Seductress (61 page)

260
This woman, she wrote . . . :
Quoted ibid., 299.

260
It all originated . . . :
Frymer-Kensky,
Wake of the Goddesses,
28.

261
The “divine hierodule . . .”:
Husain,
Goddess,
92.

261
Terrified of the . . . :
For a discussion of this abnormal fear of eros, the “Tyrant of Gods and Men,” see Bruce S. Thornton’s excellent book
Eros,
11-47 and passim.

261
She jumped ship . . . :
Herodotus,
The Histories,
trans. Aubrey de Selincourt (Baltimore: Penguin, 1954), 155, and Hayward,
Dictionary of the Courtesans,
86.

262
As she grew . . . :
Sabrina Mervin and Carol Prunheber,
Women Around the World and Through the Ages
(Wilmington, Del.: Atomium Books, 1990), 90.

262
Her lover, Praxiteles . . . :
Hayward,
Dictionary of the Courtesans,
365-66.

262
As immodest as . . . :
Quoted in Basserman,
Oldest Profession,
21.

262
Filled with the . . . :
Licht,
Sexual Life in Ancient Greece,
349.

262
An avatar of . . . :
Friedrich,
Meaning of Aphrodite,
92.

263
“Phyrne had talents . . .”:
Quoted in Hayward,
Dictionary of the Courtesans,
367.

263
If she were loveworthy . . . :
John S. Haller, Jr., and Robin M. Haller,
The Physician and Sexuality in Victorian America
(New York: Norton, 1974), 98 and 101.

263
Blanche d’Antigy bathed . . . :
Richardson,
Courtesans,
31.

264
“A love affair . . .”:
Quoted ibid., 200.

264
Of these arrogant. . .:
Quoted in Polly Binder,
The Truth About Cora Pearl,
(London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1986), 55.

264
One prince said . . . :
Quoted in Binder,
Cora Pearl
, 9.

264
Paris in 1855
. . . : Quoted in Christiansen,
Paris Babylon,
17. Estimates vary from thirty to a hundred thousand prostitutes. See ibid., 86, and Binder,
Cora Pearl,
32.

265
For starters, “she . . .”:
Binder,
Cora Pearl,
30.

265
She had a round, freckled . . . :
Quoted in Richardson,
Courtesans,
52.

265
Adopting a “new . . .”:
Binder,
Cora Pearl,
40.

265
“A coarse vulgarian . . .”:
Quoted in Richardson,
Courtesans
, 52.

265
In her company . . . :
Havelock Ellis, “Prostitution,”
Studies in the Psychology of Sex
(New York: Random House, 1937), vol. 2, part 3, quoted on 299 and 222, and quoted in note, 299.

266
As soon as . . . :
Binder,
Cora Pearl,
35.

266
“Disciplined against the . . .”:
Quoted ibid., 39.

266
Men, she believed, . . . :
Quoted ibid., 39.

266
She lost her . . . :
Quoted ibid., 150.

266
Her “merry disposition” . . . :
Richardson,
Courtesans,
62.

266
She died of . . . :
Binder,
Cora Pearl,
148.

267
But, then, she’d . . . :
Binder,
Cora Pearl,
56.

267
Cora, though, “was . . .”:
Ibid., 45.

267
Panicked by domestic . . . :
Quoted in Bram Dijkstra,
Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 13.

267
She claimed she’d . . . :
Quoted in Binder,
Cora Pearl,
150.

267
“Let us live . . .”:
Quoted ibid., 123.

267
“Spell sex,” said . . . :
Quoted in Arthur H. Lewis,
La Belle Otero
(New York: Trident Press, 1967), 4 and 5.

267
Known as the Suicide . . . :
Quoted in Cornelia Otis Skinner,
Elegant Wits and Grand Horizontals
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962), 242.

267
Tangoing around the . . . :
Quoted in Lewis,
La Belle Otero,
34.

267
Her breasts, which . . . :
Quoted ibid., 4.

268
Thus began her obsession . . . :
Quoted ibid., 194.

268
An American impresario . . . :
Ibid., 31.

268
He took her . . . :
Quoted ibid., 33.

269
One young Russian . . . :
Quoted ibid., 74.

269
A fly-by lover, . . . :
Lawrence Durrell,
Justine
(New York: Penguin, 1957), 105, and quoted in Skinner,
Elegant Wits,
239.

269
The trail of . . . :
Quoted in Lewis,
La Belle Otero,
126.

269
“The flames,” she . . . :
Quoted ibid., 75.

269
Caparisoned in head-to-toe . . . :
Quoted ibid., 182.

270
“I wasn’t meant,” gibed . . . :
Quoted ibid., 193.

270
Like the “advancing . . .”:
Friedrich,
Meaning of Aphrodite,
92.

270
After work she . . . :
Quoted in Skinner,
Elegant Wits and Grand Horizontals,
240.

270
“When one has . . .”:
Quoted in Lewis,
La Belle Otero,
112.

270
Although besieged with . . . :
Quoted ibid., 192.

270
She weekended with . . . :
Quoted ibid., 188.

271
Men continued to . . . :
Quoted in Lewis,
La Belle Otero,
243.

271
“The king of . . .”:
Quoted ibid., 248.

271
She wrote a highly colored . . . :
Quoted ibid., 250.

271
Supported by monthly . . . :
Quoted ibid., 121.

271
She was snubbed . . . :
Quoted ibid., 121.

271
“Think of the . . .”:
Quoted ibid., 142.

271
Otero was “impossible” . . . :
Quoted ibid., 243.

271
Had she known the right . . . :
Frymer-Kensky,
Wake of the Goddesses,
29.

272
The “terrible maneater” . . . :
Quoted in Julie Wheelwright,
The Fatal Lover: Mata Hari and the Myth of Women in Espionage
(London: Collins & Brown, 1992), 68.

272
Her true love . . . :
As World War I approached and her prospects dimmed, Mata Hari seized on the persona of courtesan spy and boasted to the French Secret Service about an imaginary affair with Crown Prince Wilhelm of Germany and persuaded it to pay her a million francs to extract war secrets from him. Instead she latched on to a minor military attaché, with whom she exchanged worthless gossip while pretending to work for the Germans.

She fooled nobody and cooperated fully in the national witch-hunt for women who renounced domestic responsibilities. (During the war, with the combined threat of women in the workplace and the need for maternal succor and sacrifice, antidomestic sirens involved in politics were targeted as spies and demonized. Hence the myth of the double agent ball breaker in black satin.)

Blunder followed idiotic blunder. As if lured by a fata morgana into the abyss, she demanded more money, invented adventures, and changed the story of her life whenever she found herself in a tight spot. After she was arrested as a German spy, she hired a lawyer with no experience and bungled her way into a death sentence through a web of fibs and weak alibis.

Her one redeeming trait and only link with the siren-adventurers was her classy death. She refused a blindfold, smiled at the firing squad, and blew a kiss as they gunned her down. Victimhood, though, no matter how stylish, didn’t belong in the sirens’ repertoire. Grand Horizontals preferred conquest, victory parades, and the spoils of war. By the 1920s they’d nearly disappeared, a casualty of postwar prejudices against unhousebound she-swells—except for a few remnants haunting Mediterranean resorts like deposed queens.

One of the last of them, Liane de Pougy, regarded Mata Hari’s career from her Nice estate with utter contempt. “She had a loud voice and heavy manner,” sneered Liane, “she lied, she dressed badly, she had no notion of shape or colour, and she walked mannishly.” She might have also added that she knew less than nothing about seduction. Quoted in Wheelwright,
Fatal Lover,
35.

272
The reputed courtesan . . . :
Michael Gross, interview, “ ‘Basically, I’m a Backroom Girl’: Of Lovers, Husbands, Wealth, and Power,” Week in Review,
New York Times,
February 16, 1997, 14. Even though she subordinated herself like a “geisha-girl” to men, they had a habit of humiliating and discarding her. Her first husband, Randolph Churchill, philandered in her absence; Averell Harriman and Ed Murrow returned to their wives; Gianni Agnelli jilted her (after having sex with another woman next door while she got an abortion); Elsie de Rothschild ditched her; and both Leland Hayward and Averell Harriman were hard taskmasters, domineering and on occasion insulting. Quoted in Christopher Ogden,
Life of the Party: The Biography of Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1994), 311.

Instead of escaping the feminine lockup for adventure and an autonomous existence, Pamela embraced the fifties’ ethos. She only asked for a man to submerge her identity into, to accept her, and give her entrée into a society where she could follow the script. One socialite told another that the secret of Pamela’s success was “merely housekeeping, but housekeeping of the most rarefied sort.” She lectured, “We could all learn a thing or two from Pamela’s superb example.” The “thing or two” might be how to win “best in show” in a good wife competition and how to serve difficult men, but certainly not how to strike out and win the really big prizes of freedom, independence, and the insane adoration of wonderful men. Quoted in Marie Brenner, “The Prime of Pamela Harriman,”
Vanity Fair
(July 1988), 77.

272
And she “didn’t . . . :
Ogden,
Life of the Party,
238. A European man who slept with her often during the fifties corroborated this and said that “her amorous temperament was not very big,” 238.

272
Her contemporary, the . . . :
Aline, Countess de Romanones,
The Spy Wore Red: My Adventures as an Undercover Agent in World War II
(New York: Random House, 1987), 11.

272
But she too caved . . . :
When Aline married Luis, count of the ancient family of Quintanilla, she underwent a road to Damascus conversion. Submitting to his tutorials with bovine docility, she studiously upclassed herself. When he reproved her for waking unfashionably early, she stayed in bed until ten; when he criticized her “revolting” American table manners, she held her knife the European way; when she did “right and [had] a boy,” she obediently gave the child the eight names he dictated. She deferred to his “quiet authority” and strove to fit into the “straitlaced” untraconservative world of the Spanish gentry. When the gaudy Eva Perón arrived in Madrid in heavy maquillage and sexy clothes, Aline winced at her “bawdy sense of humor” and “longed to tell her to tone down.” Aline, Countess of Romanones,
The Spy Went Dancing
(New York: Putnam’s, 1990), 154 and 155;
The Well-Mannered Assassin
(New York: Jove Books, 1994), 18; and
Spy Went Dancing,
131.

By toning down, scaling back, and cutting herself to the pattern of a grande dame, Aline earned a big payoff. She dined with movie stars, wore heirloom jewels, and renovated an ancient family ranch and pored over the Romanones archives. She obligingly gave birth to three sons, each with eight names apiece. Her politics, in deference to her husband’s views, mirrored the official Romanones position, which wits called “somewhere to the right of Attila the hairdresser.” Paul McCarthy, quoted in
Newsweek
(March 25, 1991), 59. The Romanones family represented the extreme right-wing interests in Spain and was severely indicted by the philosopher Ortega y Gasset.

But after Luis’s death, Aline loosened her stays and regained a measure of her old independence and swerve. By writing books about her OSS and CIA escapades, she recovered, at least vicariously, the highs of self-sovereignty, action, risk, initiative, and death-defying subterfuge.

272
Drag race champion . . . :
Interview, Barbara Walters, November 21, 1997, and Kelly Flinn,
Proud to Be
(New York: Random House, 1997), 172.

273
The cream of . . . :
Quoted in John Connolly, “Hollywood After Heidi,”
Swing
(June 1996), 73.

273
Free spirits everywhere . . . :
See
Rolling Stone
special issue “Women of Rock,” (November 13, 1997).

273
As Leslie Blanch . . . :
Blanch,
Wilder Shores of Love,
170.

274
One cultural critic . . . :
William Bolitho,
Twelve Against the Gods
(New York: Viking, 1957), 147.

274
Wired to move, . . . :
See Liebowitz,
Chemistry of Love,
77.

274
As befitted deputies . . . :
See Grace Lichtenstein, Chapter 12, “The Ultimate Playing Field: Sex,”
Machisma: Women and Daring
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1981), 279-302 and passim.