In 1853, Lola Montez took a Pacific Mail Steamship from Panama to San Francisco. The Gold Rush that began a few years earlier had transformed the frontier and it was mostly rough hewn speculators who lived in the burgeoning city. Her arrival came as a complete surprise, unlike her arrival to New York City, but as theatre and entertainment were very new to the city and extremely welcome, she got booked. Though she was not esteemed as an actress, everyone wanted to see the Spider Dance. The Tarantula dance had begun in Southern Italy, but her take on it, stomping on imaginary spiders until she became a spider herself, was considered erotic. Young men packed her performances. San Francisco was forgiving of any moral issues in her past. Because she did charity events, she was thought to have a good heart. However, for the first time Lola Montez suffered being parodied and satirized and lampooned. Another dancer performed as Mula Lolo of Bohemia. A comedic biographical song was sung about her.
She went to Sacramento, then Marysville, and then Grass Valley, which was, despite its name, then the largest city in Nevada County, California, and a site known for quartz mining, the quartz having flecks of gold. No longer a shanty town, it was bustling and prosperous and schools, churches, and gambling houses had been built. "Spanish" women lived there ; likely prostitutes.
As her dancing became yesterday's news, according to author James F. Farley, Lola gave a private dance to a small circle of fans that might have been most revealing.
But then she married Patrick Purdy Hull, in 1853 at a Catholic Mission. This was her second Catholic marriage, despite all those protests against Catholicism in Europe. She had now married on three continents. After a month she sought a divorce. She suggested that Hull suffered from an "affliction" but then she knew her first husband was alive after all. Did he give her syphilis or did she give him it? Though she had many lovers, she never had children, yet, like Marilyn Monroe did, she was especially kind and generous to children. (Hull died in 1858 after a stoke he never recovered from.)
By then Lola Montez was 35ish. In Grass Valley she purchased a cottage with a garden and perhaps found contentment for the first time in her life. She seemed to retire, to calm, as she humbly did the gardening herself. She went hunting and riding, read and wrote her memoir, but it's speculated that what was really happening was that her health was in decline. She authored three books that were published in 1858 which were an autobiography, 125 love stories of classic couples, and a witty beauty book which included advice to gentleman on how to deal with the ladies at a time when she was bitter about men.
In 1855 she closed up the cottage and went back to San Francisco to plan a comeback - a world tour. She needed to earn. It was a time of financial crashes and bank closures. She got depressed. She looked worn out. She got into Spiritualism - contacting spirits to ask them questions. Her world tour included small venues near the gold fields but she made it to Australia and back to New York. Perhaps realizing she would die, she made a will favoring the children of her manager.
In her forties, Lola Montez got back into Protestantism while also a spiritualist. As she got sicker she got more pious. She visited the Magdalen Society asylum for former prostitutes and seems to have repented her life of sin. But she said it was her mother who ruined her first. She died on January 17, 1861 with a Minister at bedside reading the Bible. Her tombstone says "Mrs. Eliza Gilbert." Word of her death was spread by Pony Express.
Rumors of Romance always followed Lola. As did rumors of children she might have had, perpetrated by people who claimed her as a mother - and King Ludwig I as a father. (Three said so!) After they divorced, Lola and Patrick Hull were also supposed to have had a little girl born about 1856. And the tabloid press in England, as suggested by a man who had been her valet and servant,claimed she'd had a child with George Heald. No evidence exists that any of this was true.
Book Review by Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot C 2019
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