Seductress (33 page)

Although she took a thousand courtiers with her on her publicity tours through the kingdom, she had her favorites. First in her heart was Robert Dudley, a handsome cavalier who came within an ace of being prince-consort. Elizabeth’s much-touted virginity may have been the centerpiece of her goddess campaign, but it may also have been a lie. She visited “Sweet Robin” day and night in his bedchambers and confessed to top-secret improprieties during one of her death scares. When Dudley, though, grew too importunate and trenched on her dominion, his days were over. “I will have here one mistress,” she flared, “and no master.”

Each of her subsequent favorites went the way of “Sweet Robin”: intense courtships, heated ups and downs, and congés without marriage commitments. She played off her inamorati against one another and extracted their obedience in private and in affairs of state. Her treasure chests bulged with their jewels and love tokens. Christopher Hatton, her lord chancellor, endured a “hell’s torment” of love in her service, torn between her “teasings, tiffs, [and] retributions” and sickbed visits and intimacies. He never married.

During the foreign threats to England in the second half of Elizabeth’s reign, she manipulated suitors from abroad with similar political success. Through discreet alliances and covert amours, she foiled Roman Catholic plots to dethrone her and prompted her beau the earl of Essex to polish off the Spanish Army in Cádiz after the Armada victory. With divine sangfroid (goddesses include death in their totality), she coolly executed Essex when he conspired in treason, just as she’d beheaded her cousin Mary, Queen of Scots.

All the while her love affair with the British blazed higher; she became a “transcendental object of sexuality.” Buccaneer-knights explored new worlds at her behest. To shine in her eyes, Sir Walter Ralegh voyaged twice to America and named the Virginia colony after his beloved Virgin Queen. By the time she died, she’d transformed herself into an idol, a totemic “Sun Queen” who personified the nation. “To have seen Elizabeth,” said a visiting diplomat,” is “to have seen England.”

Because of her virginity spin, Elizabeth I has been treated less harshly than other absolutist
Machtweiber.
Sexually inactive, her power remains in bounds—a familiar Madonna-cum-Mary Poppins. Even so, she’s taken her hits. Recent films caricature her as a boss lady on a bad hormone day or a clench-jawed modern careerist who tries, and fails, to have it all.

Elizabeth decidedly did not have it all. She lost out on the super-sated sex she deserved. But she wasn’t the mere “honorary man” some have claimed either. She actively traded on her gender, milking her affinities with the goddess queen of myth in order to “have her way as absolutely as her father did.”

She actually improved on her father. Rather than terror and force, she got her way through the subtle beguilements of the sex divinity. With her numinous bewitchments, she made herself both the most beloved and able of English monarchs. The hardest-headed parliamentarians felt themselves under the sway of something supernatural. They said she was “absolute—that she had the power to release herself from any law, that she was a species of divinity.”

Russia has its own version of Elizabeth I on Tilbury Plain. In this patriotic freeze-frame Catherine the Great, uniformed as an imperial guardsman, caracoles on her stallion at the head of fourteen thousand troops. After dethroning her husband, Peter III, she addresses the multitude: We, “having God and justice on our side, have ascended the throne as Catherine II, autocrat of all the Russias.”

Once again, with inspired promotional savvy, a female monarch invoked myth to solidify her authority. The difference was time and place. Eighteenth-century Russia, with its tradition of czarinas and folk veneration of the goddess, permitted Catherine her divine reward: absolute sovereignty and full expression of her superself, sex included. Making free with her mythic prerogatives, she put Russia on the map of modern history. She crowbarred the country out of the Dark Ages, reformed the government, expanded the empire, and led a renaissance in culture and the arts. Through it all, she ripped sexually. Until she died, an elite corps of men loved her and filled her bed. Compared with John Kennedy or Louis XIV, Catherine was a sedate serial monogamist. No horses, revolving door hookups, and studs screened for jumbo johnsons. Only the
Machtweib
’s rightful due—reigning and having “so good a time” in the process.

Catherine knew few good times in the first half of her life. She endured ordeals, she said, that “would have driven ten other women mad.” Completely non-Russian, she was born Sophia Augusta Fredericka to impoverished German nobility in 1729. Her home life seethed with unhappiness. Her mother disliked her “unlovely” daughter, her father ignored her, and tutors had no use for her. She was an insufferable square peg, they all complained, a smart aleck, rebel, and tomboy. Then came four years in an iron body brace for a twisted spine. But Sophie never grew taller than five feet or pretty. She had a long nose, narrow bosom, and a chin so pointed her governess told her to tuck it in to avoid hitting people.

Through a political toss-up, she found herself at fourteen affianced to the heir to the Russian throne. She arrived in St. Petersburg with three shabby dresses in a half-filled trunk, unaware of the
Walpurgisnacht
ahead. Her tyrannical mother-in-law, Empress Elisabeth, hagrode her, and her husband, the future Peter III, put her through a Boschean hell. A freakish hyperkinetic creature, probably the product of a chromosomal abnormality, Peter tortured rats and played soldiers and could not consummate their marriage. He lapsed in and out of madness, drank to excess, and beat her while the empress rained curses on her for failing to produce an heir.

In this harsh school, however, Sophie developed a cast-iron ego. She acquired starch, discipline, and indomitability and fashioned herself on an Olympian scale. While humoring Peter, she consumed the great books, languages, and Russian history, Russianized her name to Catherine, and cultivated the wise elders at court.

She also launched a multifront charm offensive. Retaining her brio amid persecution, she laid herself out to amuse and “please.” She was the belle of the Thursday transvestite balls. In stylish male drag Catherine worked the “sheer magic of personality” on courtiers and assembled diplomats. Warm, gay, and funny, a jokemeister and animal mimic, she bragged that no man could be in her company “a quarter of an hour . . . without feeling at ease.”

After seven years of marital mayhem, Catherine took her charms outside wedlock. Robustly sexed, she loved the “pleasures of the bed” and handpicked top-shelf studs from the royal entourage. There was the debonair Count Serge Saltykov, who fathered her first child; then a gorgeous Polish count; and finally Gregory Orlov, the “giant with the face of an angel.”

Gregory, her lover for twelve years, engineered the coup that put Catherine on the throne. Beginning with her coronation in 1762, Catherine played up her association with the Divine Female Authority of Russian legend. She called herself Little Mother, in reference to Baba Yaga, “Queen of the World,” and she swept into Uspensky Cathedral to a fanfare of trumpets and crowned herself on the high altar.

Although an adherent of self-government in principle, she subscribed to absolute monarchy in practice. “Creation,” she announced with divine grandeur, “has always appealed to me.” For the next thirty-four years she devoted herself to a national makeover and accomplished it with such enticing artistry that the country accepted her totalitarian sway with scarcely a peep.

On her ministers and henchmen she practiced the same seductions she used on her beaux. An adept ego massager, she praised “in a loud voice,” scolded “in a whisper,” and courted consent through a barrage of erotic ploys: ornate dress, flash on the dance floor, gourmet banquets, amateur theatricals, and liberal doses of laughter and relaxed banter. Rather than direct confrontation and domination, she believed in making “men believe that they want to do what I tell them to do.”

Through this eroticized MO, Catherine took Russia into a new age. A leader of vision, manifold industry, and sting-like-a-butterfly statecraft, she overhauled the administration, extended religious tolerance, expanded industry, and issued a number of humane edicts. She built hospitals and schools and ushered in a golden age of Russian architecture, art, theater, music, literature, medicine, and science.

With a nod toward feminine advancement, she founded the Smolny Institute for Young Ladies and placed Princess Dashkova at the head of the Academy of Sciences. Her court was the crown jewel of the hemisphere, filled with diamond-freighted nobles, and the masterworks of European art, furniture, and decor.

Internationally she got Russia off the mat. Both warrior and mother queen, she beefed up the navy and in seven wars prevailed over all three traditional enemies, Poland, Sweden, and Turkey. With goddess rapacity, Catherine knew the right side of a scimitar. She executed a popular czar pretender and set the stage for future foreign wars and the Bolshevik Revolution through the brutal suppression of slaves and peasants. Yet, all told, few rulers have earned “the great” more; Voltaire christened her “The Incomparable,” “heir to the Caesars.”

None of this power and might scared off men; it was a walloping aphrodisiac. After Catherine decommissioned Orlov (who died “broken hearted and mad”), she took nine more favorites, all prodigious cocksmen and ardent lovers. She loved them back—on her terms. Insisting on her right to “live according to [her] own pleasure, and in entire independence,” she bedded and shed them to suit herself. She refused to let them shake her self-possession, with the possible exception of Gregory Potemkin, her “wolfbird” and “golden cock.”

This colossus of a man and Catherine set each other on fire and may have married secretly. But they were too volcanic a couple to last and parted amicably after two years. She made him roving viceroy and overlord of the Black Sea territories, and he steered attractive lovers her way. Her last was her handsomest, a “devoted” guards officer—twenty-three to her sixty-one—who threw Potemkin to such fits of jealousy that he tried to oust him and reinstate himself.

On her deathbed Catherine demanded no mourners, “only stout souls and professional laughers.” But she died the most grieved and beloved as well as the most powerful of Russian czars. Posterity, typically, has shortchanged her, Hollywood in particular. Marlene Dietrich and Elisabeth Berger reduce her to a vapid babe incapable of a coherent sentence; and Catherine Zeta-Jones, to a lonely boss lady without the love of a good man.

Catherine, however, wasn’t typecastable. She was a multiple-choice character—female largeness personified, convinced that she was “exceptional” and “born to succeed.” “Autocracy,” she said of herself, “requires certain qualities.” Half these qualities—the grit, stamina, and training—were acquired; the rest, goddess-given. As Voltaire put it, the secret of her reign was her dual ability to “charm
and
rule.”

 

Originally Inanna, the Sumerian sex goddess, occupied the highest seat of heaven. On her seals she wears the insignia of her former glory—a tiered crown, a royal gown, and eagle wings spiked with maces—and she holds a staff of entwined serpents. She plants her foot on a lion, the emblem of kingship. But with the ascent of patriarchal domination, Inanna lost her absolute sovereignty.

Although still called the Queen of Heaven and Earth and Framer of All Decrees, she became the divine ordainer of male rule. At the sacred marriage ceremony, Inanna (played by a priestess) invested the king with the authority of office and infused him with divine eros, the cosmic life force, by copulating with him on the high altar. Without her imprimatur, he could not govern; without her wisdom and guidance, he could not keep the ship of state on course. Inanna’s consort, Dumuzi, ran afoul the moment she left him alone and had to be chastened and educated to mature leadership through a descent to the underworld. Thereafter Inanna, the “Brave One” and “Honored Counselor,” reigned by his side, the guarantor of the “right ordering of Sumerian society.” And the source of her supernal statecraft was all in her
hi-li,
her holy sex appeal and ride-the-whirlwind sacred lust.

In one of the many legends told of her, Theodora once worked as a prostitute among the Amazons where she entertained a penniless stranger. He gave her all he had, a ring and a promise to marry her if he became emperor. Years later, of course, she handed the ring to Justinian and became the great sixth-century empress of Byzantium. The only true parts of the story are the emperor’s lowly origins (his successful uncle summoned him to power from a “wild and desolate heath”) and Theodora’s early career in prostitution. She was a true child of Inanna, a
putain royale,
rambling rose, and anointer of kings.

From the time of Justinian’s ascent to the throne, Theodora sanctified and guided his reign. Under her aegis the Byzantine Empire prospered for nineteen years, and it unraveled when she died in 548. She was the left ventricle of Justinian’s rule, “one of the most influential women of any past era,” and a ravishing seductress who beguiled Justinian into a permanent passion and his ministers and subjects into submission to their authority.

Theodora’s background has all the ingredients of scandal sheet copy. Though largely fabricated by enemies, her history still pullulates with lurid sex and dark underworld dealings. The daughter of a poor circus bear trainer and woman of easy virtue, she called the Hippodrome home—the racetrack/fairground of the city. After her father’s early death she and her sisters scraped by as gymnastic performers, turning tricks on the side. Theodora’s stunts shocked even the jaded Byzantines. She danced nude, delivered obscene comic monologues, and performed a specialty act in which trained geese picked barley grains from her vulva. At postshow parties she reputedly took on squads of men at marathon orgies and complained that her nipples lacked orifices wide enough to permit intercourse.