Seductress (30 page)

Theater, at base, was a drama about sex, an affirmation of the transcendent life instincts through collective rapture and illumination. And the original leading lady was the “sexual essence of creation,” the great goddess. Not for nothing are stage stars enshrined as love goddesses, though few have taken advantage of it in private. Others weren’t so dumb. Two in particular, comedienne Nell Gwyn and tragic diva Rachel, were world-class performers and seductresses, prima donnas who knew their heritage and what to do with it.

Nell Gwyn, Charles II’s famous mistress, has long been canonized as a Protestant harlot-saint, guileless, blunt, softhearted, and faithful to the king until the bitter end. By tradition, an orange is placed on the altar of the Savoy Chapel each December in memory of her early days as an orange girl. But it’s the wrong altar and the wrong halo. Nell was an avatar of the pagan sex goddess in her carnival guise, the lightning-crowned Inanna. She loosed the anarchic aphrodisiac of comedy, blasted men into festival orbit, and “unsettl[ed] all things.”

Sentimentalists called her Little Pretty Nelly, a childish darling of Miss Muffet hug appeal. Nell Gwyn, however, had quills, sinew, and a thoroughly adult fix on life. She came up, as seductresses often do, the hard way and developed elbows at an early age. Soon after her birth, her father died in prison, and her alcoholic mother took over the management of a Covent Garden brothel.

Denied schooling, she spent her youth scavenging for ha’pennies in the fetid bowels of one of London’s worst slums, Coal Yard Alley. At thirteen she went to work in Madame Ross’s bawdy house, a cutthroat venue filled with tough, backstabbing “dunghill wenches.” (More than three thousand prostitutes plied the streets in a city of a hundred thousand.) Her sister rescued her with a job as an orange girl in the King’s Theatre, which Nell parlayed into a theatrical career through the pull of a rich lover.

A sharp-tongued street queen with fizz and attitude, she proved a born comic. She chose one of the best Shakespearean actors, Charles Hart, for a lover and coach and soon conquered London. An infatuated Samuel Pepys exclaimed that he’d never seen “so great performance of a comical part,” and the leading dramatists wrote her into their plays. In each, she played variations on the same madcap siren—a cheeky prostitute, a tease in “gallant” drag, and a jilt who seduces her Don Juan counterpart by rolling on the floor with her legs splayed and crotch exposed. For the plague-ravaged British population, she represented hedonism and life renewal and was as in demand amorously as professionally. After a brief affair with Sir Charles Buckhurst, an aristocratic roisterer and wit, she caught the eye of the king.

The occasion was a performance of Dryden’s
Tyrannic Love,
in which Nell, who’d killed herself for love, rose up on her bier as she was being carted off the stage. “I am the ghost of poor departed Nell,” she recited, “I’ll be civil; I am what I was,/ A little harmless devil.” According to report, the smitten king “carried her off ” that night. Not long after, she became a palace fixture, and a year later she left the theater to be a mistress to the man she always called Charles the Third.

Charles II, a cultivated, periwigged version of Hugh Hefner, loved and collected beautiful women, rotating among the voluptuous Barbara Villiers, “La Belle Stuart,” and sundry blondes of passages. Nell stood out like an ugly stepsister in this company. Without a trace of prized china doll
joliesse,
she had unfashionably red hair, full “blub” cheeks, a small, slightly wattled chin, and a wide mouth with a protruding nether lip.

But she held her own among the beauty queens and jockeyed past them to first place in the king’s affections. Though women came and went, including a long liaison with the French mantrap Louise de Kéroualle, Charles favored his “frisking comedian” above all. She grew dearer and more indispensable with time. By the end of his reign he confined his nights to her, toasted her health twice at dinner, and required his “constant diversion” so continually that courtiers accused Nell of “bewitching” him.

In a sense she had. When Charles lured her away from the theater onto his payroll, he allowed the imp of comedy, that most subversive
sorcière,
to infiltrate the royal premises. A one-woman show, Nell knew all the tricks of the trade. She aped cavaliers in male disguise, danced incomparable jigs, threw parties designed like theatrical spectacles, costumed and painted herself for display, and always amused.

She was an improv queen with a guttersnipe tongue and gift for springloaded repartee. She told his highness to “lock up his codpiece” when he pleaded poverty, ribbed him about his “French bitch,” and refused to invite one of his ex’s to his birthday party. “One whore at a time is enough for his majesty,” she told him.

Charles, cramped by ceremony and wearied of state tedium, ate up this impudence and unbridled hilarity. With Nell, it wasn’t just an act. Despite her horrific childhood, she was a merry jade, naturally ebullient and high-spirited. Whenever Charles strayed, she joked that he’d come back for her “fun and frolic.” He also came back for other siren extras: her “frankly wanton” bedcraft, unusual cleanliness, maternal ministrations, and refreshing straight-on style.

As she rose in Charles’s favor, Nell’s income and status increased proportionally. She lived in high equipage in mansions at London and Windsor, drew a six-figure allowance, and saw both her sons ennobled. Like the prodigal spirit of Dionysian comedy itself, Nell squandered thousands at the gaming table and upholstered her homes with Neronian excess—private bowling alleys and handcrafted silver beds.

Contrary to legend, Nell didn’t sleep alone while the king dabbled with playgirls. During the conflict with Holland, Nell wrote her dressmaker that “none of [her] lovers” had left for war. Too streetwise not to know which side her bread was buttered on, she didn’t flaunt her infidelities, but she definitely enjoyed them. A “lovely” lieutenant, Stint Duncombe, “mount[ed] her well,” and at least two others, a Dutch stud and a member of her “merry gang” of male drinking buddies, shared her bed.

Nor did she fit the camp follower image of a royal paramour. A free-souled law unto herself, she defied the king politically. She cultivated Whig friends (conspiring in the Monmouth plot to make Charles’s oldest illegitimate son his heir) and took the protesters’ side in the anti-Catholic riots. When the mob mistook her carriage for Louise de Kéroualle’s, she stepped out with a hearty laugh. “Pray good people, be civil, I am the Protestant whore!”

At Charles’s death four years later, his final thoughts were for Nell. “Let not poor Nelly starve,” he said with his last breath. Thanks to his successor’s generosity, she didn’t starve, but she may have come downwind of a more lethal royal legacy. At thirty-seven she died of the pox Charles had possibly given her.

The Reverend Thomas Tennison almost lost the bishopric for officiating at her funeral. Though whitewashed and venerated later, Nell drew vicious fire in her day. Too big for her britches, too insurgent, and sexually powerful, she was pilloried as “Puddle Nell” and the “hair[
sic
]-brained whore.” Women, with the simon-says servility of the oppressed, keelhauled and cut her.

But Nell could take care of herself. An alley scrapper and tough infighter, she didn’t give a fig for public opinion and made short work of the female sex. She enacted vicious caricatures of rivals, fed sweetmeats to an actress laced with jalap (a diarrhetic), and taunted the “French whore” to the brink of laudanum.

Like Inanna, “the sexual joy of the cosmos,” Nell kicked ass. The two go together; without an attack gene and a goddess ego, art can’t happen. An Oxford don of the time dedicated a book of classical deities to Nell and compared her to both Hercules the Mighty and Aphrodite. If he’d gone back farther, he’d have pegged her: the all-powerful deity of eros who reinvigorates the planet, commands carnival, heats the blood, and bewitches hearts with laughter.

Men trembled and broke out in “ice cold shivers” at her performances, women fainted, and Charlotte Brontë “shuddered to the marrow of her bones.” This was the
mysterium tremendum,
the bolt of awe and terror felt in the presence of the goddess. The semidivinity was Rachel Félix, known regally as Rachel, the greatest tragedienne of mid-nineteenth-century Europe.

A diva of “demonical powers,” she returned to the archaic origins of tragedy and recovered women’s holy office as shaman, the maker of divine delirium and agent of deliverance from death to life.

Tragedy carries a tremendous sexual thrust. And Rachel knew exactly how to handle that high-test primordial aphrodisiac. Unlike the normal run of lovelorn leading ladies, Rachel put the erotics of theater to full account and made out as brilliantly with men as at the box office.

Like Nell Gwyn, Rachel didn’t look the part. She seemed closer to the poor little match girl than a “born empress” of drama and desire. A mite-size four feet eleven inches, she was flat-chested and rail-thin, with the bulging forehead of a beluga whale, close-set eyes, a pendulous lower lip, and a curved long nose. Her pedigree too lacked distinction. She was born on the road to itinerant Jewish peddlers somewhere en route from Switzerland to France. Soon afterward she fell off the old clothes cart unnoticed and was retrieved by a mongrel dog.

Nine years later she was miraculously rescued a second time. While she and her sister played the guitar and sang for handouts, the director of a Parisian music school wandered by and plucked them off the streets of Lyons. He enrolled them in the prestigious École de Musique Sacré, and the rest is history.

Once there, the savage little urchin kicked up a tempest and ignored lessons, preferring instead to mount tabletops and declaim French dramatic parts in a threadbare shawl. When the director caught her at it, he transferred her to a master teacher at the Théâtre Molière, who trained her in the classical repertoire.

She then moved to the Comédie Française, where she was taken on by the theatrical Svengali and queen-maker Joseph-Isidore Samson. “She’s my discovery, my creation,” he proclaimed, and tutored her gratis in his home for a year. In June 1838 she made her debut as Camille in Corneille’s
Horace
and by fall was the toast of Paris, with ticket lines forming at midday and wrapping around the block.

She was nothing less than a “poetic revolution.” She didn’t rant or flail her arms in the approved stylized manner. Instead she prowled the stage with pantherine strides and built by slow degrees to a soul-shattering crescendo. At the play’s climax she dissolved into a paroxysm of passion and shrieked “as if the earth had cracked at your feet.” She resurrected the ur-priestesses of ancient tragedy, transforming the old victim heroines into spirit-possessed, ecstatic maenads.

A steely victrix, “driven to conquer or die,” Rachel took command of her romantic life as masterfully as her stage career. In both she left nothing to chance. Just as she overrehearsed and planned her performances to the last detail, so she scoped out lovers, calculated her moves, and made sure her erotic destiny remained firmly in hand. Rather than a frigid schemer, however, she was a passion artist and man lover with a craving for novelty, rapture, and independence. “I am
free,
” she insisted, “and mean to remain free. I will have renters, but not owners.”

In common with other
sorcières,
she picked men who nurtured, inspired, and promoted her—an actor who devoted himself to her “genius,” and the Parisian bigwig Dr. Louis Vernon, who made her his “new religion” and launched her in society. Rachel appeared at Vernon’s levees and balls in chaste ingenue frocks on her father’s arm. But beneath this lily maid disguise, she operated like a master siren on the make. While sleeping with Vernon, she seduced the nabobs he threw in her path. A marquis and famous lawyer visited regularly, and the celebrated poet Alfred de Musset courted his “Fan-Fan” with letters, poetry, and a play. Dukes and counts sought her hand, and at some point in 1840 she became briefly engaged.

An accomplished
charmeuse—
witty, piquant, spirited, and flirtatious—she consulted her pleasure. Or pleasures. Rachel had a low one-man threshold and liked her sexual menu varied, rich, plentiful, and highly spiced. Lovers called her a “mad Messalina” in bed who made them cry obscenities as she climaxed.

In 1841, with her theatrical career on a meteoric rise, she premiered in England, where Queen Victoria gave her a bracelet and pronounced her “a nice modest girl.” But the “Jewish sorceress” behaved as immodestly, as extravagantly as ever, driving the British to mob hysteria with her rhapsodic performances and trifling with lords and stockpiling their presents.

When she returned home in glory, she dropped Dr. Vernon and sought men of her own caliber, a covey of lovers connected to her male counterpart, Napoleon. First she chose the gorgeous prince de Joinville, hero of the St. Helena expedition, then Count Alexandre Walewski, Napoleon’s illegitimate son by a Polish countess. With a creator’s homing instinct for wives, she found in Alexandre the perfect domestic support system for her genius. He loved her with doglike devotion and provided a deluxe home on the rue Trudon custom fitted for her care.

Rachel, a flagrant self-adorer, emblazoned an
R
on every surface, and stenciled RACHEL on the wall of a gold and white salon surmounted by panels of the nine muses. A panorama of excess and pagan spectacle, the rooms featured white bearskins, Etruscan vases, lavish Persian hangings, and daggers and human bones on display tables. She opened a successful salon and blossomed creatively under this red carpet care. At the zenith of her career she branched out into new, high-risk territory. She tackled crone and comic parts and daringly sexualized her image by playing a lust-drunk Phèdre.

As her fame escalated, so did her male devotees. They formed a
cénacle Rachel,
and she availed herself of their sexual services on tour (in a carriage fitted out with a bed) and at home. An incurable polygamist and thrill junkie, Rachel couldn’t be corralled into fidelity. “I love to be loved as I love when I love,” she said. After Rachel and Alexandre had a son together, she disported so flagrantly with a noted journalist that the two split up.