28 Celebrities Dish on the First Time They Had Sex

“Attending a boys’ prep school meant I stayed ignorant for too long of the traditional initiation rites of boy-girl relationships. But in my freshman year at Stanford University, which was coed, I made some great discoveries about the real world, about the opposite sex, and yes, about sex too.”

“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.”