over here they like me to ‘Tallulah.’ You know—dance and sing and romp and fluff my hair and play reckless parts.” After a triumphant and extravagant eight years, she returned to the United States to be signed up by Paramount, which planned to make her “the new Dietrich.” They didn’t—they made a string of turkeys. There was something about the nature of film that failed to capture what made her so sexy and delicious in the flesh. She continued to make the occasional movie, but through the 1930s and 1940s, her best work was on Broadway.
Tallulah was bisexual but liked to joke that she couldn’t be a lesbian because “they have no sense of humor,” and she once let slip that she could never have an orgasm with anyone she was in love with. The only man she truly loved was an English aristocrat called Napier Sturt Alington, known as “Naps,” who was also bisexual. He married someone else, became a captain in the Royal Air Force, and died in Cairo on active service in 1940. Tallulah married only once, in 1937, to the bit-part actor John Emery. She told friends that she had chosen him because he was “hung like John Barrymore,” but later confided that “the weapon may be of admirable proportions but the shot is weak.” They never had children and were divorced after four years. When she was thirty, Tallulah had to have a hysterectomy brought on by a bad case of gonorrhea, an infection she blamed on going to bed with Gary Cooper. Leaving hospital in a very weakened condition, and having lost a lot of weight, she barked at her doctor, “Don’t for one minute think this has taught me a lesson!”
She was the mistress of the one-liner. When a former lover came up to her excitedly babbling that he hadn’t seen her for many years, she shot back: “I thought I told you to wait in the car.” Arranging an assignation, she scribbled a note: “I’ll come and make love to you at five o’clock. If I’m late start without me.” She talked nonstop: One of her friends followed her around for a day, timing her with a stopwatch, and estimated that she spoke seventy thousand words, the length of a short novel. As the Hollywood publicist Howard Ditz wearily remarked, “A day away from Tallulah is like a month in the country.” Sometimes her mouth got her into serious trouble. Speaking to a fan magazine in 1932, Tallulah confessed that she hadn’t had an affair for six months, adding, “Six months is a long, long while, I WANT A MAN!” This drew a sharp reprimand from Will Hays, Hollywood’s censor and moral guardian, for allowing a star to indulge in “verbal moral turpitude.”
Tallulah took her clothes off in public so often that her friend Estelle Winwood asked, “Why do you do that, Tallulah? You have such pretty frocks.” She was notorious for not wearing underwear, and delighted in showing off the fact to as many people as possible. When the film crew complained of her regular exposures on the set of
Interviewing Tallulah was never easy. When
Success, as opposed to notoriety, returned to her life from two unexpected quarters. In 1950 she became the host of a weekly celebrity talk radio slot called
