“I was fifteen and a half. She was what was known in those days as a nymphomaniac—at least, that was the term we used. But she was a very nice person. Her name was Barbara, and she was about nineteen. It happened when my brother Ronnie was home from Korea on leave, and he threw a New Year’s Eve party, and the parents were gone. Anyway, there was a line of guys standing outside this bedroom door. I said, ‘What’s going on?’ and they said, ‘This woman’s in there, and she’s taking us on one at a time.’ And they put me in front. I was very excited when I walked in. It was very dark. ‘Hello, Barbara,’ I said, and she said, ‘Is that you, Ronnie?’ In a split second, my brain told me, You’d better be Ronnie or she’s going to kick you out. So I said, ‘Yeah,’ in my brother’s voice. Like the first time for so many of my colleagues in the world, it was over before it began. But I couldn’t believe that was it, so I just kept going, partly out of fear, because she thought she was making love to my brother. When a shaft of light came in, she saw my face and screamed. And I jumped off and just ran out, naked. If I ever had to look back at the first moment I knew I was an actor or realized it was a good idea to be one, I’d have to say that was it.”
“I couldn’t even think about having sex until I got past certain inhibitions. Sex was taboo in my family. It was drilled into me that you don’t hold hands, you don’t kiss—because you could get a disease—and you absolutely don’t make love until you get married. With that background, I didn’t have my first sexual experience until I was eighteen. In one way, it was what I expected it to be, but not completely. It got better later.”
“I was attracted to straight me since I was very young. One man who was rather important in my life was a famous Italian pop singer. We met on the tube in London. I was a punk with spiky hair and wearing bondage gear. He came up to me and, smiling, asked if I had a girlfriend. I laughed and said no. Then he asked if I had a boyfriend, and I said, ‘Sometimes,’ though actually I was still quite innocent. And he said, ‘Oh, then could you come with me?’ He was very handsome, very elegant, and he smelled great. He took me to this posh dinner party that some ballerinas were giving. And later, he took my virginity, which I did not mind at all. I was fifteen.”
“I left home at seventeen, right after high school, and did a short tour in the Coast Guard Reserve. Then, at eighteen, I got my first apartment and my first lady. Her name was Ida. Several beautiful women followed. And I learned that no matter how much womanizing you do as a bachelor, you always think you’ve never done enough.”
“To have sex when you’re in love is the best way. I was just graduating from junior high when I fell in love for the first time, with a boy named Harry. It happened at first sight on a basketball court when our schools played each other. I looked at Number Nine and my heart was beating so fast, I knew I just had to have him. Harry was real popular and had tons of girlfriends, but eventually I got him, and we went steady for a year. We broke up because he started playing around. By the time we got back together, it was too late. He’d gotten another girl pregnant. I was protected by the gods. That could have been me.”
“When I first became well-known, I told reporters I was bisexual. I said that when I was fourteen, sex suddenly became all-important to me. It didn’t really matter who or what it was with, as long as it was a sexual experience. So I said it was some very pretty boy in a class I brought home and neatly took on my bed upstairs. And that was it. I really floated around for quite a while in my early life, because I felt comfortable with nothing. I was so young then, and I was experimenting, searching for what I really wanted. For most of the period when I was going through the bisexual thing, my attraction was always to really beautiful transvestites or drag queens. But I was never gay or transvestite. And it wasn’t that long before I realized I was truly heterosexual.”
“I lost my virginity with an older woman in a London park when I was fifteen. She invited me, and I gratefully accepted. When it was over, she was very understanding and nice about it, because although she satisfied me, I wasn’t able to satisfy her. I didn’t know the first thing about sex then. After that, though I certainly tried, I couldn’t get anybody else for two years. And that’s a long time, especially when you don’t have TV in the house.”
“I had a real rigid moral upbringing. My stepfather was one of those men who said, ‘You know what guys are after. Once they get it, they’ll never want to see you again.’ And so the first time I made love, I felt bad. I felt dirty. Maybe every girl goes through that. I mean, I felt like a bad girl for a long time. Even when I was married—I was twenty-one—I felt guilty. And when I was pregnant for the first time, I was sort of ashamed instead of thrilled I was having a baby.”
“I lost my virginity over the course of five encounters with the same girl when I was sixteen. It was the first time for both of us.”
“I was an altar boy and graduated from all-male Catholic schools. In those days, women were occasions of sin. When you realize how much energy was spent trying to keep boys and girls from becoming breathless, you begin to understand why so many of them became breathless. If I wasn’t interested in a girl sexually in high school, I wasn’t interested in her at all. In college, I dated so much my roommate threatened to rent out half the premises. But I never performed the ‘marriage act,’ as we used to call it at Notre Dame, until a year after graduation. On my wedding day in 1958—marriage number one—I was still a virgin.”
“I won’t tell you how old I was the first time I had sex, because that would probably sound real perverted. But it was just very emotional. I felt I could show my emotion, just like I show it with words. I felt I wanted to share my emotion, and I did. To me, sex wasn’t dirty; it was something very intimate and real. I wasn’t afraid the first time I tried it, and I’ve never had a bad experience with sex. I have always loved it.”
“It’s not always true that the first time is the best. I was fifteen—and it was traumatic for me to learn that the girl, who was the same age, wasn’t as innocent as she pretended to be. My love life only began in earnest the next year, when I was a junior in high school, with a girl named Ann. She was funny and light-years ahead of me in everything. This time I saw rockets. She gave me a lot of confidence. Too much of it. The things I was later accused of—being a womanizer, going from one girl to the next—I really did in my senior year. I had morning affairs, evening affairs; I’d switch cars, change shirts, race to get to the next date. And that was wonderful—then.”
“I was twelve when I first had sex. My partner was the babysitter hired to watch us kids for the weekend. She was seventeen and really pretty. Her job actually was to look after my younger brothers and sister. My mother thought I was old enough to take care of myself, and apparently, she was right about that.”
“When I was a teenager, my peer group was enormously preoccupied with girls, but I was always shy around them. So with that handicap, I lost my virginity at a far more advanced age than the others. But I’m not willing to share the details.”
“I was a virgin when I married the first time—a sixteen-year-old determined not to debauch myself. He was gorgeous, and I was wildly attracted to him physically, as he was to me. But I learned that it’s impossible to match two people purely on their mutual physical attraction and expect the relationship to last. We soon found that sex didn’t work out too well for us. In fact, it was just boring.”
“I was a busboy at Grossinger’s Hotel in the Catskills, seventeen years old. She was a married lady who was up there for the summer. Her husband would come up on weekends. While I was putting butter on her plate, she was making eyes at me. And one weeknight, she asked me to take a walk with her. We went by the baseball field and had sex on home plate. It was a home run—but I wasn’t very good.”
“I grew up in a large, devoutly Catholic Italian family and attended convent school. I never fell in love or went steady or did any of the things other teenagers did, because as the eldest of nine, I was busy helping out with the younger children. When I went off to college at seventeen, to Catholic University, in Washington D.C., I was probably the oldest virgin I knew. That year, I met Chris Sarandon. He was my first time—the first and only man in my life for years and years. I was just a baby, and he was six or seven years older, and I thought he knew everything. We married when I was twenty. I was incredibly lucky to stumble upon someone who not only educated me but had the patience to let me make my own mistakes. Finally, I think to grow up, we just had to split. Whatever changes we went through, we left behind our youth. But we were very good friends when we divorced—and still are.”
“When I was fifteen, it was like there was a banner over my head: INTERCOURSE OR BUST. And when my parents went away for a weekend, leaving me home, I desperately made plans to lose my virginity. There was this very experienced young woman I knew who’d had intercourse with a friend of mine. I got up the nerve to call her, and she came over. I tried to have sex with her in every room in the house before finally doing it—really doing it—in my parents’ bedroom. That was like a good and bad thing, you know? I finally had sex and that was exciting. But it took place in my parents’ bed. Little did I know how expensive that would prove to be: Losing my virginity where I did sent me, eventually, into psychoanalysis. Talk about guilty!”
“At thirteen, but looking older, I was in Miami on a vacation with my family and had first-time all-the-way sex down there in the back of a car with a woman of about forty. The mosquitos bit my butt off. It wasn’t a very romantic experience, but there was something about it that I liked. When I got home, I started seeing this girl and went with her for two years. We made out up on the rooftops in the summer. And in winter, we’d go down to the storage room in the basement and have sex on top of the bicycles and the sheets.”
“I was very eager at a very young age to experience everything in life; I wanted to do everything I’d ever seen done in the movies—and more. But the first time I had sex, when I was in my teens, was such a letdown. I said, ‘There has got to be more to it than this.’ My idea of the greatest way to learn about sex is to explore. I found out there are many more things to do than have intercourse—things that are so much sensual and fun. And I adored every one of them.”
“Sex I discovered all by myself, after being taught in Catholic schools in the French Quarter of New Orleans. Grammar school was all nuns, and we never talked about sex. When I got to Holy Cross, the brothers concentrated on violence to keep the boys in line. So I knew very little about sex on the night I lost my virginity in a New Orleans park in my mid-teens. By the time I was eighteen and working as a disc jockey on a classical radio station, I was mainly interested in getting drunk and picking up strange women. But I gave up both of those habits years ago.”
“I was eighteen when I lost my virginity on a visit to New York. I’d bumped into a girl I once went to school with in California. We were in a restaurant when she told me she wanted to be with me. I was so naïve. I didn’t have a clue as to what ‘be with’ meant. When she elaborated, saying she wanted to make love with me, I was horrified. How was I going to handle this? I thought I’d get out of it by saying, ‘Well, I want to be with you too, but where?’ ‘My apartment,’ she said, and I thought, Oh, my God. As we were walking to her place, she quietly asked, ‘By the way, have you ever made love before?’ I turned and said, ‘Hey, come off it.’ Anyway, it took me quite a while to get in the mod, but when I did, what a wonderful thing it was! I just fell in love with making love.”
“When I was fourteen, my girlfriends were all telling me how much fun sex was, that I could get away with it and that boys would respect me—as long as I didn’t go all the way. But I thought stopping short was ridiculous. I wanted to find out what it was all about. So I just did it, all at once, with the guy next door I was madly in love with. When we finished I said, ‘Is that it?’ He said, ‘Yeah.’ And I said, “Well, you can go home.’”
“I had my first job at sixteen, dancing in a chorus line with twelve other girls at the Cotton Club in Harlem. My mother used to sit in the dressing room with me to make sure nobody touched me. She was protecting my virginity—saving it for a moneyed man. He never showed up. At nineteen, I married Louis Jones, who was twenty-eight. He was polished, polite, the son of a Baptist minister, a college graduate—and poor. I could have been talked out of that marriage. To put it bluntly, I was still a virgin, and one of the reasons marriage was attractive to me was that I was desperately eager to know the physical side of love. If someone had simply told me to go to bed with Louis, or with some other nice boy, a great deal of the pressure that simple curiosity can generate would have been dissipated.”
“How old was I when I first made love? Oh good, now my mother will read this and she’ll finally know! All I will say is that I had my first boyfriend when I was eighteen and in school in Sweden. You could say I was a late bloomer in that department.”
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