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Authors: Elizabeth Mahon

Tags: #General, #History, #Women, #Social Science, #Biography & Autobiography, #Biography, #Women's Studies

Scandalous Women: The Lives and Loves of History's Most Notorious Women (16 page)

BOOK: Scandalous Women: The Lives and Loves of History's Most Notorious Women
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Lola was her own worst enemy. She was known to entertain men at all hours of the day and night, although she claimed to Ludwig that she was completely faithful to him. At the theater, she would remain seated when the king came to greet her, a complete breach of protocol. It was as if the more the citizens of Munich rejected her, the uglier Lola’s actions became, as if she were giving them the proverbial middle finger.
Lola made her fatal mistake when she convinced Ludwig to close down the university after the student protests against her and her supporters. An irate crowd of two thousand students gathered and made their way to city hall, where a petition was presented to the king asking him to reopen the university. Ludwig refused. When a mob of students gathered outside her home to heckle her, Lola strode out on her balcony and toasted them with champagne. In the end her affair with the king toppled the government. Lola was forced to flee the city, taking refuge in Switzerland. Ludwig was pressured into rescinding her citizenship, revoking her title, and publishing an order for her arrest. The king decided to abdicate in favor of his son. The whole sorry affair lasted less than two years. Despite having cost him his throne, Ludwig continued to write to Lola for several years and to send her an annual allowance of twenty thousand florins. But Ludwig never saw his beloved Lolita again.
After one has conquered the heart of a king, what else is there to top that? Only America offered Lola the challenge of a fresh start and a whole new continent waiting to experience the Lola magic. Immediately after her arrival in New York, she set to work giving interviews, espousing liberal ideas. Deciding to give the people what they want, Lola commissioned a five-act play, called
Lola in Bavaria
, detailing her version of her relationship with Ludwig. It was an early version of the docudrama, and probably the first time in a historical play that the protagonist played herself. The play was enormously successful and Lola took it on the road, crisscrossing the country.
But where Lola went, trouble was sure to follow. A visit to a boys’ school in Boston had people in an uproar, accusing her of corrupting the morals of youth. She smoked in public and got into a scuffle with a prompter in New Orleans. Lola decided to retire and settle down in the West. While living in California, Lola showed another side to her character than that of the horsewhipping femme fatale. Madame Lola became a model citizen of Grass Valley, much admired by the other townsfolk, devoting her time to helping troubled women. She kept a menagerie of pets in her white cottage on Main Street, including a tamed grizzly bear named Major, which she took for walks. But the money soon ran out, and Lola was back on tour.
Lola wasn’t exactly without a man in her life. She married two more times, first to a young blade, then to an Irish charmer; neither marriage was successful or legal. One of her lovers drowned mysteriously after they returned from a tour in Australia, leaving Lola distraught. She entertained numerous male friends at her Wednesday night soirees in Grass Valley. Later she was jilted by an Austrian baron who conveniently forgot he had a wife and children tucked away in upstate New York. Unlucky in love, she wrote, “Love is a pipe we fill at eighteen and smoke until forty. Then we rake the ashes till our exit.”
Realizing that her career was on the wane, Lola reinvented herself once again, this time on the lecture circuit. Wearing a simple black dress and no jewelry, she made her debut in Hamilton, Ontario, in 1857 with a piece entitled “Beautiful Women,” which discussed famous women in history. It turned out that Lola was a formidable and eloquent lecturer, far better than she was a dancer. A Buffalo newspaper reported, “Rarely if ever was a Buffalo audience better pleased, we may say more fascinated, with a lecture than it was with Lola Montez.” The
Boston Bee
declared her the “unquestioned Queen of the lecture room.” Lecturing was a winwin situation for Lola. No expensive sets or costumes, and she could perform in town halls, which were cheaper to rent. Better yet, she didn’t have to share the box office with anyone but her manager. That meant more money in Lola’s pocket.
She added to her repertoire titles like “Gallantry” and “Heroines of History and Strong-Minded Women.” Lola felt that she was the epitome of the strong-minded woman; it was her most personal lecture. In it, she espoused the theory that the beauty and wit of women “controlled the councils of diplomacy and the state.” Referencing her own recent history in Munich, she added, “And this is as true of modern as of ancient courts.” She believed that deeds, not words, were the measure of a strong-minded woman, having no use for women like Susan B. Anthony, whom she considered scolds. Lola was no feminist; although she defended the right of extraordinary women to take a role in public life, she also extolled the virtues of women who had “no ambition outside the hearth and home.” For three years, she plied her new career up and down the eastern seaboard to great success, along with a short European tour.
She also wrote several books, including her autobiography and a book called
The Arts and Secrets of Beauty, or Secrets of a Lady’s Toilet with Hints to Gentlemen on the Art of Fascinating
, based on her most popular lectures on beauty and grooming
.
It was filled with interesting tips, such as binding slivers of raw beef around the face to help stave off wrinkles.
Lola’s mind also began turning toward religion, her own spiritual state, even thoughts of death. It seemed that she had become remorseful over her life. She spent most of her time quietly reading and studying the Bible and making frequent visits to the Magdalen Asylum for wayward women. As New York, where she now lived, sweltered in a heat wave in June 1860, she suffered a stroke. The condition left her unable to move or speak for several months. News of Lola’s illness reached her mother, who traveled to America on the pretext of seeing her daughter for what might be the last time, but it appeared her actual purpose was to find out whether or not Lola still had any of the jewels that Ludwig had given her. She returned to Scotland disappointed and empty-handed. After her mother’s visit, Lola made sure to make out her will.
By December, she had recovered enough to hobble outside for a breath of fresh air on Christmas Day. It was to prove the death of her. Lola developed pneumonia and, on January 17, 1861—a month before her forty-first birthday—she died. Her life quickly passed into legend. She’s buried in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. Her headstone is inscribed with a name she never used—her maiden name of Eliza Gilbert.
 
Mata Hari
 
1876-1917
 
The evil this woman has done is unbelievable. This is perhaps the greatest spy of the century.
—LIEUTENANT ANDRE MORNET, PROSECUTOR, 1917
 
 
Her name is now synonymous with femme fatale, a slinky seductress luring men to their doom, but who was Mata Hari exactly? Was she the treacherous spy who sent thousands of men to their death or was she used as a convenient scapegoat by not only the British, but the Germans and the French as well? Two decades after her death, a French journalist investigated the claims of espionage but came away unenlightened. Of the three hundred men and women who were executed for espionage during World War I, only Mata Hari became a household name. Mata Hari came to embody everyone’s fears about enemy aliens, the wayward woman, and sexual decadence.
Mata Hari began life as Margaretha Zelle in a small town in northern Holland, the daughter of a prosperous store owner. The life that Margaretha knew came to a screeching halt when she was thirteen, when her father’s business failed and he declared bankruptcy. The humiliation and horror was an experience that would scar her for the rest of her life. Within a year, her parents had separated, and by the time she was fifteen her mother had passed away. Her father took off for Amsterdam, where he quickly remarried. He eventually sent for her brothers but not for her. Margaretha never got over her father’s abandonment of her and would spend her life seeking the same attention he once gave her from the men in her life.
A short stint training as a kindergarten teacher went nowhere when it was discovered that the headmaster had flirted outrageously with her. At nineteen, and with no prospects, Margaretha, on impulse, answered a personal ad in the paper. Rudolph MacLeod was thirty-nine, almost twice her age, and had served in the Dutch East Indies for almost twenty years. Bald and good-looking, he wore a uniform well. Margaretha always was a sucker for a man in uniform. After a two-month courtship, they were married. It was a disaster from the beginning; her husband preferred drinking and whoring to his young wife. They quarreled bitterly about everything from child care to how much money she spent on clothes. Margaretha refused to conform to the image of an obedient army wife. Not even the birth of two children and a transfer to Sumatra changed things. When their son died under mysterious circumstances, the marriage was over. After a brief reconciliation, MacLeod abandoned her, taking their daughter with him.
La Belle Époque in Paris would now be her home. When she was asked by a journalist why she had chosen Paris, she replied, “I don’t know. I thought all women who ran away from their husbands went to Paris.” Since her husband refused to pay alimony, Margaretha tried to get a job modeling for artists but with little success. Finally she found a job with an equestrian circus run by Ernst Molier. It was he who suggested that she turn to dance. And not just any dance—she would turn herself into Mata Hari. Translated from Malay, it meant “the eye of the day.” Her costume consisted of a jeweled metallic bra; long colored veils that represented beauty, love, chastity, voluptuousness, and passion; and a jeweled headdress of Javanese design. Her dancing, what there was of it, consisted of her striking erotic and exotic poses while slowly removing the veils from her body. Even Mata Hari admitted, “I never could dance well. People came to see me because I was the first who dared to show myself naked to the public.”
Making her debut at the home of a society hostess, she was an instant smash. Within a year she had given thirty performances, both public and private. She created a suitable background for her creation, which changed from one interview to the next, but generally she said that she had learned the dances from her mother, who was a Javanese temple dancer. The critics raved, falling over themselves to come up with new adjectives to describe her undulating arms and swarthy complexion.
The Gallic
praised her as “so feline, extremely feminine, majestically tragic, the thousand curves and movements of her body trembling in a thousand rhythms.” They bought into her exotic story. She also found the first of many lovers who paid the bills and kept her in the style she had become accustomed to as a child. But she had extravagant tastes and was constantly in debt.
For ten years, Mata Hari managed to hold sway over Europe, dancing in Monte Carlo, Berlin, Vienna, and Spain, becoming one of the highest-paid dancers in Europe at the time. She danced in opera houses and in music halls. But time was running out; she was pushing forty, and in the wake of her success came imitators. She took to holding concerts in her mansion in Neuilly, where she danced accompanied by a Sufi holy man and master musician, Inayat Khan. Otherwise, she was supported by her various lovers, many of whom were officers.
Everything changed for Mata Hari when World War I started. She was in Berlin, where she had been engaged to perform, and she tried to get out of her contract. Her dresser kept her jewels and furs for lack of payment and her bank accounts were frozen by the Germans. With very little money, Mata Hari took a train to Switzerland but ran into difficulties because she didn’t have a Dutch passport. She finally made it back to Holland, where she became the mistress of Baron Edouard Willem van der Capellan. But Holland was too staid for her after the bright lights of Paris, so Mata Hari resolved to go back to France.
It was in Holland that Mata Hari was approached by a man named Karl Kroemer, the honorary German consul in Amsterdam, to spy for Germany. He offered twenty thousand francs, the equivalent of sixty-one thousand dollars today, with the promise of more if she was successful. She was to sign all communications “H21.” Mata Hari accepted the money, but she had no intentions of spying for Germany. She felt that the money was owed to her for having to leave her furs and jewels behind and having her accounts frozen.
Looking back at it now, for either Germany or France to recruit Mata Hari as a spy makes no sense. She was well known in Europe, her every move reported in the gossip columns of the day. Even without her fame, Mata Hari was a striking woman; she stood out in a crowd, not just because of her height but also because of her beauty. A spy’s skill lies in blending in. She was also incredibly apolitical, sharing her favors with soldiers from all sides of the conflict. And she barely knew what was going on in the war. As far as the French and Germans were concerned an amoral woman who had already exposed herself onstage and been seen to take money from men would do anything.
BOOK: Scandalous Women: The Lives and Loves of History's Most Notorious Women
12.92Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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