Vivien Leigh: Bisexual Adulterer

'Gone With the Wind' star also liked male prostitutes
By Evann Gastaldo,  Newser Staff
Posted Aug 23, 2010 9:29 AM CDT
Vivien Leigh: Bisexual Adulterer
This 1939 photo provided by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin shows Vivien Leigh, as Scarlett O'Hara, and co-star Clark Gable in Gone With The Wind.   (AP Photo/The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin)

Vivien Leigh: “The essence of English womanhood,” as a poet laureate once said, or a bisexual adulterer with a taste for male prostitutes? The latter, according to an upcoming biography of the Gone With the Wind actress. Throughout Leigh’s marriage to Laurence Olivier, she cheated on him with men and women, and routinely drove down to a Los Angeles brothel to pick up “street boys” and pay them with cigarette cases and jewels, write Darwin Porter and Roy Moseley in Damn You, Scarlett O’Hara.

In addition to three lesbian flings, the book claims Leigh had affairs with co-stars Marlon Brando and Rex Harrison. "Today, she would be diagnosed as bipolar and there are drugs that would help," a source tells the Daily Mail. "But in those days people did not know how to deal with a star who tore off all her clothes and ran out of her house."
(More Vivien Leigh stories.)

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