Dirty Gertie from Number 30

Gertrude Lawrence, photographed by Cecil Beaton, 1930

From an article in The Daily Mail [of all places!]:

Yes, it was a spectacle the star's daughter was never to forget. As Pamela Clatworthy opened the door of the Number One dressing room at New York's St James Theatre on an April afternoon in 1951, she encountered a scene that froze her in her tracks.

Her mother, the legendary musical star Gertrude Lawrence, was in flagrante.

Her oyster-pink hooped satin ball gown was over her head like an inverted circus tent. Burrowing beneath it with dedicated zeal was a man of whom Pamela could see only his bare feet and equally bare buttocks.

'When they noticed I was there, and he emerged, his head was as bald as his backside, and I realised it was Yul Brynner'.

That was the first intimation Pamela had that her mother was involved in a passionate affair with her co-star in the hit Broadway musical, The King And I, a married man 17 years Gertie's junior, who owed to her his ascent to stardom.

'It was a closely guarded secret,' says Pamela. So secret that it has eluded every biographer of Lawrence and Brynner.

'It makes me laugh when I keep hearing stories about my mother supposedly being a lesbian. She was the complete reverse. Her appetite for men verged on nymphomania.'

Gertrude Lawrence on Wikipedia