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CHAPTER ONE

LOLA MONTEZ

THE DANCER WHO KICKED OVER A THRONE

Her Majesty's Theatre in London, one night in 1843, was jammed from pit to roof. Lumley the astute manager, had whispered that he had a "find." His whisper had been judiciously pitched in a key that enabled it to penetrate St. James Street clubs, Park Lane boudoirs, even City counting-rooms.

The managerial whisper had been augmented by a "private view," to which many journalists and a few influential men about town had been bidden. These lucky guests had shifted the pitch from whisper to pæan. By word of mouth and by ardent quill the song of praise had spread. One of the latter forms of tribute had run much in this rural-newspaper form:

"A brilliant divertissement is promised by Mr. Lumley for the forthcoming performance of 'The Tarantula,' at Her Majesty's. Thursday evening will mark the British debut of the mysterious and bewitchingly beautiful Castilian dancer, Lola Montez.

"Through the delicate veins of this lovely daughter of dreamy Andalusia sparkles the sang azur which is the birthright of the hidalgo families alone. In her is embodied not alone the haughty lineage of centuries of noble ancestry, but all the fire and mystic charm that are the precious heritage of the Southland.

"At a private view, yesterday, at which your correspondent had the honor to be an invited guest, this peerless priestess of Terpsichore——"

And so on for well-nigh a column of adjective-starred panegyric, which waxed more impassioned as the dictionary's supply of unrepeated superlatives waned. This was before the day of the recognized press agent. Folk had a way of believing what they read. Hence the gratifyingly packed theater to witness the mysterious Spaniard's debut.

Royalty itself, surrounded by tired gentlemen in waiting who wanted to sit down and could not, occupied one stage box. In the front of another, lolled Lord Ranelagh, arbiter of London fashion and accepted authority on all matters of taste—whether in dress, dancers, or duels. Ranelagh, recently come back from a tour of the East, divided with royalty the reverent attention of the stalls.

The pit whistled and clapped in merry impatience for the appearance of the danseuse. The West End section of the house waited in equal, if more subdued eagerness, and prepared to follow every possible expression of Ranelagh's large-toothed, side-whiskered visage as a signal for its own approval or censure of the much-advertised Lola's performance.

The first scene of the opera passed almost unnoticed. Then the stage was cleared and a tense hush gripped the house. A fanfare of cornets; and from the wings a supple, dark girl bounded.

A whirlwind of welcome from pit and gallery greeted her. She struck a sensuous pose in the stage's exact center. The cornetists laid aside their instruments.

Guitars and mandolins set up a throbby string overture. Lola drew a deep breath, flashed a vivid Spanish smile on the audience at large, and took the first languid step of her dance.

Then it was that the dutiful signal seekers cast covert looks once more at Lord Ranelagh. That ordinarily stolid nobleman was leaning far forward in his stage box, mouth and eyes wide, staring with incredulous amaze at the posturing Andalusian. Before her first step was complete, Ranelagh's astonishment burst the shackles of silence.

"Gad!" he roared, his excited voice smashing through the soft music and penetrating to every cranny. "Gad! It's little Betty James!"

He broke into a Homeric guffaw. A toady who sat beside him hissed sharply. The hiss and the guffaw were cues quite strong enough for the rest of the house. A sizzling, swishing chorus of hisses went up from the stalls, was caught by the pit, and tossed aloft in swelling crescendo to the gallery, where it was intensified to treble volume.

Lola's artistically made-up face had gone white under its rouge and pearl powder at Ranelagh's shout. Now it flamed crimson. The girl danced on; she was gallant, a thoroughbred to the core—even though she chanced to be thoroughbred Irish instead of thoroughbred Spanish—and she would not be hissed from the stage.

But now "boos" mingled with the hisses. And Ranelagh's immoderate laughter was caught up by scores of people who did not in the least know at what they were laughing.

The storm was too heavy to weather. Lumley growled an order. Down swooped the curtain, leaving the crowd booing on one side of it, and Lola raging on the other.

Which ended the one and only English theatrical experience of Lola Montez, the dreamy Andalusian dancer from County Limerick, Ireland. That night at Almack's, Lord Ranelagh told a somewhat lengthy story—a story whose details he had picked up in the East—which was repeated with interesting variations next day on Rotten Row, in a dozen clubs, in a hundred drawing rooms. There is the gist of the tale:

Some quarter century before the night of Lola's London premiere—and derniere—an Irish girl, Eliza Oliver by name, had caught the errant fancy of a great man. The man chanced to be Lord Byron, at that time loafing about the Continent and trying, outwardly at least, to live up to the mental image of himself that was just then enshrined in the hearts of several thousand demure English schoolmaids.

Byron soon tired of Miss Oliver—it is doubtful whether he ever saw her daughter—and the Irish beauty soon afterward married a fellow countryman of her own—Sir Edward Gilbert, an army captain.

The couple's acquaintances being overmuch given to prattling about things best forgotten, Gilbert exchanged to a regiment in India, taking along his wife and her little girl. The child had meantime been christened Maria Dolores Eliza Rosanna; which, for practical purposes, was blue-penciled down to "Betty."

Seven years afterward, Gilbert died. His widow promptly married Captain Craigie, a solid, worthy, Scotch comrade-at-arms of her late husband's. Craigie generously assumed all post-Byronic responsibilities, along with the marriage vows. And, at his expense, Betty was sent to Scotland—later to Paris—to be educated.

At sixteen the girl was a beauty—and a witch as well. She and her mother spent a season at Bath, a resort that still retained in those days some shreds of its former glory. And there—among a score of younger and poorer admirers—two men sued for Betty's hand.

One was Captain James, a likable, susceptible, not over-clever army officer, home on furlough from India. The other was a judge, very old, very gouty, very rich.

And Betty's mother chose the judge, out of all the train of suitors, as her son-in-law-elect. Years had taught worldly wisdom to the once-gay Eliza.

Betty listened in horror to the old man's mumbled vows. Then, at top speed, she fled to Captain James. She told James that her mother was seeking to sacrifice her on the altar of wealth. James, like a true early-Victorian hero, rose manfully to the occasion.

He and Betty eloped, were married by a registrar, and took the next out-bound ship for India.

It was a day of long and slow voyages. Betty beguiled the time on shipboard by a course of behavior such as would have prevented the most charitable fellow passenger from mistaking her for a returning missionary.

There were many Anglo-Indians—officers and civilians—aboard. And Betty's flirtations, with all and sundry, speedily became the scandal of the ship. By the time the vessel docked in India, there were dozens of women ready to spread abroad the bride's fame in her new home land.

English society in India was, and is, in many respects like that of a provincial town. In the official and army set, one member's business is everybody's business.

Nor did Betty take any pains to erase the impressions made by her volunteer advance agents. Like a blazing star, she burst upon the horizon of India army life. Gloriously beautiful, willful, capricious, brilliant, she speedily had a horde of men at her feet—and a still larger number of women at her throat.

Her flirtations were the talk of mess-room and bungalow. Heartlessly, she danced on hearts. There was some subtle quality about her that drove men mad with infatuation.

And her husband? He looked on in horrified wonder. Then he argued and even threatened. At last he shut up and took to drink. Betty wrote contemptuously to a friend, concerning this last phase:

"He spends his time in drinking, and then in sleeping like a gorged boa-constrictor."

James was liked by the English out there, and his friends fiercely resented the domestic treatment that was turning a popular and promising officer into a sodden beast.

One morning James rode away over the hills and neglected to come back. His wife never again heard of him. And at his exit from the scene, the storm broke; a storm of resentment that swept Betty James out beyond even the uttermost fringe of Anglo-Indian society.

She hunted up her generous old step-father, Craigie, and induced him to give her a check for a thousand pounds, to get rid of her forever. She realized another thousand on her votive offerings of jewelry; and, with this capital, she took the dust of India from her pretty slippers.

Here ends Lord Ranelagh's scurrilous narrative, told at Almack's.

On her way back to England, Betty broke her journey at Spain, remaining there long enough to acquire three valuable assets—a Spanish accent, a semi-tolerable knowledge of Spanish dancing, and the ultra-Spanish name of Lola Montez, by which—through mere courtesy to her wishes—let us hereafter call her. Then she burst upon the British public—only to retire amid a salvo of hisses and catcalls.

With the premature fall of the curtain at Her Majesty's Theater, begins the Odyssey of Lola Montez.

She went from London to Germany, where she danced for a time, to but scant applause, at second-rate theaters, and at last could get no more engagements.

Thence she drifted to Brussels, where, according to her own later statement, she was "reduced to singing in the streets to keep from starving." Contemporary malice gives a less creditable version of her means of livelihood in the Belgian capital. It was a period of her life—the black hour before the garish dawn—of which she never afterward would talk.

But before long she was on the stage again; this time at Warsaw, during a revolution. She danced badly and was hissed. But the experience gave her an idea.

She went straightway to Paris, where, by posing as an exiled Polish patriot, she secured an engagement at the Porte St. Martin Theater. It was her last hope.

The "Polish patriot" story brought a goodly crowd to Lola's first performance in Paris. But, after a single dance, she heard the horribly familiar sound of hisses.

And at the first hiss, her Irish spirit blazed into a crazy rage; a rage that was the turning point of her career.

Glaring first at the spectators like an angry cat, Lola next glared around the stage for a weapon wherewith to wreak her fury upon them. But the stage was bare.

Frantic, she kicked off her slippers, and then tore loose her heavy-buckled garters. With these intimate missiles she proceeded to pelt the grinning occupants of the front row, accompanying the volley with a high-pitched, venomous Billingsgate tirade in three languages.

That was enough. On the instant the hisses were drowned in a salvo of applause that shook the rafters, Lola Montez had "arrived." Paris grabbed her to its big, childish, fickle heart.

She was a spitfire and she couldn't dance. But she had given the Parisians a genuine thrill. She was a success. Two slippers and two garters, hurled with feminine rage and feminine inaccuracy into the faces of a line of bored theatergoers, had achieved more for the fair artillerist than the most exquisite dancing could have hoped to.

Lola was the talk of the hour. An army of babbling Ranelaghs could not now have dimmed her fame.

Dujarrier, all-powerful editor of "La Presse," laid his somewhat shopworn heart at her feet. Dumas, Balzac, and many another celebrity sued for her favor. Her reign over the hearts of men had recommenced.

But Lola Montez never rode long on prosperity's wave-crest. A French adorer, jealous of Dujarrier's prestige with the lovely dancer, challenged the great editor to a duel. Dujarrier, for love of Lola, accepted the challenge—and was borne off the field of honor with a bullet through his brain.

Lola sought to improve the occasion by swathing herself somberly and right becomingly in crape, and by vowing a vendetta against the slayer. But before she could profit by the excellent advertisement, Dumas chanced to say something to a friend—who repeated it to another friend, who repeated it to all Paris—that set the superstitious, mid-century Frenchmen to looking askance at Lola and to avoiding her gaze. Said Monte Cristo's creator:

"She has the evil eye. She will bring a curse upon any man who loves her."

And by that (perhaps) senseless speech, Dumas drove Lola Montez from Paris. But she took with her all her new-born prestige as a danseuse. She took it first to Berlin. There she was bidden to dance at a court reception tendered by King Frederick William, of Prussia.

The rooms of the palace, on the night of the reception, were stiflingly hot. Lola asked for a glass of water. A much-belaced and bechained chamberlain—to whom the request was repeated by a footman—sent word to Lola that she was there to dance for the king and not to order her fellow-servants around.

The net result of this answer was another Irish rage. Lola, regardless of her pompous surroundings, rushed up to the offending chamberlain and loudly made known her exact opinion of him. She added that she was tired of dealing with understrappers, and that, unless the king himself would bring her a glass of water, there would be no dreamy Spanish dance at the palace that night.

The scandalized officials moved forward in a body to hustle the lesemajeste perpetrator out of the sacred precincts. But the rumpus had reached the ears of King Frederick William himself, at the far end of the big room. His majesty came forward in person to learn the cause of the disturbance. He saw a marvelously beautiful woman in a marvelously abusive rage.

To the monarch's amused queries, the chamberlain bleated out the awful, sacrilegious, schrecklich tale of Lola's demand. The king did not order her loaded with chains and haled to the donjon keep. Instead, he gave a laughing order—this gracious and gentle sovereign who had so keen an eye for beauty.

A moment later a lackey brought the king a glass of water. First gallantly touching the goblet to his own lips, his majesty handed it with a deep obeisance to Lola.

Except for the advertisement it gave her, she could gain no real advantage from this odd introduction to a king. For, next day, she received a secret, but overwhelmingly official hint that an instant departure not only from Berlin, but from Prussia, too, would be one of the wisest moves in her whole career. She went.

To Bavaria, and to greatness.

Lola Montez, the Spanish dancer, was billed at a Munich theater. She danced there but three times. For, on the third evening, the royal box was occupied by a drowsy-eyed sexagenarian whose uniform coat was ablaze with decorations.

The old gentleman was Ludwig I. Dei gratia, King of Bavaria, a ruler who up to this time had been beloved of his subjects; and whose worst vice, in his people's eyes, was that he encouraged art rather than arms.

Ludwig watched breathlessly while Lola danced. Afterward he sent for her to come to the royal box and be presented to him. She never danced again in Bavaria.

For next day Ludwig introduced her at court as "my very good friend." Lola dazzled Munich with her jewels and her equipages. The king presented her with a huge and hideous mansion. He stretched the laws by having her declared a Bavarian subject. And, having done that, he bestowed upon her the titles of "Baroness von Rosenthal and Countess von Landfeld." Next, he granted her an annuity of twenty thousand florins. Things were coming Lola's way, and coming fast.

The Bavarians did not dislike her—at first. When Ludwig forced his queen to receive her and to pin upon the dancer-emeritus' breast the Order of St. Theresa, there was, to be sure, a shocked murmur. But it soon died down. Had Lola been content with her luck, she might have continued indefinitely in her new and delightfully comfortable mode of life.

But, according to Lola's theory, a mortal who is content with success would be content with failure. And she strove to play a greater role than the fat one assigned to her by the love-sick old king.

She had read of Pompadour and other royal favorites whose vagrom whims swayed the destinies of Europe. She sought to be a world power; the power behind the throne; the woman who could mold the politics of a dynasty. And she laid her plans accordingly.

It was not even a dream, this new ambition of Lola's. It was a comic-opera fantasy. Bavaria, at best, was only a little German state with no special voice in the congress of nations. And Lola herself had no more aptitude for politics than she had for dancing. Nor did she stop to consider that Germans in 1846 were much more likely to tolerate a fair foreigner's meddling with their puppet king's domestic affairs than with matters of public welfare.

But Lola Montez ever did the bulk of her sane thinking when it was too late. So she proceeded to put her idiotic plans into operation.

First, she cajoled King Ludwig into dismissing in a body his perfectly capable and well-liked ministry. As delighted with that success as is the village cut-up when he pulls a chair from under the portly constable—and with even less wholesome fear of the result to herself—Lola next persuaded the king to change his whole policy of state. Then things began to happen.

One morning Lola awoke in her ugly and costly mansion to find the street in front of the door blocked by a highly unfriendly mob, whose immediate ambition seemed to be the destruction of the house and herself. This was the signal for one more Irish rage, the last on public record.

Lola, throwing a wrapper over her nightgown, snatched up a loaded pistol, and, pushing aside her screaming servants, ran out on the front steps.

At sight of her the crowd roared in fury and made a dash for the steps. Lola retaliated by emptying her revolver into the advancing mob. Events had moved rapidly since the primitive days when she was content to bombard her detractors with slippers and garter buckles.

The rioters halted, before the fusillade. Before they could combine for another rush, and while Lola from the topmost step was reviling them in her best and fiercest German, a company of the royal bodyguard, headed by the old king himself, charged through the crowd and rescued the angry woman.

But, though Ludwig had just saved her from a sudden and extremely unpleasant form of death, he was not strong enough to stem the avalanche of public opinion that crashed down upon her. This same avalanche proceeded to brush Lola out of her big and hideous house, to knock away from her her titles of baroness and countess and her twenty-thousand-florin annuity, and to whirl her across the Bavarian frontier with stern instructions never to return.

Incidentally, poor old King Ludwig came in for so much unpopularity on her account that he was forced to abdicate. Thus, in her own fall from power, Lola had also dragged a once-popular king off his throne a noteworthy achievement, in that pre-Gaby-Deslys period, for an Irish girl with a variegated past.

The Ludwig scandal preceded Lola wherever she tried to go. The divinity that hedges a king was everywhere on guard against her. The gate to practically every country in Europe was slammed in her face. Folk fell to repeating Dumas' "evil-eye" words, and to applying them to discrowned old Ludwig. Lola Montez was not wanted anywhere; certainly nowhere east of the Atlantic.

So she came to New York. Here there were no kings, to bar her out lest they share Ludwig's fate. And Americans knew little and cared less about the evil eye. If Lola Montez could make good on the stage, America was willing to welcome her: If not, it had no further general interest in her.

Moreover, she was well past thirty; at an age when the first glory of a woman's siren charms may reasonably be supposed to be slightly blurred. New Yorkers were curious to see her, on account of her history; but that was their only interest in her.

She danced at the old Broadway Theater. People thronged the theater for the first few performances. Then, having gazed their fill on the Bavarian throne's wrecker and finding she could not dance, they stayed away; and Lola ended her engagement at the Broadway to the hackneyed "beggarly array of empty benches."

An enterprising manager—P. T. Barnum, if I remember aright—raked up the Byron story and starred Lola in a dramatization of Lord Byron's poem "Mazeppa." But people here had already looked at her, and the production was a failure. Next she appeared in one or two miserably written plays, based on her own European adventures. These, too, failed. She then wrote a beauty book that had a small sale, and wrote also a drearily stupid volume of humor, designed as a mock "Guide to Courtship."

On her way to America, Lola had stopped in England long enough to captivate and marry a British army officer, Heald by name. But she soon left him, and arrived in this country without visible matrimonial ties.

New York having tired of her, Lola went West. She created a brief, but lively, furore among the gold-boom towns along the Pacific coast; not so much by reason of her story as for the wondrous charm that was still hers. She gave lectures in California, and then made an Australian tour.

Coming back from the Antipodes, she settled for a time in San Francisco. There, in rather quick succession, she married twice. One of her two California spouses was Hull, the famous pioneer newspaper owner, of San Francisco.

But she quickly wearied of the West, and of her successive husbands. Back she came to New York. And—to the wonder of all, and the incredulity of most—she there announced that, though she had been a great sinner, she was now prepared to devote the rest of her life to penance.

Strangely enough, her new resolve was not a pose. Even in her heyday she had given lavishly to charity. Now she took up rescue work among women. She did much good in a quiet way, spending what money she had on the betterment of her sex's unfortunates, and toiling night and day in their behalf.

Under this unaccustomed mode of life, Lola's health went to pieces. She was sent to a sanitarium in Astoria, L.I. And there, in poverty and half forgotten, she died. Kindly neighbors scraped together enough money to bury her.

Thus ended in wretched anticlimax the meteor career of Lola Montez; Wonder Woman and wanderer; over-thrower of a dynasty and worse-than-mediocre dancer. Some one has called her "the last of the great adventuresses." And that is perhaps her best epitaph.

Her neglected grave—in Greenwood Cemetery, in Brooklyn, by the way—bears no epitaph at all. That last resting place of a very tired woman is marked merely by a plain headstone, whose dimmed lettering reads:

Mrs. Eliza Gilbert. Died June 16, 1861. Age 42.

One trembles to think of the near-royal Irish rage that would have possessed Lola if, at her baroness-countess-Bavarian zenith, she could have foreseen that dreary little postscript to her lurid life missive.