5 People Who Died During Sex: And 100 Other Terribly Tasteless Lists Paperback (9 page)

“ought to be in the Smithsonian under glass.” “Last night I was so drunk,” she told her friends, “I fell down and missed the floor.” Her husband was similarly alcoholic and they were childless; a friend noted that she wouldn’t “have anything in common with children because they don’t drink.” After four failed suicide attempts, she died at seventy-four when her liver gave way.

5

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD Said to write better drunk than most novelists could sober, he and wife Zelda lived a riotous lifestyle through the jazz age, their partying supplemented by the phenomenal success of
The Great
Gatsby
. Unlike his more accomplished drinking companion, Ernest Hemingway, Fitzgerald was an abusive drunk with a habit of embarrassing himself in expensive restaurants by throwing ashtrays before passing out. Fitzgerald wrote presciently in the first draft of an autobiography: “Drunk at twenty, wrecked at
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[Ten Creative Drunks]

thirty, dead at forty.” He wasn’t far from the mark: He went into terminal decline—ill, drunk, and unable to recreate his early commercial success—and died of a heart attack in 1940, aged forty-four.

6

EDGAR ALLAN POE The self-destructive poet and short-story writer was an impulsive binge drinker and probably a laudanum addict, although it didn’t stop him from joining the local temperance society and giving lectures on the evils of drink. Poe attended West Point Military Academy but was expelled for “gross neglect of duty” after appearing on parade naked except for a white belt and gloves. No writer of Poe’s talent ever died lonelier or more pathetically. In 1849, he left home to visit friends in New York but never made it: After a mysterious five-day absence, he was found dying in a Baltimore gutter suffering from delirium tremens.

7

JACKSON POLLOCK The original “piss artist.”

Pollock was almost permanently inebriated from the age of fifteen, which explained the frequent fights he got into and his habit of relieving himself in public—

although his incontinence occasionally came in handy, especially the time he set fire to his mattress and saved his life by urinating on it. It was rumored that Pollock would urinate on a canvas before delivering it to a dealer or client he didn’t like, which gives his habit of naming his paintings “number one” and “number two” new meaning. Pollock went on the wagon for three years from 1948 to 1951, during which time he created his best-known Abstract Expressionist works, but sudden stardom
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[Ten Creative Drunks]

caused him to lapse, and he hit the bottle again. In 1956, his wife Lee Krasner left him, and a month later Pollock was killed after driving his car into a tree, killing one other passenger.

8

DYLAN THOMAS Reveling in his romantic image of the drunken poet, Thomas was often prone to exaggerating his own considerable drinking prowess. He liked to boast that he suffered from cirrhosis of the liver—a claim his autopsy eventually disproved. When he was drunk, Thomas was either a fantastic wit or a disgraceful bore, depending on your point of view. One evening he suddenly stopped in mid-flow and observed:

“Somebody’s boring me. I think it’s me.” On his final trip to New York, he began drinking very heavily and was unable to stop throwing up during a rehearsal of
Under
Milk Wood
. He died at the age of thirty-nine while taking advantage of the long drinking hours in New York before starting a lecture tour. On November 9, 1953, he staggered out of a bar and fell into a fatal coma: His last words were “Seventeen whiskies—a record, I think.”

9

BRENDAN BEHAN The greatest Irish playwright of his era described himself as “a drinker with a writing problem.” Raised on whiskey by his maternal grandmother because it was “good for the worms,”

Behan achieved public notoriety with a series of drunken public appearances, including a memorable live TV

interview during which he didn’t manage to speak a single comprehensible word. Behan was once hired to write an advertising slogan for Guinness and was given
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[Ten Creative Drunks]

half a dozen kegs of their product for inspiration. After a month the company asked the legendary writer what he had come up with. Behan replied: “Guinness makes you drunk.” He collapsed in a Dublin bar in March 1964 and died a few days later, aged forty-one.

10

GEORGE JONES Jones is said to have the best voice in the history of recorded country music. The tribulations of his booze-fueled third marriage to fellow country legend Tammy Wynette was detailed in various duets, from “We Can Make It” in 1971 through “We’re Gonna Hold On” in 1974. In an attempt to wean him off liquor Wynette hid his car keys, making Jones a house prisoner.

Desperate for a drink, he set off for Nashville in the only vehicle he could find keys for, his sit-down lawnmower.

He was apprehended on the freeway. Jones was later twice convicted of drunk driving in Nashville, once following a televised police chase through the streets in 1983, then again after wrapping his car around a bridge in 1999.

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Ten

10

Hard Acts to Follow

1

Ozzy Osbourne, no stranger to shock tactics, surpassed himself on January 20, 1982, during a gig in Des Moines, Iowa, when a fan threw a live bat onstage and Ozzy picked it up and bit its head off, believing it to be a rubber toy. Ozzy underwent a course of rabies injections.

In May 1981, bored at a record-company press conference in Los Angeles, he repeated the trick by biting the head off a live white dove.

2

Tommy Minnock, a variety artist who plied his trade in Trenton, New Jersey, in the 1890s, allowed himself to be literally crucified onstage. As the nails were being driven into his hands and feet, Minnock sang “After the Ball Is Over.”

3

The American entertainer Orville Stamm, by way of an encore, lay on his back with a piano on his chest, belting out “Ireland Must Be Heaven Because Mother Comes from There” while a pianist bounced up and down on his thighs.

4

The original cast of
Friends
had a seventh regular member, Marcel the monkey. He was fired because of his habit of vomiting live worms on the set.

5

In 1996, Dora Oberling, a stripper from Tampa, Florida, cheated death when a dissatisfied member of the audience tried to shoot her. The bullet bounced off one of her silicone breast implants.

6

Matthew Buchinger, a German living in the late seventeenth century, was the first all-round entertainer.

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[Ten Hard Acts to Follow]

He mastered a dozen musical instruments and was a fine dancer and a brilliant magician. He was also an excellent marksman, a superb bowler, and an accomplished calligrapher. His chief claim to fame, however, was that he was 2' 4'' tall and possessed neither arms nor legs.

7

In September 1994, a glass eye worn by Armando Botelli shattered when a soprano hit a high note during an opera in Milan.

8

Frenchman Joseph Pujol, the virtuoso of the anal accordion, earned fame and fortune at the turn of the nineteenth century as Le Pétomane. While lying in the bath, Pujol made the remarkable discovery that he could modulate sound with completely odorless farting. Pujol took his “act” to Paris, where he became an overnight sensation, outselling even France’s favorite actress, Sarah Bernhardt. His performances included a series of imitations, such as the sound of calico being torn, a cannon, an eight-day-old pup, a creaking door, an owl, a duck, a swarm of bees, a bullfrog, and a pig. He could intone, by placing a small flute in his rectum, “By the Light of the Moon,” and he could anally extinguish a candle at a distance of one foot. For an encore, Pujol inserted a yard of rubber hose with a cigarette in one end into his rectum, then drew on the cigarette and exhaled smoke. The highlight of Pujol’s spectacular career was a continental tour that drew many of the crowned heads of Europe, although King Leopold II of Belgium felt obliged to see the show in disguise. When Pujol died in 1945, aged eighty-eight, he was succeeded by several
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[Ten Hard Acts to Follow]

imitators, including a female “pétomane” called La Mere Alexandre, who could imitate the farts of the famous and perform a series of entertaining “occupational farts”

including those of nuns and freemasons. Her magnum opus, however, was her impression of the bombardment of Port Arthur. In the 1980s, an American “pétomane”

known as Honeysuckle Divine could extinguish a candle flame at two paces and fart “Jingle Bells.”

9

At the Organization of African Unity summit meeting in 1975, Ugandan leader Idi Amin entertained his fellow African presidents by demonstrating how to suffocate people with a handkerchief.

10

The actor Lorne Greene had one of his nipples bitten off by an alligator while filming
Lorne Greene’s Wild
Kingdom.

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10

Essential Elvis Trivia:

The Top Ten

1

Before he discovered Elvis, Colonel Tom Parker’s most notable success was “Colonel Parker’s Dancing Chickens,” an act that involved persuading chickens to perform by placing them on an electric hotplate.

2

There are an estimated 85,000 Elvis impersonators worldwide. In the Islamic city of Mogadishu in Somalia it is illegal to impersonate Elvis without a beard.

3

Elvis once ate nothing but meat loaf, mashed potatoes, and tomatoes for two years.

4

Elvis became addicted to Feen-a-mint chewing gum while attempting to overcome severe constipation.

5

Dr. Jukka Ammondt, a Finnish professor, is the only Elvis impersonator known to sing his songs in Latin, including

“Nunc Hic Aut Numquam” (“It’s Now or Never”).

6

Next to sex and gluttony, the King’s favorite nocturnal pastime was visiting the Memphis morgue to look at the corpses. He also liked to watch lesbian sex through a see-through mirror from his bedroom while nibbling on a bucket of giblets.

7

Elvis was once injected with the urine of a pregnant woman as part of a fad diet.

8

In July 1993, Air Force major Bill Smith, a Texan, filed a lawsuit in Fort Worth against the estate of Elvis Presley.

Major Smith charged that Presley’s estate had perpetrated a fraud by keeping up the pretense that the King had died in 1977. The major complained that this
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[Elvis Trivia: The Top Ten]

had interfered with his attempts to sell his new book on Elvis’s current whereabouts.

9

Elvis’s last meal was four scoops of ice cream and six chocolate-chip cookies.

10

Death was Elvis’s best-ever career move. If he had lived, he would have almost certainly been bankrupt within six months. In 2006, his estate, including the famous Graceland mansion, was estimated to be worth $150

million.

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Ten Nota 10

ble Literary Deaths

1

1156: Pietro Aretino, an Italian satirist, poet, and critic, laughs so hard at a scene in a play involving one of his sisters that he falls off his chair, fatally striking his head on the floor.

2

1824: George Gordon (Lord Byron) catches a virulent form of rheumatic fever while rowing an open boat across a lagoon in a thunderstorm, in Greece.

3

1850: Honoré de Balzac dies of caffeine poisoning after regularly drinking about fifty cups of black coffee per day.

4

1867: Charles Baudelaire dies insane, paralyzed, and speechless at the age of forty-six from the combined effects of syphilis and addiction to alcohol, hashish, and opium.

5

1900: Oscar Wilde dies in France under the assumed name of Sebastian Melmoth from an abscess on the brain, which had spread from an infected middle ear, despite an operation by an ear specialist. When Wilde is told how much the failed operation had cost, he replied,

“Oh, well then, I suppose I shall have to die beyond my means.” (According to an even wittier but apocryphal version, Wilde’s last words were “Either that wallpaper goes or I do.”)

6

1915: Rupert Brooke, who wrote, “If I should die, think this only of me: ‘that there’s some corner of a foreign field / That is for ever England’,” expires on a French hospital ship from blood poisoning, the result of an infected mosquito bite aggravated by sunstroke.

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[Ten Notable Literary Deaths]

7

1931: Arnold Bennett is taken by typhoid, after cheerfully drinking a glass of tap water in a Paris hotel to demonstrate how completely safe it is.

8

1950: George Bernard Shaw falls out of the apple tree he was pruning at the age of ninety-four.

9

1963: Sylvia Plath, American poet, gasses herself in her kitchen oven at the age of thirty.

10

1983: Tennessee Williams chokes to death on a bottle cap that accidentally dropped into his mouth while he was using a nasal spray.

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Ten

10

Thoughts on Shakespeare

1

VOLTAIRE “This enormous dunghill.”

2

LEO TOLSTOY “Crude, immoral, vulgar, and

senseless.”

3

J. R. R. TOLKIEN “I went to King Edward’s School and spent most of my time learning Latin and Greek; but I also learned English literature—except Shakespeare, which I disliked cordially . . .”

4

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW “With the single

exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his. It would be positively a relief to me to dig him up and throw stones at him.”

5

WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR, BRITISH POET

“The sonnets are hot and pothery, there is much condensation, little delicacy, like raspberry jam without cream, without crust, without bread.”

6

DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON “Shakespeare never had six lines together without a fault. Perhaps you may find seven, but this does not refute my general assertion.”

7

ROBERT GREENE, ENGLISH PLAYWRIGHT