Princesses Behaving Badly (14 page)

Stephanie did her part, and more, for the party, but her efforts didn’t make her popular with everyone in the Nazi hierarchy. Fickle, paranoid Hitler began to agree with what people were saying about the princess—that she was Jewish (which she was; her mother had converted to Catholicism), that she was a blackmailer (a known fact), and that she had fingers in too many pies (definitely true). In early 1939, when the Nazi Party cut her off financially, Stephanie was on her own.

She tried to get her old job back with Rothermere but he refused, so she decided to take a gamble. She sued him for breach of contract, claiming he’d agreed to pay her in perpetuity. It was a move that looked a lot like blackmail, particularly when Stephanie made it clear that if he didn’t pony up, she’d publish her memoirs, revealing Rothermere as a treasonous Nazi sympathizer who liked to chase after much younger women.

Not one to be bullied, Rothermere let the case go forward, and in November 1939 it reached the British high court. Stephanie lost, and even worse, the trial had shown her to be close with Hitler, which was really bad because, by then, Britain was at war with Germany. Shortly after the trial ended, a group of society ladies at the Ritz shouted at her, “Get out, you filthy spy!”

So she did. With nowhere left to go, 48-year-old Stephanie headed to America. When she and her 106 pieces of luggage landed in New York in December, the press was waiting for Hitler’s precious princess, as was the FBI. Both trailed her assiduously (although it was the paparazzi she once found in her hotel bathroom). Ever the survivalist, Stephanie once again started seeding Nazi sympathy among high society, probably in an effort to regain favor with her old friends. The American government didn’t take kindly to her efforts, and when her temporary visa expired in November 1940, an extension was denied by J. Edgar Hoover himself.

It was then that Stephanie got desperate—and dramatic. She appealed directly to President Franklin Roosevelt, but he showed her little sympathy. She threatened suicide and claimed to be “too ill” to testify at her deportation hearing, even going so far as to arrive on a stretcher delivered by an ambulance. All to no avail. On March 7, 1941, Roosevelt gave a direct order to get “that Hohenlohe woman” out of the country. The next day, she was arrested.

Stephanie’s son later said that she had a “special talent for turning former enemies into devoted friends.” Which is quite an understatement, given her next feat. In the space of a few hours, the prisoner princess met and seduced the head of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, a married father of four named Lemuel Scholfield. On May 19, he allowed Stephanie to be released on bail. Handily, one of the conditions was that she remain in contact with her INS regional director—Scholfield, with
whom she was now having frequent sleepovers.

Stephanie may have gained a temporary reprieve, but on December 8, 1941, the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and America’s entrance into World War II, she was arrested yet again. This time, no one was taking any chances—she was placed in solitary confinement at an immigration center in New Jersey. The besotted Scholfield tried using his influence on Hoover but only succeeded in enraging him; he was forced to resign. Stephanie was transferred to an internment camp for enemy aliens in Seagoville, Texas, where she spent the rest of the war behind barbed wire by order of the president. She was the last detainee to leave the camp, in 1945, and Scholfield was waiting for her; they lived together until his death in 1954.

Amazingly, Stephanie was able yet again to claw her way back onto the society pages and into the good graces of powerful people. In 1965, 20 years after her release from the internment camp, she was invited to Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidential inauguration. Stephanie died in 1972, at the age of 80, and though she was old and ill, her death still came as a shock to those who knew her. Given how deftly she’d managed the trick of survival, no one thought the resilient princess would ever let go of life.

Lucrezia

A
PRIL
18, 1480–J
UNE
24, 1519
I
TALY

I
t was said that the beautiful Lucrezia Borgia wore a hollow ring filled with poison, convenient for slipping the stuff into unattended drinks. It was said that she murdered her lovers when she was done with them, and that she bathed in blood to maintain her flawless skin. It was said that she and her brother, the prodigiously homicidal Cesare, were lovers. It was unsurprising, really, that people whispered such terrible, tantalizing things about her—after all, her family’s reputation as a proto-Mafia clan remains potent even today.

But the real Lucrezia Borgia wasn’t a murderess, and she probably was never intimate with her brother. In fact, despite a rocky young adulthood that saw her married three times before the age of 22, she eventually blossomed into a woman you might actually like to have tea with. Just maybe pour your own cup.

By the time of Lucrezia’s birth, in 1480, the Borgia family was one of the most powerful clans in Renaissance Italy and Spain. It was certainly one of the most corrupt: Borgias murdered, married, lied, and cheated their way into power, and once they had it, they went to great lengths to keep it. They were, effectively, a Renaissance mafia family, but with even fewer laws to curtail their crimes.

Lucrezia’s father, Rodrigo, was a nephew of the late Pope Calixtus III. Though clearly not suited for the celibate life, at age 25 he was made a cardinal, a position that came with a lot of power and a massive income. At the time, the Roman Catholic church was the political, as well as the spiritual, center of Western Europe; it governed the Papal States, a region that encompassed a wide swath in the center of what is now Italy. The church and its head, the pope, wielded major influence over other Italian city-states, including the kingdom of Naples to the south and powerful Florence to the north, as well as the Catholic monarchies of Spain and France. It was also as corrupt as any ruling institution can be, which explains how Rodrigo could be considered a legitimate ecclesiastic leader while hosting wild parties replete with young ladies, wine, dancing, and lots of unpriestly sex. He reportedly fathered as many as nine children, at least four (including Lucrezia and Cesare) with his longtime mistress, the married noblewoman Vannozza Cattanei. But if the Borgia children were illegitimate, they were never made to feel that way. Beautiful Lucrezia was treated every bit like the princess she would later become.

When Lucrezia was 12, Cardinal Rodrigo was elected pope, taking the name Alexander VI, a triumph that cemented the Borgias’ fortunes and made her father the most powerful man in Europe. It also meant that pretty Lucrezia, who according to contemporaries had long blonde hair,
hazel eyes that could appear gray or tawny, and an “admirably proportioned” bust, was the Borgias’ new most-valuable asset.

Pope Alexander was exceptionally adept at marrying off Lucrezia for maximum gain—each of her three marriages was to a more politically important family. The first, when Lucrezia was just 13, made her the wife of Count Giovanni Sforza, member of a rival clan and ruler of Pesaro, a city-state on the Adriatic coast. But Sforza proved a disappointment: though terrified of his new relations, he was equally afraid of his own family. Lucrezia’s father determined she would be worth more were she married to someone else, and so when she was 17, he moved to have her marriage annulled. He was the pope, after all, but he had to claim that Sforza was impotent and the marriage was never consummated. That Sforza’s first wife had died in childbirth would seem to indicate that he was able to perform his husbandly duties, but overlooking that fact wasn’t nearly as difficult as getting Sforza to agree to sign the divorce papers. The count, as you can imagine, was not enthusiastic about telling the world he was impotent, but ultimately he capitulated to pressure from the Borgia family as well as his own.

Meanwhile, Lucrezia embarked on an ill-fated dalliance with independence. While her family wrestled over her divorce, she removed herself to a convent outside Rome. But if you think she couldn’t get up to much trouble there, think again—she soon found herself pregnant after a passionate affair with Pedro Calderon, a Spaniard in service to her father. Within weeks of her family discovering the pregnancy, Calderon was dead—Cesare supposedly stabbed him in the Vatican at the pope’s feet, although a papal scribe says that he “fell not of his own will into the Tiber.” The lady-in-waiting who’d tried to help Lucrezia cover up her growing bump was pushed into the river after him. The fate of the child, whom Lucrezia may have delivered in March 1498, is unknown.

Such conditions would have made any other woman unmarriable, and gossips were calling Lucrezia the “greatest whore there ever was in Rome.” Yet suitors clamored for her hand, and by August 1498 she was again at
the altar. Her second marriage, to 17-year-old Alfonso of Aragon, the duke of Bisceglie and illegitimate son of the king of Naples, made Lucrezia a duchess and earned her the title of princess of Salerno. Lucrezia adapted well to her new husband, with whom, by all accounts, she was very much in love. Within six months, she was pregnant with their son, who was born on November 1, 1499. But people who became inconvenient to the Borgia family had a tendency to die, and the young duke was becoming very inconvenient, indeed.

Renaissance politics were as tangled as a bowl of pasta (sorry), but here’s the long story less long: Cesare, who had recently married a French noblewoman, wanted help from France to conquer the city-states of southern Italy. Because France was warring against Naples, Lucrezia’s marriage to a Neapolitan was an obstacle to family business. So one day in 1500, “unknown” assailants attacked Alfonso in St. Peter’s Square, leaving him severely wounded but alive. Lucrezia nursed him back to health, only to have him later strangled by armed attackers. As a contemporary reported, “Since Don Alfonso refused to die of his wounds, he was strangled in his bed.” There was no doubt who’d commissioned the murder—all signs pointed to Cesare. Aware that he was the prime suspect, Cesare claimed his brother-in-law had tried to kill him with a crossbow while he walked in the garden and therefore deserved to die. Exactly no one believed that story, and gossips claimed that Alfonso was murdered not just for hindering the alliance with the French, but also because he’d replaced Cesare in his sister’s affections.

Lucrezia was devastated by her husband’s death. According to his former tutor, who was present at both attacks, Lucrezia filled the palace with “shrieking, lamenting, and wailing.” Her constant weeping and raging against her father (who, incidentally, had no part in the murder) and her brother proved too much; they sent her and her infant son to Nepi, a small town some 30 miles north of the Vatican, to recover her senses. And though she had loved her husband, Lucrezia loved her brother Cesare even more (how much more is open for debate); she soon forgave him. Next task on the family to-do list: find her another status-boosting husband.

Lucrezia’s third and final walk down the aisle was with another Alfonso, this time Alfonso d’Este, duke of Ferrara. This match was the trickiest: at first Lucrezia seemed disinclined to remarry, complaining to her
father that, to date, all of her husbands had been—
ahem
—“very unlucky.” What’s more, Ercole d’Este, Alfonso’s father, didn’t trust the Borgias as far as he could throw them, and so he spent years delaying the marriage. Courtiers continually tried to convince him of Lucrezia’s personal modesty, her Christian devotion, and her good sense; Lucrezia, who was nothing if not ambitious, also started a frequent correspondence with Ercole in the hopes of impressing him. In the end, it was probably the sizable Borgia dowry and power, as much as her personal charms, that facilitated the match. Once again, Lucrezia bent herself to her family’s will, leaving her 2-year-old son in Rome to wed the duke.