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Anaïs Nin

Another wild child, Nin married her first husband, Hugh Parker Guiler, in 1923, when she was 20 years old. Unlike Colette, she stayed married to him, but this didn’t seem to impede her love life one bit. She famously had a passionate love affiar with Henry Miller, living with him in Paris in the 1930s (it’s hard to know what her husband thought of this, since he insisted on being completely written out of her diaries), and financed the first printing of Tropic of Cancer in 1934. In 1947, at the age of 44, she met 28-year-old Broadway actor Rupert Pole. In her diary entry that night, Nin wrote “Danger! He is probably homosexual,” but he was no such thing. The two began dating, and eventually went to California together. In 1955 she married him. What about Guiler, you ask? Well, he was in New York, still married to Nin, who privately referred to her two marriages as her “bicoastal trapeze.” Eventually, Nin had to have her marriage with Pole annulled, due to tax reasons, but she continued to live with him until her death in 1977, and he served thereafter as her literary executor.