"Sex life" was a redundancy for Vicki Morgan.
Her life was sex.
Even as a willowy teenager, she exuded a sensuality that led men to dismiss reason and do things they shouldn't.
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| Vicki Morgan |
Her first lover was a young man who left her pregnant at age 16.
This sort of thing was still a family scandal in 1968 in her hometown of Montclair, Calif., so Vicki was spirited away to St. Anne's, a Catholic maternity home for girls in Los Angeles.
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| St. Anne's, in Los Angeles |
Her life was more than half gone by the time her son was born.
In her final, frantic 14 years, Morgan became a professional mistress—and a headline waiting to happen. If she was going to have sex anyway, she seemed to conclude, it might as well be with someone wealthy.
She bedded both men and women, including a movie star or two, a Moroccan king and a Saudi princess, according to accounts she gave to journalists, biographers and in a court deposition.
She wed three times, but marital status was irrelevant.
She was a fabulously promiscuous nymph of the swingin' '70s. She tried it all, from group lesbianism to S&M to more traditional heterosexual hedonism.
She rarely worked, yet she lived at some of the most luxurious addresses in Los Angeles.
Morgan blanched at the notion that she was a high-priced hooker.
But as one of her lovers put it, she lived a life "of guilty compromise, a dishonorable truce between money and conscience."
Amid her many romantic entanglements, Morgan for 12 years was the mistress of Alfred Bloomingdale, a scion of the department store family, founder of a groundbreaking credit card firm and a member of Ronald Reagan's "kitchen cabinet."
His wife, "Best-Dressed" Betsy Bloomingdale, was Nancy Reagan's closest friend.
The long-lived affair blew up into front-page headlines just months after Reagan was elected. With Alfred Bloomingdale on his deathbed with cancer, Mrs. Bloomingdale cut off Vicki Morgan's monthly love money.
She responded with a palimony suit that, even in those pre-tabloid days, kept the newspapers filled with blue prose and kinky details for months.
Inevitably, Morgan went out in another front-page ball of fire about a year after the scandal broke. She was murdered by a man who desired her, like everyone else.
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