Princesses Behaving Badly (13 page)

If Catherine’s goal was to gain Rhodes’s romantic affections, as Jourdan claimed, she was barking up the wrong tree. Rhodes was either a confirmed bachelor or a closeted homosexual. Initially, at least, she seemed to have a different objective in mind: political influence and access. Through Rhodes, she met several South African politicians; as a princess, she was an immediate sensation in Cape Town, a fixture at all the most important social events and a regular visitor to Parliament. Rhodes’s aides called her
“Princess Razzledazzle” for all her intrigues and attempts at political maneuvering. Within a few months, however, she had worn out her welcome, especially after Rhodes heard tell that she was saying they were having an affair, even that they were engaged. Catherine was indeed spreading bizarre and untrue stories, and her reasons for doing so remain unclear though may have had to do with gaining political credibility. Unfortunately for her, the plan backfired.

In the meantime, the shifting political landscape turned dangerous with the advent of the Boer War. With Rhodes under siege in the town of Kimberly for four months, Catherine contacted Dutch leaders of the Afrikaner Bond party, with the intention of creating a broader Anglo-African Party and reconciling the political elite to Rhodes. She even started a newspaper called
Greater Britain
, devoted to his defense. Catherine’s behavior had crossed the line into weird; she wanted to be the one who orchestrated the rise of Rhodes to the role of prime minister of a federated South African state. Rhodes, however, did not want “the old Princess” in his corner, nor did he want her around, period. But no matter how far he ran, she pursued him with undaunted zeal.

Catherine probably kept up her gambit because by that time she was broke. In March 1900, she wrote asking Rhodes to act as her financial guarantor. He never responded in writing, though he later said that he instructed his attorney to inform her that he would pay her outstanding hotel bill if she agreed to leave the country. In April Catherine did leave, but only for a little while. After a short stay in London, during which she penned newspaper articles pushing for Rhodes’s political rebirth, she again boarded a ship bound for Cape Town in June. At some point in the next few months, relations between Rhodes and Catherine erupted into all-out war, with some historians claiming it started when she began blackmailing the object of her unusual affection.

What did she have on Rhodes? Likely the so-called missing telegrams, documents related to the failed Jameson Raid that were supposedly evidence that the British secretary of state for the colonies had foreknowledge of the raid and worked out the plan with Rhodes. How Catherine got hold of the telegrams is a bit of a mystery, but it’s plausible she had stolen them during one of her unattended visits to Rhodes’s office.
Whatever the documents were, she had them and he wanted them—the two reportedly had a “violent quarrel” over them. Authorities subsequently searched her room but turned up nothing.

Catherine’s behavior took an even more overtly criminal turn in 1901, when, desperate for money, she began forging Rhodes’s name on promissory notes to the tune of £24,000. When denied at a bank, she turned to a less reputable moneylender: a loan shark. Lies compounded upon lies, and over the next ten weeks, Catherine got in over her head so deeply that little could be done to extricate her. When a Mr. Tom Louw brought action against both Catherine and Rhodes for nonpayment, Catherine’s crimes came to light. Neither defendant showed up at the hearing; the case was postponed, and Catherine was arrested on 24 counts of fraud and forgery. She was released a week later after mysteriously finding bail money. The trial was set for February 1902.

Now it was Catherine’s turn to be the victim of blackmail—Rhodes’s camp offered to pay off the forged checks if she returned the papers. Catherine refused; she seemed to be most concerned with escaping South Africa. “If I don’t go tomorrow, I shall be put in the street or in prison. Suicide is better a thousand times,” she wrote to a former friend. So Rhodes decided to pursue a different tack: public humiliation. He traveled back to South Africa to appear in court to discredit “that woman.” Catherine repeatedly postponed her court appearance, pleading illness. In her absence, the checks were declared to be forgeries, and Rhodes was vindicated. But because it was a civil matter, Catherine went unpunished.

And she would have escaped unscathed had she not gone and done something completely crazy: she sued Rhodes for a £2,000 bill. He responded by turning her case over to criminal prosecution. Unless she could prove that Rhodes had signed the checks, she was jail bound. Catherine decided to wage a bizarre campaign against her accuser. She paced in the road outside Rhodes’s cottage, tormenting the man who, by all accounts, was rapidly dying of heart disease. If she was deliberately trying to kill him, it worked: Rhodes died on March 26, at only 49 years old.

A month later, Catherine stood trial. The whole thing was a farce: she called no witnesses, had no defense, and seemed disinclined to help her lawyers come up with one. She appeared confused under questioning, and her answers often provoked laughter from the audience. Two days later, having already been convicted by the court of public opinion, Catherine was found guilty of fraud and forgery and sentenced to two years in prison. “If that is justice,” she said, “I pity those who are administered by people having such a peculiar idea of it.”

Catherine served 16 months in a South African prison. Her own lawyer, who by this time had turned against her, claimed she was released early because she’d made life so difficult for the guards and staff (the real reason: ill health). No documents relating to the Jameson Raid were ever found in her possession.

When Catherine’s daughter heard that her mother had been sentenced to prison, she declared that “she regretted the sentence had not been harder.” Only Catherine’s half brother believed in her innocence; the rest of her family abandoned her. She emerged from prison nearly destitute. She married again in 1911, this time to a businessman named Charles Emile-Kolb, a brief union about which little is known.

Around this time, Catherine moved back to St. Petersburg and the bosom of her old court. She managed to live off her writing, publishing books purporting to reveal the inside scoop on European royalty, including
Secrets of Dethroned Royalty, Royal Marriage Market of Europe, Confessions of the Czarina
, and, most intriguingly,
Black Dwarf of Vienna and Other Weird Stories
.

But the princess was not quite done with the bizarre public episodes. In 1913 she resumed her old nom de plume, Count Paul Vasili, and in a book titled
Behind the Veil of the Russian Court
, she let slip the one secret the Russian court had tried so hard to hide: that the young tsarevich suffered from hemophilia. Catherine was immediately found out and deported (which might’ve been for the best, given that the Bolshevik Revolution was about to cut a mighty swath through the aristocracy). She
moved to Stockholm, continued to write prodigiously, and embarked on a lecture tour. In April 1917, she traveled to America to give a talk on Russian royalty and the revolution but was held at Ellis Island and ordered to explain her “career in South Africa.” She eventually made it to Manhattan, where she tried to earn a living as a writer. More often, however, she was the subject of news items, such as the time she showed up at a lecture to denounce as a hoax the Protocols of Zion, a supposed Jewish plot for world domination, or when she was turned out of a hotel because she couldn’t pay her bill.

So although her title earned her headlines, it didn’t always earn her bylines. Over the next decade, Catherine lived hand to mouth, sometimes working as a telephone switchboard operator while trying to sell wordy articles offering her royal perspective on world events. In 1932, she wrote her second autobiography,
It Really Happened
, detailing her life in Europe and the United States and leaving out everything about South Africa. In it, she describes her life as a broke princess living in a New York tenement and befriending the local hooker with a heart of gold, a little dying girl, a haggard old woman who turns out to be dollars-stuffed-in-the-mattress rich, and a boy abused by his drunken father whom Catherine takes under her wing. As one biographer noted, “The title seems to have been a misnomer; it is unlikely that much of what she describes ever really occurred.”

At some point in her adventures, Catherine converted to Catholicism and became a U.S. citizen. She later said, “I really became an American in heart. I cannot conceive of living anywhere else”—and she never did. She died in New York on May 12, 1941, at age 84. Her family had never forgiven her, in life or in death.

Stephanie von Hohenlohe

S
EPTEMBER
16, 1891–J
UNE
13, 1972
S
OCIAL
C
IRCLES ACROSS
E
UROPE AND
A
MERICA

I
n 1938 Princess Stephanie von Hohenlohe arrived in Manhattan with a visitor’s visa and 106 pieces of luggage. The picture of a glittering socialite, she was greeted by the press—and by the FBI. Stephanie’s wit and charm endeared her to nearly everyone she met—everyone, that is, except Allied intelligence. They thought Adolf
Hitler’s own “dear Princess” was a devious “gold digger,” a blackmailer, and an amoral Nazi agent. But getting her out of the country, well, that would be tough.

Born into a middle-class family in Vienna in 1891, Stephanie clawed her way into the aristocracy armed with little more than a fine profile, an ability to flirt, and a useful manipulative streak. In 1914 she married an Austro-Hungarian prince, despite being two months pregnant with another man’s child. Though they divorced in 1920, Stephanie kept her title and, more important, her connections to more than half the royal houses of Europe. It didn’t take long for her to realize the value of her high-society contacts. She’d always had a taste for luxury (this was the woman who had brought her servants
and
a bathtub to the front lines while serving as a nurse in World War I), so when the cash ran out, she took to selling the only assets she had left: introductions and connections.

And perhaps more. By 1928, Stephanie was under the watchful eye of British and French intelligence. Documents found in her Paris apartment in 1932, shortly after she made a quick getaway to London, revealed that she was being paid by the Germans to befriend Lord Rothermere, owner of the
Daily Mail
, Britain’s most popular newspaper. She was tasked with convincing him to use his papers to campaign for the return of German territory lost in the Treaty of Versailles. She eventually got to Rothermere, and her relationship with him was quite lucrative for both her and her Nazi connections. The same year she left Paris under a cloud of suspicion, she inked a deal with the press baron to be his European “society columnist” for £5,000 a year (about $433,000 in today’s money), with an additional £2,000 for every completed assignment. Rothermere asked Stephanie to introduce him to Hitler, the new chancellor of the Reich, which was exactly what the fledgling Führer wanted. (He knew the value of good propaganda.) With Stephanie’s coaching, Rothermere became one of the Nazi Party’s most outspoken supporters in Britain. In 1938, their relationship ended, after Rothermere complained that she was asking for money all the time.

But Rothermere wasn’t Stephanie’s only gig. Throughout the 1930s she’d become increasingly valuable to the Nazis, especially because her conquests reached to the very top of the British aristocracy: King Edward VIII and the woman for whom he abdicated, Wallis Simpson. In fact, the only thing that stopped Stephanie from succeeding in keeping the pro-Nazi king on the throne was Parliament’s dislike for the twice-divorced American commoner with a man’s name.

By the mid-1930s, Stephanie had “wormed her way into society circles in London,” according to her official secret service file, gathering intel on the country’s influential people, spreading pro-German propaganda, and seeding the elite with Nazi sympathizers. She was under near-constant surveillance, though the Home Office was reluctant to kick her out owing to the “milieu in which the princess moved” (read: powerful friends who’d pitch a fit).

Stephanie’s star in the Nazi Party was rising. She was their favorite hostess, bringing together party officials and European leaders for cocktails and conversation. Hitler invited her to his mountain retreat and showered her with gifts: bouquets of roses, portraits of himself in expensive frames dedicated to his “Dear Princess,” a sheepdog puppy she called Wolf, after his own German shepherd, even a castle. In 1937, she was awarded the Honorary Cross of the German Red Cross for her “tireless activities on behalf of the German Reich.” In 1936–38 she received VIP invitations to attend Hitler’s famous goose-stepping rallies, even sitting on the Reich’s platform in 1938. That same year, she became an “honorary Aryan” when she was awarded the Nazis’ highest honor, the Gold Medal of Honor.