Seductress (19 page)

The imagination, however, was her real strike zone. “Let ’um
wonder,
” she told women; spook men’s minds with humor, surprise, distance, and mystery. Flex your egos, she said, and take command of love. Men were like apes trying to play the violin; women ought to run the sexual show.

Run the show she did. On the verge of seventy she chose a chorus boy from her Vegas “muscleman act” and found “ultimately what every woman wants,” a senior erotic dream. Thirty-three, blue-eyed, and abulge in all the right places, Chester Ribonsky changed his name to Paul Novak to please her and believed God had put him “on this earth to take care of Miss West.”

He cooked for her, supervised her exercise, and spent romantic weekends with her at a Malibu beach cottage that housed two pet monkeys and murals of naked men and golden phalluses. At “seventy-sex,” her libido still smoked. She rewrote the screenplay of
Myra Breckenridge
so that
she
(and not the other way around) put a young student in the hospital after a tumble, and she grabbed Paul’s crotch at dinner when he denied her dessert and said, “This is one thing you’re not going to tell baby she can’t have.” She died at eighty-seven, an eponym for
bambola
and an icon on the scale of Marilyn Monroe, who, as she pointed out, couldn’t “even talk.”

Unlike Marilyn, Mae was “genuinely dangerous.” She dredged up one of patriarchy’s worst nightmares and shoved its noses in it: the older woman unchained. Promiscuous, multiorgasmic, dead attractive to the opposite sex, and triumphant over them. “I was the first liberated woman, y’know,” she shrewdly observed. My “message [was] a little too premature.” She was drummed out of Hollywood and reduced to a comic caricature, but no one could beat down this mythic senior manslayer.

Several contemporaries grasped her numinous significance. One critic associated Mae with “a vanished race of regal sirens”; Mussolini called her a fertility idol, and Fellini wanted her to play the old “erotic witch” in
Satyricon,
the only woman sex-wise enough to give the jaded hero an erection. Dalí painted her as a modern goddess of desire, her face superimposed on a scarlet wallpapered shrine, her hair looped over a curtain rod in long blond temple veils.

Mae, though no student of mythology, wouldn’t have disagreed. “I’m the woman’s ego,” she trumpeted, a “regal” “sex personality that requires multiple men.” Or as her
Diamond Lil
book proclaimed, “Ancient Babylon in all its glory had no Queen of Sin to equal her. Sex was her scepter and she knew how to use it.”

 

Mae would have credited another spell, besides sex, to her erotic sway: money and status. Wealth, she loved to say (as one of Hollywood’s richest stars), “is stronger than a love-potion.” Erotic texts through the ages have celebrated the aphrodisiacal impact of cash. “No loadstone so attractive,” wrote the sixteenth-century Robert Burton, “as that of profit.” And it can be a sizzling turn-on in older women, who often gain riches, authority, and rank with age.

We associate alpha sex appeal with men, but women create the same power buzz. The first goddess, after all, was a divine
ganze,
an almighty mistress of the universe who owned the real estate, cornered the money market, and called the shots. The legendary Celtic crone Morgan le Fay of Glamorgan (origin of “glamour”) sat in the CEO’s seat at the Green Knight’s table and controlled the show.

Late-nineteenth-century America, of all places, produced a mogul Silver Fox who made out like a bandit with men and money. She used a man’s name, Frank Leslie, and stormed the world with the lust of a robber baron. When women her age shuffled into the sunset to hook antimacassars, Mrs. Frank Leslie, “the colossus” of “publishers’ row,” ran a newspaper empire and raked in husbands, lovers, and admirers. Only older women, she declared, had the “gift of fascination,” a gift in her case that traded heavily on clout and capital.

At the apex of feminine invisibility in public life, she was the “most famous and successful woman” of her time, author of seven books and nearly fifty articles, and head of Frank Leslie Enterprises, the biggest publisher of books and periodicals in the nation. She was also a hell of a
femme d’un certain âge.

In her sixth decade a marquis and a prince came to blows over her in Hyde Park, a noted poet eulogized her, beaux crowded her box at the opera, and a young literary swell became her fourth husband after a four-day courtship. No modest matron, Frank identified with Napoleon, swanked around like an “undisputed queen,” and reinvented herself goddess-wise, changing her name a total of eight times.

Frank (née Miriam Florence Folline) had good reason to reinvent herself. Although she fantasized a New Orleans childhood of lazy days on grillwork verandas, she grew up as seductresses tend to—off the curve, in hardship. She was born illegitimate and lived a poverty-stricken existence in an aberrant household.

Her eccentric father, however, a failed cotton broker, absolved her from a southern belle’s education in genteel idiocy. In a crackpot scheme he grilled Miriam from age three for a “spectacular and exalted career,” subjecting her to dumbbell workouts, cold plunges, and a crash course in Western culture. By ten she was fluent in four languages.

Her precocity didn’t stop with academics. When her family moved to New York City to run a boardinghouse, she traded sexual favors for borrowed diamonds from a jewelry clerk named David Peacock. Her mother forced the couple to marry, and at eighteen the “Young Aspasia of the South” was already a divorcée, wise in men, jewels, and book learning and ramping for adventures beyond the classroom.

At this juncture she found the siren’s classic open sesame, a guide and guru. After Miriam’s brother committed suicide over a failed affair, the penitent ex-mistress appeared on the Folline doorstep and offered to employ his sister. The mistress was none other than Lola Montez, perhaps the most brilliant “mankilling spectacle” of the century. Fandango dancer, international heartbreaker, and fomenter of riots and a Bavarian revolution, Lola had just launched a theatrical tour of the East Coast.

She rechristened Miriam Minnie Montez and cast her in playlets as a “noble, rich, and beautiful widow” who ruins men. She primed Miriam for the part. As the archmaven of seduction she taught her “sister” the ropes, from the basics—hygiene, costume, conversation, and sexpertise—to the bravura moves of erotic brinkmanship and prestidigitation. Always a quick learner, Miriam seduced a married congressman after two months on the road and moved to his love nest in New York City.

There she plotted her next move and waited for her cards to turn up. The card in question was no king of diamonds, but he sufficed for a starter marriage, an almost universal feature of seductress’s careers. Ephraim Squier, an archaeologist fifteen years her elder, had written the definitive book on serpent symbolism and knew a divine avatar (the moon goddess’s ageless snake mascot) when he saw one. They married in 1857, and for four years Miriam kept a low profile, translating two French books and founding a New York Spanish newspaper.

Then the swarthy Frank Leslie arrived on the scene and hired her husband for his newspaper. It was instant fireworks. Frank, the father of American tabloid journalism, published three blockbuster newspapers and pulsated sex appeal. When he took the Squiers to Lincoln’s inaugural ball, Miriam went in for the kill.

Though unpretty by any gauge—a face with cigar store Indian’s nose, square chin, and pinched little putto mouth—Miriam “took down” all the ladies at the dance. She wore a white décolleté tulle gown that made the most of her lavish curves and an ivy wreath around a tumbling mane of copper curls. Her “beauty,” wrote Frank in his newspaper the next day, “bewitched the crowd”; her “grace” and “sprightly and intellectual conversation” ravished dignitaries. She was, in short, the “acknowledged belle of the ball.”

Two weeks later Frank left his wife and children and moved in with the Squiers, where he took up residence in a room adjoining Miriam’s boudoir. The ménage à trois lasted for ten sensational years. Once the lovers jumped from a carriage on the way back from the theater and let Ephraim ride home alone; another time they bolted for a two-week “honeymoon” in Paris and abandoned him in a Liverpool jail to serve out Frank’s unpaid debt.

During this heated triangle Frank put Miriam in business. He made her editor of a failing women’s magazine, the
Ladies Gazette,
which she turned around overnight, replacing drab Civil War sagas and household hints with punchy fun-and-fashion features. In less than a year she salvaged a second magazine and netted six figures.

By 1873 she’d added a third to the list and published her translation of Arthur Morelet’s
Travels in Central America.
The same year Frank’s divorce went through, Miriam rid herself of Ephraim, who spent the rest of his life in a lunatic asylum.

At the advanced age of thirty-eight she wed for the third time, wearing a knuckle-length solitaire diamond. As Mrs. Frank Leslie she re-created herself into a high society doyenne. The Leslies opened a posh Fifth Avenue salon for “the most cultured and refined of the city” and bought a baronial Saratoga estate with its own lake and steamship, where they entertained the social elite.

Although Miriam now possessed her dream man and the most uxorious of husbands, she kept her options open. She wore the “lowest of low necks and shortest of short sleeves” and came on strong. When the Don Juan “Poet of the Sierras” Joaquin Miller hymned her as a goddess propitiated by ten thousand men and as the heroine of a romantic novel,
The One Fair Woman,
she rewarded his esteem with rendezvous. Some said Rome; others, Saratoga.

At the height of the party the roof caved in. A vindictive journalist exposed her amorous history in newspapers nationwide. Then the stock market crashed. Frank Leslie lost his shirt and, with satanic timing, contracted throat cancer. He died in 1880, enjoining his wife with his last breath to “do his work until [his] debts [were] paid.”

Never one to strike tragic postures, Miriam changed her name to Frank Leslie and sprang into action. In less than a year she paid off creditors and turned a profit through aggressive makeovers, timely scoops, and modernized equipment. The astonished business world called her a “Commercial Joan of Arc,” a miracle “moneymaker,” as well as “the most fascinating newspaperman in America.”

At forty-five she knew what to do with her senior sex appeal. The “belle,” she wrote in one of her advice books, is “apt to be a widow” who upstages ingenues with her seasoned social charms, “perpetual youth,” and “intellectual and conversational powers.”

These were no idle boasts. Men packed her “Thursday Evenings” wall to wall and wooed her relentlessly. The rakish marquis de Leuville, a distant relative of Louis XIV, composed a sequence of love poems to her that he called his rosary, shot her initials on a wood plank, and stalked her for years with marriage proposals. But she refused to give up her “role of enchantress.”

The marquis was followed by Prince George Eristoff de Gourie, a tall ripsnorting Russian fifteen years her junior. When the prince and the marquis crossed swords over her in Hyde Park and proved unequal to her regard, she dropped them both and kicked off a gala lecture tour across America. En route a Minnesota magnate nearly married her.

Frank, however, had other plans and set her sights on a literary trophy boy, Willie Wilde, Oscar’s thirty-nine-year-old brother. She was fifty-five, with a full purse and a full pack of seductive wiles, including “Odic” kisses and the “secret of fascination.” In less than a week he succumbed and wed her.

But the honeymoon was short-lived. Willie got drunk at the wedding supper and stayed that way, rising each day at one and toting up triple-digit liquor bills. After six months Mrs. Leslie-Wilde shucked him. “He was of no use to me either by day or by night,” she quipped. “I really think I should have married Oscar [who was gay].”

Through all these romantic escapades Frank minded the store. She churned out copy at lightning speed—books, features, a play adaptation—and rescued Leslie enterprises from bankruptcy a second time, posting a sixfold profit in four months.

With a Scarlett O’Hara-on-steroids management style, she dressed in tight black gowns with ruffled organdy aprons, blended masculine steel with “feminine charm” and treated employees like a “queen with her court.”

To better reflect her “Empress of Journalism” title, she renamed herself baroness de Bazus at the turn of the century. Emblazoning her coat of arms on every surface, she turned her Thursday evenings into quasi-royal levees. With a brace of terriers in tow, she swished out in full-dress satin, festooned with jewelry—a bracelet with her name in diamonds, a ruby-eyed serpent brooch, and a Venetian chain of three thousand diamonds that contained a secret vial for poison.

Overrouged and overpowdered, the septuagenarian Frank Leslie still had the old “gift of fascination.” Two serious beaux occupied her golden years: a founder of a chain of coffee stands and a Spanish poet, scholar, and gentleman-in-waiting to the king who died just before their wedding. For the rest of her life Frank wore his gold key to the king’s bedchamber on a chain around her waist. When her health failed in her late seventies, a devoted doctor gave up his practice to nurse her.

A showwoman to the last, she surprised everyone at her death by leaving her money to none of the promised legatees but to women’s suffrage. The behest guaranteed the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Not that feminists thanked her; she was too sexy and ahead of her time.

A twenty-first-century visionary, she believed in female superiority and in combined erotic and professional power. The same “habit of command,” “self-confidence,” and “weight of will” worked in the marketplace and the “battle of the sexes.” Go for the clout, she encouraged, strip off the “swaddling bands,” become “queen of your position and he will make you queen of his.”