MATA HARI - TANTALIZING COURTESAN AND SPY - EXECUTED 1917 : MISTRESS OF THE MONTH OCTOBER 2013

MATA HARI 

August 7, 1876 to October 15th 1917 - Executed by firing squad for spying.

She started life in the Netherlands in a family rich enough to send her to exclusive schools as Margaretha Geertruida Zelle.  Then the family went bankrupt and broke up. 

At 18 she answered a newspaper ad placed by a man twenty years older than her and looking for a wife, Dutch Colonial Army Captain Rudolf MacLeod.  She married him and went to live in the Dutch West Indies and reentered the upper class. The couple moved to Java and she had a son and daughter. It wasn't a happy marriage.  MacLeod drank, was abusive, and he kept a concubine, which was common and legal in the Dutch West Indies at the time.

She left him and she came back.

She learned about the local arts and culture and in 1897, when she wrote to her family back in the Netherlands, she said she had a new name, an artist name, Mata Hari.  The name translates from the Sanskrit language as "eye of the sun." 

A couple years later both of her children became seriously ill.  Rumors were that they had contracted syphilis or been poisoned by one of Captain MacLeod's enemies!  Her son died and her daughter survived, though this daughter later died at only 21 years old. Finally Margaretha left Rudolf for good. Custody battles and divorce followed in 1906. 

But, before she officially divorced, Mata Hari went to Paris and began to dance exotically.  Like Isadora Duncan and other dancers in the early 20th century, she looked away from ballet and European formal or folk dance to dance inspired by other cultures.  Her inspiration was the sacred dance of the Hindus. 

Mata Hari created a new past for herself by promoting herself as having been born Hindu - Javanese and said she'd been studying sacred dance from an early age.  While there is a long tradition of sacred dancers in Hindu temples, they are always dressed modestly.  Not Mata Hari.

She was photographed many times appearing nude or scantily dressed and her husband used these against her in his custody battle to keep their daughter.  She was considered to be flirtatious, promiscuous, and to be an exhibitionist.  By today's standards her act might seem tame because her movements were not obscene.  She was said to be graceful as a lioness.  She wore skin colored body stockings and jeweled bras, which never came off, and elaborate headpieces.  It was that she slowly undressed until she wore only these things that made her presentation questionable.

On March 13, 1905 she debut her act in Paris at a museum of Asian art that exists to this day and is well respected, The Guimet Museum (Musée National des Arts Asiatiques-Guimet or Musée Guimet), which has one of the largest Asian collections outside of Asia.  Thus her dance was seen as high class and artistic, removed from the more raw sensuality of French dance hall girls.  The museum had been founded by a millionaire, Emile Etienne Guimet, an industrialist.  The museum which would later be attacked for having pillaged treasure from Asia to fill its exhibits.  Mati Hari became his long time mistress.

Imitators sprung up, and she began to gain weight. Mata Hari had started late for a dancer and near age 40, she danced for the last time in public.  She became more famous for being a courtesan, seductress, and  a bohemian, free-spirited and artistic.   Now she had multiple liaisons with powerful men and traveled Europe...

I'll leave you with this much and get to the SPYING in a near future post!