The Lady in Gold (3 page)

This new Vienna was a city of contradictions. It was one of Europe's richest cities, yet its immigrants were among the poorest. The construction of opulent new palaces did little to hide a severe housing shortage. Vienna doctors were creating modern medicine—pioneering surgeries; discovering germs, the polio virus, and blood types—yet incurable syphilis spread unchecked.
Sigmund Freud was illuminating hidden drives of sex
and aggression at a time of xenophobia and
anti-Semitism so crude that some believed Jews murdered children to leaven their matzoh with blood. Famed for its gaiety, “
the sacred city of musicians” had the
highest suicide rate in Europe.

The hallowed house of Habsburg, which produced the kings of the Holy Roman Empire and boasted such ancestors as Julius Caesar and Nero, seemed to be coming apart. Emperor Franz Joseph was carrying on with an actress. His wife, Empress Elisabeth, detested court life and spent her time traveling the continent, earning a reputation as Europe's most famous liberated woman. His brother, Maximilian, playfully donned a sombrero during an ill-fated adventure as emperor of Mexico that ended with his execution by firing squad. His wife, Charlotte, went mad in a Belgian castle.

The dynasty that had united Europe and the Americas had become the empire's premier dysfunctional family.

Franz Joseph, Emperor of Austria, King of Bohemia, and Apostolic King of Hungary, ruler of the empire from 1848 until his death in 1916; shown here in 1897. (
Illustration Credit 1.1
)

Arrivistes were upending the social order. Prominent Jewish men like
Gustav Mahler—who converted to Catholicism to qualify for an imperial post as director of the
Vienna State Opera—were somehow becoming eligible bachelors, chased by wealthy Catholic society girls. The intoxicating waltz was throwing Viennese maidens into the arms of strangers. “
African and hot-blooded, crazy with life . . . restless . . . passionate,” wrote an appalled director of the Burgtheater. “The devil is loose here . . . in one single night, the Viennese went with him.”

Yet even in this “
Gay Apocalypse,” Vienna maintained a deeply old-fashioned charm, with its snow-covered palaces and strolling parks, its aromatic cafés and seductive pastry carts piled with petit fours and chocolate bonbons filled with sweet liqueur. Possessed of a childlike love of adornment, Vienna was a city where gilded iron roses climbed balconies and stone goddesses framed doorways; where gargoyles glared from cornices and Herculean men bared their immense chests from façades.

Even the empire's military was as festive as a marching band, with
Emperor Franz Joseph in scarlet trousers trimmed with gold braid, his officers and hussars strutting through Vienna in uniforms in purple, salmon, and powder blue, festooned with red lanyards and long plumes trailing from their helmets.

In 1898, Vienna was a place where illusions could still be preserved by well-to-do families like the Bauers, who gathered at their elegant apartment above the Ringstrasse on a March afternoon when the musky sweetness of lilacs filled the damp air.

Adele Bauer was standing before the family in a white Grecian robe, revealing a slender frame as long and delicate as a vase. Her thick dark hair fell to her waist. At sixteen, Adele was crossing that mysterious line between girl and woman. Dressed as the spirit of Spring, she held a wicker cornucopia filled with spring blossoms and sheaves. With her poise and regal bearing and her dark, heavily lidded eyes, Adele might have been an actress, like
Katharina Schratt, who ruled a few steps down the Ringstrasse, at the Burgtheater. For now, Bauer family gatherings were the stage for Adele, the pampered youngest child of Viennese banker Moritz Bauer.

Katharina Schratt, shown here ca.
1880
, was the greatest actress in the Germanic world. Emperor Franz Joseph built her the Villa Schratt at Ischl and made her an heir. (
Illustration Credit 1.2
)

Today Adele would read a poem in honor of a family wedding. In two days, her sister, Therese Bauer, would solemnize her union with Gustav Bloch, the jovial son of a prominent Czech sugar baron. So there was a dynastic air to the proceedings in the Bauer parlor, a great room richly furnished with gilded mirrors, the framed portraits of family ancestors, and an ornate clock, adorned with a golden Roman chariot.

Bauer family celebrations always had a touch of theater. Friends played music while guests waltzed. A special poem elevated the atmosphere from the realm of the ordinary, inviting guests to share the deeper significance of the moment.

The room grew still.

“
Do you recognize me? Must I introduce myself?” Adele began, in a low, rich voice, with an air of intrigue. “Do you know who is speaking to you?

“I bring you joy, I bring you lust for life! I chase away your sorrow and grief. In a word, I am the Good Spirit of the house.” This slip of a girl did look like a spirit; or a long-limbed water sprite, or a lithe Muse from an Etruscan urn.

Gustav Bloch smiled at his bride-to-be, Therese, the very proper sister of Adele. Gustav, a handsome man with a thick mustache, had wooed Therese with the intricate courtesies suitable to the old-fashioned daughter of an established banker.

Gustav's brother, Ferdinand, standing beside him, eyed Adele. Ferdinand was poised to take over his Czech father's sugar beet industry. Sugar barons were the oil sheiks of pastry-mad Vienna, their wealth increasing with every surge in the price of the white gold. Ferdinand was twice Adele's age. He was a kind, homely bachelor who collected fussy eighteenth-century porcelain. Serious and methodical, Ferdinand was as different from his café-loving brother as Therese was from her literary, artistically inclined sister.

Adele Bauer's sister, Therese, was everything Adele was not: conventionally feminine and a conformist at heart. This pastel sketch dates from ca. 1898. (
Illustration Credit 1.3
)

The conventional Therese would straighten out Ferdinand's bon vivant of a brother. But her sister! Adele looked like a charming little pagan goddess.

“I am a creature of this house, which I have always loved, always inhabited, and seldom left,” Adele was reciting. “My worst enemy is the sadness that drove me away.” Ferdinand suffered from periodic melancholy. He listened more closely.

“But you see that I emerged the stronger one!” Adele said, with theatrical triumph. “And how do I return? Whole and strong, with all the Might that I can muster.

“How much do I love to see you here? You can see it in my shining eyes, in my flushed cheeks. My masterpiece is you, gathered here,” Adele said with rising emotion, as the guests smiled.

Ferdinand was hooked. How had his distracted brother managed to betroth himself to this charming Viennese family?

“As my little Ghosts foretold,” Adele said, “Happiness has moved in with the Bauers.”

Ferdinand's eyes wandered to a sepia portrait of Adele's mother in a heavy gilded frame, dressed in the daring pre-Victorian manner, her gown falling far from her thin shoulders, and baring a touch of décolletage. Adele obviously took after her mother.

“Is it not true that little Cupid, with his bow and arrow, has made an
excellent shot?” Adele asked, taking Gustav and Therese by the hand. “I feel it, in the beating of my heart; in the blood that runs through my veins; I feel it in the hot streak of luck that shoots through me!”

The poem was long. Guests shifted on their feet impatiently, thinking of the champagne and roast beef to come. Ferdinand wondered if he could arrange to be seated near Adele.

“Suddenly, I have lost my words!” Adele stalled mischievously. “My desires rise to my lips, inside me my feelings are in turmoil, and every emotion clamors to emerge at once!”

Waiters were bringing fluted glasses.

“But the
hausfrau
is giving me an annoyed look,” Adele said, smiling at her mother. “She wants you to sample her culinary skills. The man of the house would like you to judge his vintages of wine. Therefore, I will go now.

“I call out to you, with all the force of my lungs, and even more: Long live the bride and groom!”

Everyone raised a glass. The deserving but dour Ferdinand made a silent toast to the dazzling woman-child in white, the bewitching embodiment of youth and hope.

Not far from Adele's sheltered world, the finest painter in Austria was charting a collision course with the Vienna art establishment.

Gustav Klimt still didn't seem the rebel as he held court at his daily haunt, the Café Tivoli, at the foot of the gardens of the Schönbrunn Castle. Every morning Klimt downed strong coffee and ordered an enormous breakfast. “
Whipped cream played a major role,” along with
Gugelhopf,
a rich cake of rum, raisins, and cherries in the shape of a Turkish turban, recalled the painter
Carl Moll, who sat at the open-air table with Klimt and their fellow artists, plotting the future of Austrian art.

Klimt was becoming a celebrity. When he strode into Vienna's Café Central, heads turned. Women found him alluring. His massive athletic frame, tanned face, and boldly direct glance distinguished him from the
prissier dandies of upper-class Vienna, who paid careful attention to their dress and the figure they cut. Klimt exuded the natural sexual charisma of a man comfortable in his own skin.

Gustav Klimt, Austria's finest painter, whose affairs fueled Vienna gossip, shown here ca. 1900. (
Illustration Credit 2.1
)

Klimt's friends called him König—the King.

At thirty-five, Klimt
was
a king, of the Vienna art world. By the time he was in his midtwenties, Emperor Franz Joseph had awarded him the golden service cross, and had personally congratulated him for his staircase murals in Vienna's Imperial Burgtheater, or “Castle Theater,” the monumental new building for one of the greatest stages in the Germanic world. Klimt's decorative paintings of Greek myths, Norse legends, and heroic women adorned palaces, spas, and theaters throughout the empire.