Seductress (39 page)

Their shared sexpertise, strong chemistry, and passion for action and adventure made for a happy union, which lasted twenty-five years. Medjuel showered her with gifts and devotion, and she built him a Baghdad mansion worthy of a caliph: voluptuous gardens and fountains, exotic menageries, and a sumptuous roof for postprandial lounging. Diplomats and scholars throughout Europe made it their headquarters and regarded Jane as an authority in the area. She was “out and out,” said Middle Eastern expert Sir Richard Burton, “the cleverest woman” he had ever met.

But Jane and Medjuel rarely remained long in Baghdad. Impatient with “cooped up town life,” they spent at least half a year on the “wide and boundless desert.” Heeding the call of her “roving blood,” she hunted antelopes and wolves, charged into tribal battles, and mock-raced Medjuel on their thoroughbred horses and camels. “Oh,” Jane exclaimed amid these escapades, “how I
love
such excitement.” A sheikh awarded her the sword of a famous Saracen warrior for her bravery.

Throughout old age Jane lost none of her thrill fever and magisterial swerve. After watching a Bedouin sword dance, she said, “If I chose, I could surpass them all in fire and agility.” Men (including the Brazilian emperor) still adored her, and Medjuel, except for one indiscretion in the desert, remained faithful to the end. She loved him like “an impetuous girl of seventeen,” and he returned her devotion threefold, making ardent love to her and pampering her until she died, at seventy-four. At her funeral he bolted from the cortege and galloped back to the grave site on her favorite mare just as the coffin was lowered into the earth. He never remarried.

Jane inspired a total of eight novels. The most famous, Balzac’s
Lily of the Valley,
portrays her as Lady Arabella, a fiery siren-adventurer who lures the hero from his frail, servile “lily.” At the end he repents of his folly and returns to the love of the asexual house slave. Arabella, he fumes, was far too much a “mistress of [herself]”; she recognized “no laws” and had to be “always moving.”

Jane’s contemporaries couldn’t have put it better. She was a “notorious and profligate” rogue whose name became “a byword for scandalous behavior for generations.” But like Balzac’s minx Arabella, Jane scorned “bourgeois notions” and public censure. All that mattered was life on the edge, Medjuel beside her, “one foot in the stirrup,” and the limitless horizon before her. “This was freedom! This was life!”

If Jane Digby had remained Lady Ellenborough, she would have been in the audience at Her Majesty’s Theatre. It was the gala event of 1843, a command performance of
The Barber of Seville
with a much-heralded entr’acte by a Spanish noblewoman. When the first act ended, ladies eagerly raised their lorgnettes, then dropped them in stunned disbelief. They saw no genteel señora in a black mantilla, but a dark spitfire in a short multicolored skirt that showed off her shapely calves—a forbidden sight in Victorian England.

Still more shocking was her dance. To the violent chattering of castanets, she undulated across the stage, thrashed her skirts, stamped her feet, and, at the crescendo, chased an imaginary spider up her thigh. When she came out for her bows, catcalls erupted over the din: “Betty James! Fraud! Fraud!” Then she was gone. Maria Dolores de Porris y Montez flashed off the stage into the wings, her first and last appearance at Her Majesty’s Theatre.

The impostor was Lola Montez, aka Eliza James, the “man-killing spectacle” of Europe and, bar none, the greatest seductress of the nineteenth century. Unburdened by Jane Digby’s all-for-love Romanticism and forced to earn her way, she had the bedrock self-sovereignty and embattled drive necessary for the big leagues.

An “insatiable
amoureuse,
” wanderer, and hellion, she went through men like cordwood, afraid of only one thing, domestic captivity. “I am a free independent being,” she declared, “subject to my whims and sensations alone.” Yet few women of any age have ever been loved so deliriously. A king abdicated for her, and the cream of Europe discarded wives, careers, and earthly prospects for a place in “Lola’s harem.”

Fluidity, Lola’s ruling principle, governed her sense of identity like everything else. Along the way she acquired as many personas as the goddess Inanna. Her childhood altered with each telling. In one story, she was born in Spain to a grandee or famous matador; in another, to British aristocrats who lost her to a caravan of Gypsies.

The real story was less colorful. She was born out of wedlock in a dreary Limerick flat to a fourteen-year-old girl, herself illegitimate. Months later her parents married and took little Eliza with them to India with her father’s regiment. He died on the journey, and in less than a year her mother remarried Lieutenant Patrick Craigie and settled in Bengal.

There Eliza was abandoned to the care of indulgent ayahs who yielded to her every whim and gave her free run of the post. Wild, willful, and fearless, she roamed the jungle barefooted, swam nude in snake-infested pools, and chewed betel until her mouth turned red. By six she’d become the child from hell, petted by the regiment and so dreaded by her mother that she was sent to her stepgrandparents in Scotland to be domesticated.

The project failed. Impervious to the most brutal Calvinist coercions, she persisted in perversity and bolted naked through the streets of town when they locked her in the house. Teachers decried her “indomitable self-will,” and the Aldridge Academy for Ladies proclaimed her the “chief agitator against adult authority.” Her mother arrived unprepared. After a ten-year absence she paid a surprise visit in 1837 to announce Eliza’s engagement to a sixty-year-old judge in India. Her daughter didn’t think so. As soon as she heard the news, she smashed the tea service to the floor, ripped up her trousseau, and snaked her mother’s traveling companion and eloped with him.

Eliza soon learned to repent of her folly. Shut up with the boorish Thomas James in an airless stateroom to India, she realized she’d exchanged one form of imprisonment for another. The moment they arrived at his remote garrison in the Himalayas, she plotted her jail-break. Armed with an “instinctive zest for flirtation” and dumbfounding beauty, she ignored marital military protocol and descended alone on the regimental balls. Two years and several conquests later, she absconded to England. On board she hooked a rich cavalry officer and lured him to her cabin, where passengers observed their nude gambols through the half-open door.

With a little help from the officer, she hit London on all cylinders. A famous painter said it was worth the trip just to look at her. She had the eyes of a pre-Raphaelite sorceress—blue, black-lashed, and arched with flaring brows—and breasts “that made madmen” everywhere. Her dramatic looks and temperament seemed tailor-made for the theater, and she shrewdly targeted flamenco, still an unknown art form in Europe. She spent a year in Cádiz and returned as an aristocratic Spanish widow speaking heavily accented English. Incredibly, no one recognized her. Perhaps they never would have if Thomas James hadn’t resurfaced before her 1843 debut and blown her cover with a noisy divorce suit.

As it was, she had to flee to the Continent, where her imposture went over without a hitch. She toured the capitals of Europe, taking her racy road show from triumph to triumph. Men clapped “until their hands were bloody.” But she gave them a poor return for their devotion. She made terrible scenes. She decapitated Prince Heinrich LXXII’s prize flowers and strung them around his horses; she gate-crashed a celebration for the czar; she horsewhipped the police; and she ignited a revolutionary riot in Warsaw when she mooned a corrupt government official. Law enforcement squads stood helpless; she cried foul, drew daggers, and broke the furniture.

Amid this scorched-earth tour she paused for a brief sexual divertimento with Franz Liszt. Curious about the vaunted charms of this heartthrob composer, she presented herself at his stage door. Instantly captivated, he said that “all other women pale[d]” beside her and pronounced himself “completely satisf [ied]” in bed. He wrote a sonata in her honor and took her along on stag parties where she puffed cheroots and entertained his friends with her “merry unaffected” badinage and ribald stories. But the “lightless satellite” role was not for Lola.

A few months down the road she departed for Paris, the international roost for fortune-seeking, hedonistic birds of passage. She immediately fell in with the roistering bohemians and nouveau riche free spenders and almost married among them. Just before the wedding, however, her fiancé, a self-made newspaper millionaire, died in a duel, a misfortune she attributed to her absence from the scene. A crack shot, she was a fabled habituée of the Lepage Shooting Gallery.

With her fiancé’s legacy, Lola recuperated with a pleasure tour through Europe, towing behind her more lovers, said observers, than legs of a “centipede.” When she reached Munich, she went straight for the main attraction.

Elbowing past palace guards, she stormed Ludwig I’s private apartments and assailed him with rapid-fire Spanish and provocative poses. The sixty-year-old king, beset with civic unrest and sexual insecurities, was ripe for the picking. Stupefied, he asked if her breasts were real, to which Lola responded by slashing open the front of her bodice with a pair of scissors. The next day Ludwig told his cabinet he was “bewitched,” “in the grip of passion like never before.”

Lola proceeded to prosper as never before. For sixteen months she played the set-piece king’s mistress. She stroked his ego (comparing him with Lorenzo the Magnificent), coddled him through illnesses, serenaded him in a voice of “liquid sweetness,” and humored his sexual whims. At his request she gave him flannel swatches secreted in her vulva, let him suck her unwashed toes, and talked dirty. She wanted him to “
besar
[fuck] her with great gusto and pleasure”; she said her “
cuno
belonged to him.”

But her
cuno
belonged to Lola alone. When not in Ludwig’s service (and true sex occurred only twice), she entertained a private
Lolianer,
or Lola’s harem, at her palatial mansion on the Barestrasse. A group of university students founded a fraternity in her honor, slept with her on a rotating basis, and bore her up the crystal staircase on their bare shoulders. Warned about these high jinks by his irate counselors, Ludwig turned a deaf ear until it was too late.

When he made Lola countess of Lansfeld, the lid blew. The university closed, three cabinets resigned, and a rioting mob descended on the home of “Her Whorish Majesty,” crying for blood. Lola strode out on her balcony and toasted them with champagne, then beat a quick retreat to Switzerland. In her absence Ludwig fell apart. Shattered and deranged without her, he honored his vow, “my kingdom for Lola,” abdicated, and spent the rest of his life languishing in backwater spas for exiled aristocrats.

Lola’s life meanwhile went on as before
—accelerando con molto.
There was a seraglio of “corsairs” on Lake Geneva, a brief marriage/ divorce to a young British blade, and a grand tour through America with her flamenco revue. The country, with its Barnum and Bailey tastes and raw, frontier energy, couldn’t have been better suited for Lola’s risqué showmanship, and she succeeded beyond her wildest expectations. Accompanied by the usual tumult, she wound up her victory march in California and felt so at home among the transient population of mavericks and floaters that she put down temporary stakes.

She made another quick-stop marriage to a newspaper editor and moved to the Sierra foothills, where she hitched a grizzly bear to a tree in her yard and reinvented herself as a combination Jane Addams and Calamity Jane. Between charitable forays through the country, she swapped off-color stories with cowboys in saloons and thundered across the hills on wild stallions.

All went well until a handsome actor strolled through town. She purloined him from his wife and led him off on a tumultuous barnstorm of Australia. The trip home, however, altered her life forever. During one of their violent spats the actor jumped to his death at sea, after which Lola decided to reform. Blaming herself, she sold her jewels and became a staid—for her—“queen of the lecture room.”

To packed houses she lectured on her storied life and the secrets of seduction. In love, she preached, women could “play as well” as men, if not better. They just needed to develop “the quills of a porcupine,” stop good-girl servility, and learn the erotic arts. Apart from the obvious physical ones (which she minutely itemized), these included brains, vitality, lovecraft, and “charming” conversation. Look at the experts, she counseled, seductresses like Agnès Sorel and Catherine the Great, who wielded “a power
stronger
than
strength.
” Such paragons deserved the same treatment as men, she argued, and freedom from home and the ties that bind.

After her triumphal career on the podium, Lola retired to Ninetieth Street in Manhattan, where she feuded with judges and allegedly ran an orgiastic free love commune. But true to her contention that she was both “better than a devil” and “worse than an angel,” she converted to Christianity and died prematurely at thirty-nine with an enamored Episcopal priest by her side.

In 1998, a small claque of modern
Lolianer
gathered around her grave at Greenwood Cemetery to dedicate a new headstone. Asked, “Why Lola?” one replied that she was “the first who really did women’s lib.” Yet feminists have consistently frozen her out. She was forbidden to speak at a Boston girls’ school during her own time and cut from Judy Chicago’s
Dinner Party
of notable women in the 1970s.

As to be expected, the male establishment joined the assault, calling her an “unspeakable female” and a power-hungry impostor who “appropriated male privilege” as late as 1996. The film industry delivered the unkindest cut of all. For her crimes against
vagatio
and masculine repose, Max Ophüls enslaves her to a sadistic circus ringmaster in
Lola Montez
and locks her in a cage.