The Book of Lists

22 MEMORABLE KISSES

It was a kiss from God that infused the ‘spirit of life’ into man, according to the account of Genesis (2:7). God is said to have formed Adam from slime and dust and then breathed a rational soul into him. This concept of divine insufflation, which surfaces frequently in religious teachings, is often viewed through the kiss metaphor.

As told in the New Testament, Judas Iscariot used the kiss as a tool of betrayal around AD29, when he embraced Jesus Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane. Jewish leaders under the high priest Caiaphas had paid Judas 30 pieces of silver to identify Jesus. With a kiss, Judas singled him out. Jesus was arrested; charged with blasphemy and condemned to death.

In the classic fairy tale ‘Sleeping Beauty’, it is with a kiss that the handsome prince awakens the enchanted princess. This kiss first appeared in Charles Perrault’s version of 1697, ‘La Belle au bois dormant’. But in fact, ‘Sleeping Beauty’ dates back to two earlier romances. ‘Perceforest’ and ‘Pentamerone’. In those stories, the handsome prince finds the sleeping beauty, falls in love with her, rapes her and leaves.

In 1837, at the dawn of the Victorian era in Great Britain, Thomas Saverland attempted to kiss Caroline Newton in a light-hearted manner. Rejecting Saverland’s pass, Miss Newton not so lightheartedly bit off part of his nose. Saverland took Newton to court, but she was acquitted. ‘When a man kisses a woman against her will,’ ruled the judge, ‘she is fully entitled to bite his nose, if she so pleases.’ ‘And eat it up,’ added a barrister.

One of the most renowned sculptures in the Western world is The Kiss, sculpted by French artist François Auguste Rodin in 1886. Inspired by Dante, the figure of two nude lovers kissing brought the era of classical art to an end. Rodin described The Kiss as ‘complete in itself and artificially set apart from the surrounding world’.

The first kiss ever to be recorded in a film occurred in Thomas Edison’s The Kiss, between John C. Rice and May Irwin in April 1896. Adapted from a short scene in the Broadway comedy The Widow Jones, The Kiss was filmed by Raff and Gammon for nickelodeon audiences. Its running time was less than 30 seconds.

The figure of Guidarello Guidarelli, a fearless sixteenth-century Italian soldier, was sculpted in marble by Tullio Lombardo (c. 1455–1532) and displayed at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ravenna, Italy. During the late 1800s a rumour started that any woman who kissed the reclining, armour-clad statue would marry a wonderful gentleman. More than five million superstitious women have since kissed Guidarelli’s cold marble lips. Consequently, the soldier’s mouth has acquired a faint reddish glow.

In 1926 Warner Brothers Studios starred John Barrymore in Don Juan. During the course of the film (2 hours, 47 minutes), the amorous adventurer bestows a total of 191 kisses on a number of beautiful señoritas — an average of one every 53 seconds.

The longest kiss in movie history is between Jane Wyman and Regis Toomey in the 1941 production of You’re in the Army Now. The Lewis Seiler comedy about two vacuum-cleaner salesmen features a scene in which Toomey and Wyman hold a single kiss for 3 minutes and 5 seconds (or 4% of the film’s running time).

When the news of Japan’s surrender was announced in New York City’s Times Square on August 14, 1945, Life photojournalist Alfred Eisenstaedt photographed a jubilant sailor clutching a nurse in a back-bending passionate kiss to vent his joy. The picture became an icon of the cathartic celebration that erupted over the end of the war. Over the years, at least three nurses and ten sailors claimed to be the people in the photo. Since Eisenstaedt had lost his notes and negatives by the time the claimants came forward, he was never able to say definitively who was in the photo.

A famous 1950 photograph of a young couple kissing on the streets of Paris — ‘Le Baiser de l’Hôtel de Ville’ — found itself under an international media spotlight when, four decades after the picture was taken, the photo became a commercial success, drawing out of the woodwork dozens of people who claimed to have been the photo’s unidentified kissers. The black-and-white snapshot — originally taken for Life magazine by Robert Doisneau as part of his series on the Parisian working class — made Doisneau wealthy when, between 1986 and 1992, it became a bestseller through poster and postcard reprints. Among those who subsequently identified themselves as the kissers were Denise and Jean-Louis Lavergne, who sued Doisneau for $100,000 after he rejected their claim. They lost their case when it was determined, in 1993, that the kissers were actually two professional models (and real-life lovers), Françoise Bornet and Jacques Cartaud.

NBC’s Star Trek was the first programme to show a white man kissing a black woman. In the episode ‘Plato’s Children’, aliens with psychic powers force Captain Kirk (William Shatner) to kiss Lt. Uhura (Nichelle Nichols).

In 1969 an effort was made to crack down on young lovers who were smooching in public in the town of Inca on the island of Majorca. When the police chief began handing out citations that cost offenders 500 pesetas per kiss, a group of 30 couples protested by staging a kiss-in at the harbour at Cala Figuera. Following a massive roundup by police, the amorous rebels were fined 45,000 pesetas for their defiant canoodling and then released.

One cinema kiss that turned heads among the movie-going public was between two male actors, Peter Finch and Murray Head, in the 1971 film Sunday, Bloody Sunday. The British tale of a bisexual love triangle included a medium close-up shot of this kiss in a scene originally planned to have featured only an embrace from afar. Director John Schlesinger commented that Finch and Head ‘were certainly less shocked by the kiss than the technicians on the set were. When Finch was asked about the scene by somebody on TV, he said, “I did it for England.”’

In an unprecedented gesture of humility, Pope Paul VI kissed the feet of Metropolitan Meliton of Chalcedon, envoy of Patriarch Demetrios I, who was head of the Eastern Orthodox Church, during a Mass at the Sistine Chapel in Rome in 1975. The two men were commemorating the tenth anniversary of the lifting of excommunications that the churches of Constantinople and Rome had conferred on each other during the eleventh century. Taken aback by the pontiff’s dramatic action, Meliton attempted to kiss the pope’s feet in return but the pope prevented him from doing so. Meliton instead kissed his hand.

King Faisal of Saudi Arabia was engaged in discussions with the Kuwait oil minister when the king’s nephew, Prince Faisal ibn Mussad Abdel Aziz, burst into the office unannounced. The king stood and, assuming that the prince wished to offer him holy greetings for Mohammed’s birthday, lowered his head and waited for the traditional kiss. It never arrived. Instead the prince fired a bullet into the king’s head, and another into his neck, killing him.

Ruth van Herpen visited an art gallery in Oxford, England, in 1977 and kissed a painting by American artist Jo Baer, leaving red lipstick stains on the $18,000 work. Restoration costs were reported to be as much as $1,260. Appearing in court, van Herpen explained, ‘I only kissed it to cheer it up. It looked so cold.’

The first kiss to reach the movie screen in India was between actor Shashi Kapoor and actress Zeenat Aman in the 1978 film Love Sublime. This landmark kiss, a product of new film guidelines, triggered a nationwide debate over censorship. Kapoor felt that the increased creative freedom would only add logic to Indian love stories and result in less cinema violence. Chief minister and film actor M.G. Ramachandran called for a mass protest, labelling the kissing scenes ‘an insult’.

The first visible kiss between two women on an American network television series took place in 1991 on the show L.A.Law, when Michelle Greene kissed Amanda Donohoe. However, it was a later kiss, on the March 1, 1994, ABC-TV broadcast of the situation comedy Roseanne that caused a sensation. In a controversial scene well-publicised in the press, guest star Mariel Hemingway kisses series star Roseanne Arnold on the mouth. The kiss occurs in a ‘gay bar’ setting, and Hemingway portrays a lesbian stripper whose kiss causes Roseanne to question her own sensibilities. The episode (whose script originally included a second kiss between two additional women) became the subject of much high-profile bickering between ABC executives and series producers Tom and Roseanne Arnold during the weeks prior to its airing. Up to the eleventh hour, the very inclusion of the kiss appeared to remain in question, prompting protests by gay rights organizations. ABC finally let the kiss happen, but added a viewer warning at the start of the episode. The first lesbian kiss on British TV was broadcast two years later, on Christmas Eve 1993, when Brookside’s Beth (Anna Friel) and Margaret (Nicola Stephenson), shared an eight-second smooch.

Six-year-old Johnathan Prevette, a first-grader at Southwest Elementary School in Lexington, North Carolina, kissed a classmate on the cheek. A teacher saw the September 19, 1996, incident and reported it to the school principal, Lisa Horne, who punished Johnathan by keeping him from attending an ice cream party and ordering him to spend a day in a disciplinary programme. But Johnathan’s mother called a local radio talk show, word of the incident spread and within six months the US Department of Education had rewritten its sexual harassment guidelines to omit kisses by first graders. For the record, Johnathan said that the girl asked him for a kiss.

For the opening number of the 2003 MTV Video Music Awards, Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera sang Madonna’s 1984 hit ‘Like a Virgin’ while wearing white wedding gowns. As the music segued into Madonna’s latest hit ‘Hollywood’, Madonna stepped out of a wedding cake wearing a tuxedo. What followed was a drag show of sorts with Madonna playing the groom and Britney and Christina the virginal brides. The performance climaxed with a French kiss between Madonna and Britney and then between Madonna and Christina. The kisses overshadowed the awards themselves and were front-page news around the world.

Bahrain-based MBC-TV attempted to introduce a Middle Eastern version of the voyeuristic reality show ‘Big Brother’ to Arabic-speaking audiences. A few minutes into the first episode, Abdel Hakim of Saudi Arabia kissed Kawthar of Tunisia. This ran so counter to cultural tradition that public protests broke out and the show was cancelled after only two weeks.

7 CELEBRITY COUPLES MARRIED THREE WEEKS OR LESS

Married November 5, 1919, Hollywood’s smouldering Great Lover was locked out on his wedding night by his lovely bride. His first marriage lasted less than six hours.

After surviving her one-day marriage, Gabor commented, ‘I’m a wonderful housekeeper. Whenever I leave a man, I keep his house.’

Before she gained fame in such films as Mr Deeds Goes to Town, Mr Smith Goes to Washington and Shane, Arthur fell in love with ‘a nice Jewish boy’ named Julian Anker because ‘he looked like Abraham Lincoln’. They married on a whim, but both sets of parents were horrified and the couple filed for annulment the following day.

Pop superstar Britney Spears was married for 48 hours to an old Kentwood, Louisiana buddy. The marriage took place in Las Vegas at the Little White Wedding Chapel. The bride wore a baseball cap and torn jeans. Both were 22 years old, and claimed they were not intoxicated at the time. Said the groom, ‘It was just crazy, man. We said, “Let’s do something wild. Let’s get married, for the hell of it.”’ Spears made no comment. Calling it ‘a mistake’, the couple had a judge annul the marriage, which took two hours.

Married in Hollywood in March, 1916, Swanson and Beery separated three weeks later. Said Beery: ‘She wanted the fancy life — to put on airs and all of that. Me, I like huntin’ and fishin’ and the simple life.’ Said Swanson: ‘I wanted to have a baby and Wally didn’t want that responsibility.’

The first male nude centrefold model for the London edition of Cosmopolitan magazine, De Feu lured Greer into marriage in May 1968. However, in Greer’s words, ‘The marriage lasted three weeks. Three weekends, to be precise.’

In 1994, the pair was married for three weeks. Barrymore later admitted that she was trying to help Thomas obtain a green card to stay in the United States.

RUDOLPH VALENTINO’S 10 ATTRIBUTES OF THE PERFECT WOMAN

Idolised as the great lover of the screen in the 1920s, Rudolph Valentino starred in such romantic epics as The Sheik, Blood and Sand and The Eagle. His death in 1926 caused worldwide hysteria, several suicides, and riots at his funeral. Each year, on the anniversary of his death, hundreds of the faithful gather at his burial-site to pay tribute.

• Fidelity

• The recognition of the supreme importance of love

• Intelligence

• Beauty

• A sense of humour

• Sincerity

• An appreciation of good food

• A serious interest in some art, trade or hobby

• An old-fashioned and wholehearted acceptance of monogamy

• Courage

Source: Cleveland Amory, Vanity Fair (Copyright © 1926, 1954 by The Condé Nast Publications Inc.)

23 FAMOUS PEOPLE’S THOUGHTS ABOUT MARRIAGE

Primary source: A Curmudgeon’s Garden of Love, compiled and edited by Jon Winokur (copyright © 1991 by Jon Winokur. Reprinted by permission of the author.)

HOW 10 FAMOUS PEOPLE MET THEIR MATES

According to biographers, avant-garde artist Ono pursued Lennon relentlessly. At the time they met, she was showing her work at London’s Indica Gallery. Lennon saw the show, which impressed him, but did not respond immediately to her advances, which included pleas for sponsorship of her art, hanging around outside his door, and bombarding him with notes. Eventually the couple divorced their respective spouses and married in 1969 on the Rock of Gibraltar.

Jones was a script girl on The Flying Deuces, starring Laurel and Hardy. One day on the set, she tripped over a rolled-up carpet, struck her head on the arc light, and was taken to the hospital. While she was unconscious, Hardy was struck by her beauty. He courted her by sending flowers and notes to the hospital. They were married in 1940.

Heavy-metal rocker Osbourne met his wife-to-be when she was working as a receptionist for her father, a London music agent. He walked into her office barefoot, with a tap dangling from his neck, and sat on the floor. ‘I was terrified,’ she recalled. The couple wed two years later, in 1981, and had three children together. The Osbournes subsequently became beloved MTV stars as the world watched their vivid family life unfolding on the small screen.

The diminutive sex therapist met her third husband on a ski trip in the Catskills in 1966. Her boyfriend, Hans, was six feet tall, and an uncomfortable match on the ski-lift T-bar. At the top she told Hans, ‘I’m going up with that short man,’ pointing to the five-foot Westheimer. They married less than a year later. Westheimer sometimes called his wife ‘my skiing accident’.

The Duke of Windsor was introduced to Mrs Wallis Simpson — the woman for whom he eventually gave up the throne — at a house party. He asked whether she missed American central heating. She replied, ‘I’m sorry, sir, but you disappoint me… Every American woman that comes to your country is always asked the same question. I had hoped for something more original from the Prince of Wales.’

Baywatch actress Anderson met the Motley Crue drummer at a New Year’s party. ‘He sat with me and kept licking my face,’ she recalled. ‘When I left, he was begging me for my phone number. I said no way. But then I gave him my number because he was interesting.’ After a five-day courtship at the resort of Cancun, Mexico, the couple was wed on the beach.

Their romance began after Andrews heard that movie director Edwards had described her as ‘so sweet she probably has violets between her legs’. Amused by this remark, she sent him a bunch of violets and a note. They soon began dating and were married in 1969.

Avant-garde playwright Beckett had been stabbed by a pimp and was discovered bleeding in the street by Deschevaux-Dumesnil. She found help and visited him in the hospital. After his release, they moved in together, married and were together 28 years, until his death in 1989.

Brown, the future editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, was a 22-year-old Oxford co-ed when she decided to meet Evans, the 47-year-old editor of the venerable Times of London. Brown camped outside Evans’s door and refused to move until he agreed to see her. Four years later, Evans divorced his wife and married Brown.

On her first day in Nashville in 1964, Parton took a suitcase of dirty clothes to a launderette. Dean drove by and honked his truck’s horn at the pretty blonde. Parton cheerfully waved back, and he stopped. They chatted, began dating, and fell in love. After Dean got out of the army two years later, he and Parton married.

12 FOODS CLAIMED TO BE APHRODISIACS

Asparagus contains a diuretic that increases the amount of urine excreted and excites the urinary passages. The vegetable is rich in potassium, phosphorus, and calcium — all necessary for maintenance of a high energy level. However, it also contains aspartic acid, which neutralises excess amounts of ammonia in one’s body and may cause apathy and sexual uninterest.

In addition to being nutritious (30% protein), caviar has been considered an aphrodisiac because of its obvious place in the reproductive process. All fish and their by-products have been linked to the myth of Aphrodite, the goddess of love who was born from the foam of the sea.

Eel, like most fish, is rich in phosphorus and has an excitant effect on the bladder. In addition to its general associations with the aphrodisiac effect of fish, it has probably been favoured as an aphrodisiac because of its phallic appearance.

Both Eastern and Western cultures have long regarded garlic as an aphrodisiac. The Greeks and Romans sang its praises and oriental lovers claimed to be towers of strength because of eating it.

The Chinese call ginseng the ‘elixir of life’ and have used it for more than 5,000 years. Although medical opinion is sharply divided as to its merits, Russian experiments claim that ginseng increases sexual energy and has a general healing and rejuvenating influence on the body.

Mars, who make M&Ms, have consistently denied that green M&Ms have any effect on the libido. Nobody is sure how the rumour started, but in 1996 Mars ran an ad in which comedian Dennis Miller asks a female green M&M, ‘Is it true what they say about the green ones?’

Honey is highly nutritious and rich in minerals, amino acids, enzymes and B-complex vitamins. Galen, Ovid and Sheikh Nefzawi, author of The Perfumed Garden, believed that honey has outstanding aphrodisiac powers.

The lobster has been described as an amatory excitant by many writers, including Henry Fielding in Tom Jones. In addition, it shares the Aphrodite-derived power attributed to all seafood.

Oysters are one of the most renowned aphrodisiac foods. Like other seafoods, they are rich in phosphorus. Although they are not a high source of energy, oysters are easily digestible. Among the eminent lovers who have vouched for oysters was Casanova, who called them ‘a spur to the spirit and to love’.

‘Venus owns this tree… the fruit provokes lust…’ wrote herbalist Nicholas Culpeper. The Chinese considered the fruit’s sweet juices symbolic of the effluvia of the vagina, and both the Chinese and Arabs regard its deep fur-edged cleft as symbolic of the female genitalia. A ‘peach house’ was once a common English slang term for a brothel.

TOMATOES

When they were first brought from South America to Europe, tomatoes were thought to be the forbidden fruit of Eden. They were also celebrated as a sexual stimulant and nicknamed ‘love apples’.

Truffles, the expensive underground fungi, are similar to oysters in that they are composed mostly of water and are rich in protein. Rabelais, Casanova, George Sand, Sade, Napoleon and Mme Pompadour are a few of the many notables who have praised the truffle’s aphrodisiac powers. An ancient French proverb warns: ‘Those who wish to lead virtuous lives should abstain from truffles.’

6 POSITIONS FOR SEXUAL INTERCOURSE — IN ORDER OF POPULARITY

Gershon Legman, an American who wrote about sex, calculated that there are more than 4 million possible ways for men and women to have sexual intercourse with each other. Most of these ‘postures’, as he called them, are probably variations on the six main positions that Alfred C. Kinsey used as categories in the questionnaires on sexual habits which were the basis for his Kinsey Reports in 1948 and 1953.

The Kama Sutra, a Hindu love manual written sometime between AD300 and 540, lists many imaginative and acrobatic variations on these positions — for example, the Bamboo Cleft, the Crab, the Wild Boar; some Kama Sutra experts suggest that people try out difficult positions in the water first. Chinese pillow books, written more than 400 years ago, show more feasible positions with titles like ‘Two Dragons Exhausted by Battle’ and name the parts of the body equally poetically — the penis is called the ‘jade stem’ and the clitoris, the ‘pearl on the jade step’.

According to these sources, interpretations of ancient art, and anthropological studies, humans have changed their preference rankings of sexual positions — the ‘missionary’ (man-on-top) position, overwhelmingly the number-one choice of the Americans Kinsey studied, was not that high on the lists of ancient Greeks and Romans, primitive tribes, or many other groups.

The advantages and disadvantages of each position are taken from Albert Ellis’s The Art and Science of Love and from Human Sexual Inadequacy by William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson.

To many people this is the only position considered biologically ‘natural’, though other primates use the rear-entry position almost exclusively. Called the ‘missionary’ position because it was introduced to native converts — who liked to make fun of it — by Christian missionaries who regarded other positions as sinful.

Advantage: Allows face-to-face intimacy, deep thrusting by male, pace setting by male.

Disadvantage: Does not allow good control for the premature ejaculator, or freedom of movement for the woman.

Chances for conception: Good.

Shown in ancient art as most common position in Ur, Greece, Rome, Peru, India, China and Japan. Roman poet Martial portrayed Hector and Andromache in this position. Generally avoided by those at lower educational levels, according to Kinsey, because it seems to make the man less masculine, the woman less feminine.

Advantages: Allows freedom of movement for women, control for premature ejaculators, caressing of female by male. Most often results in orgasm for women. Good when the man is tired.

Disadvantage: Too acrobatic for some women.

Chances for conception: Not good.

From Ovid, a poet of ancient Rome: ‘Of love’s thousand ways, a simple way and with the least labour, this is: to lie on the right side, and half supine withal.’

Advantage: Allows manipulation of clitoris, freedom of movement for man and woman. Good for tired or convalescent people, and premature ejaculators, as well as pregnant women.

Disadvantage: Does not allow easy entry.

Chances for conception: Okay.

Frequently used by 15 per cent of married women. Favoured by primates and early Greeks. Rejected by many Americans because of its ‘animal origins’ and lack of face-to-face intimacy.

Advantages: Allows manual stimulation of clitoris. Exciting for men who are turned on by female buttocks. Good for pregnant women, males with small penises, women with large vaginas.

Disadvantages: Does not allow easy entry or face-to-face intimacy. Penis tends to fall out.

Chances for conception: Good.

According to Kinsey, learned by many while ‘making out’ in back seats of cars.

Advantages: Allows clitoral contact with male body, free movement, intimacy. Good for male who wants to hold off orgasm, pregnant women.

Disadvantage: Does not allow vigorous thrusting. Sometimes tiring. Penetration may be too deep.

Chances for conception: Poor.

Has echoes of a ‘quickie’ against an alley wall with a prostitute, therefore exciting. Indian lotus position: each stands on one leg, wraps other around partner.

Advantage: Allows caressing. Exciting, can flow from dancing, taking shower.

Disadvantage: Does not allow much thrusting. Entry difficult, particularly when one partner is taller than the other. Tiring. Not good for pregnant women.

Chances for conception: Poor.

6 INCESTUOUS COUPLES OF THE BIBLE

After the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the only survivors, Lot and his two virgin daughters, lived in a cave. One night the daughters plied their father with wine, and the elder daughter seduced Lot in order to ‘preserve the seed of [their] father’. The following night they got him drunk again, and the younger daughter took her turn. Lot apparently had no memory of the events, although nine months later his daughters gave birth to two sons, Moab and Ben-ammi. (Gen. 19:30–38)

Abraham and Sarah had the same father but different mothers. Sarah married her half-brother in Ur, and they remained together until she died, at the age of 127. (Gen. 20:12)

Abraham’s brother, Nahor, married his niece, the daughter of his dead brother Haran and the sister of Lot. (Gen. 11:27, 29)

Amram married his father’s sister, and Aunt Jochebed bore him two sons, Aaron and Moses. (Exod. 6:20)

Amnon raped his half-sister Tamar and was murdered in revenge two years later by Tamar’s full brother Absalom. (II Sam. 13:2, 14, 28–29)

MEMBERS OF SOCIETY: PRESERVED SEX ORGANS OF 4 FAMOUS MEN

When the exiled former emperor of France died of stomach cancer on May 5, 1821, on the remote island of St Helena, a postmortem was held. According to Dr C. MacLaurin, ‘his reproductive organs were small and apparently atrophied. He is said to have been impotent for some time before he died’. A priest in attendance obtained Napoleon’s penis. After a secret odyssey of 150 years, the severed penis turned up at Christie’s Fine Art Auctioneers in London around 1971. The one-inch penis, resembling a tiny sea horse, an attendant said, was described by the auction house as ‘a small dried-up object’. It was put on sale for £13,300, then withdrawn from bidding. Shortly afterward, the emperor’s sex organ (along with bits of his hair and beard) was offered for sale in Flayderman’s Mail Order Catalogue. There were no buyers. In 1977 Napoleon’s penis was sold to an American urologist for about $3,800. Today Napoleon’s body rests in the crypt at the Invalides, Paris — sans penis.

In 1968, in the St Denis section of Paris, an elderly White Russian female émigré, a former maid in czarist St Petersburg and later a follower and lover of the Russian holy man Rasputin, kept a polished wooden box, 18 in. by 6 in. in size, atop her bedroom bureau. Inside the box lay Rasputin’s penis. It ‘looked like a blackened, overripe banana, about a foot long, and resting on a velvet cloth’, reported Rasputin biographer Patte Barham. In life this penis, wrote Rasputin’s daughter Maria, measured ‘a good 13 inches when fully erect’. According to Maria’s account, in 1916, when Prince Felix Yussupov and his fellow assassins attacked Rasputin, Yussupov first raped him, and then fired a bullet into his head, wounding him. As Rasputin fell, another young nobleman pulled out a dagger and ‘castrated Grigori Rasputin, flinging the severed penis across the room’. One of Yussupov’s servants, a relative of Rasputin’s lover, recovered the penis and turned the severed organ over to the maid. She in turn fled to Paris with it.

One of the controversial legends of the twentieth century concerns the disposition of bank robber and badman John Dillinger’s private parts. When Dillinger was shot to death by the FBI in front of a Chicago cinema in 1934, his corpse was taken to the morgue for dissection by forensic pathologists. The gangster’s penis — reported as 14 in. flaccid, 20 in. erect — was supposedly amputated by an overenthusiastic pathologist. After that, many people heard that the penis had been seen (always by someone else) preserved in a showcase at the Smithsonian Institution. Since the publication of The Book of Lists 1, the authors have received a great number of letters asking if the story of Dillinger’s pickled penis is true. The editors called the Smithsonian to prove the story myth or fact and museum curators denied any knowledge of such an exhibit. Tour guides at the museum believe that years ago, many people mistakenly entered the building next door to the Smithsonian thinking it was part of the same complex; it was, however, a different museum altogether — the Medical Museum of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology — and it housed gruesome displays of diseased and oversized body parts, including penises and testes, as well as pictures of victims of gunshot wounds. It was here some visitors claimed they had seen Dillinger’s giant penis. The collection has since been moved to the Walter Reed Army Medical Centre, but its operators also deny that Dillinger’s organ has ever been one of its displays.

Kichizo, a well-known Tokyo gangster, and his mistress, a young Japanese geisha named Abe Sada, were involved in a long, passionate sadomasochistic love affair. He enjoyed having her try to strangle him with a sash cord as she mounted him. Kichizo could make love to Abe Sada only at intervals, because he was married and had children. She hated their separations and suggested they run away or commit suicide together. On the night of May 18, 1936, fearing he was going to leave her forever, she started to play their strangling game, then really strangled him to death. Taking a butcher knife, she cut off Kichizo’s penis and testicles, wrapped them in his jacket, and placed the bundle in a loincloth she tied around her kimono. Abe Sada fled her geisha house, but the police eventually caught her and confiscated the penis. She was tried for her crime, found guilty and sentenced to jail. She languished in prison for eight years, all through WWII, until the American army of occupation moved into Tokyo. The Americans released all Japanese political prisoners — including Abe Sada, by mistake. In 1947 an ‘aging but vivacious’ Abe Sada owned a bar near Tokyo’s Sumida River. A sensational film, In the Realm of the Senses, was made about the affair, which made dear Abe and dead Kichizo — and his penis — legend in Japan.