LOLA MONTEZ - DANCER - 19th CENTURY RADICAL

According to this video, Lola Montez was a feminist and politically astute.  She was self employed - true.  SHE WAS THE FIRST WOMAN TO BE PHOTOGRAPHED SMOKING A CIGARETTE!

SPIDER DANCE of LOLA MONTEZ

Scandalous? The videos I had originally placed here regarding Lola Montez's Spider Dance have expired and so I chose this one as a replacement June 2021 I love being able to further the interests of YouTube posters, however, videos do expire or are taken down, requiring contemplation on what else to post. Presented by Sovereign Hill Outdoor Museum. This film forms part of Goldfields Stories: Lola Montez, Star Attraction on the Culture Victoria.

 

LOLA MONTEZ : VOLATILE TEMPTRESS and MISTRESS OF KING LUDWIG I of BAVARIA WHO CHANGED HISTORY

youthful image from Wikipedia - Public Domain -
 artist Joseph Heigel painted before 1840

Eliza Rosanna Gilbert -  Lola Montez

born possibly 1818 -1821- death 1861

Also called  Senora Maria Dolores de Porris y Montez 
and a few other names.

A femme fatale of the Victorian age who gained world wide infamy,  the woman most likely born illegitimate to a fifteen year old mother in 1818 as Eliza Rosanna Watson - or Gilbert - in Ireland, was a victim of fake news and gossip like certain celebrities today, even as she caused much real ruckus herself. It seems her nature to have been a spitfire and willing to use notoriety to work her way up to the attentions of a King.  Affairs with Franz Liszt the composer, Andre Dumas Sr., who had left a lot of women with fatherless children, and many others, are probably facts but of short duration. Perhaps "mercurial" or "whimsical" would best describe a woman with a hot temper who would eventually die - most likely - of complications of syphilis.  "Word had it she had taken so many lovers that a centipede couldn't count them on its legs." (page 14)

She was, like many of the women elected Mistress of the Month here at Mistress Manifesto Blogspot, using what she had - beauty - at a time when someone coming from her origins had little opportunity to be more than a wife. Her clear blue eyes were said to shift shades of color and her white skin and black hair were quite the contrast. Considered a great beauty, in some paintings she is, in some images she isn't. Certainly her beauty and youth must have been what captivated her first husband, Lt. Thomas James, whom she married in July 1837 as a sixteen year old (?)who went to live with him in Dublin, then to India. Theirs was a Catholic union that may have never been quite dissolved and could have been a marriage arranged for her by others.

Of this marriage she would come to be quoted thus: "Runaway matches, like runaway horses, are almost sure to end in a smash up."

The author of the book below, James F. Varley, doesn't say how beautiful or desperate her mother may have been, but by 1840 Lola was shipped home to England and said to be locked up in a room.  She had a full on affair with Lt. Charles Lennox of several months duration on the way home.  In 1841, off ship, they went off to London boardinghouse to continue.  But the affair ended.

 Primary reference for posts 
on Lola Montez is this book by James F. Varley.

Later in this month I'll get to her California Adventures, for Lola is considered to be part of the history of California and the Wild Wild West in San Francisco and Grass Valley, once a prosperous boom town, but for this first post, I'll focus on what happened in Europe before she decided to travel to the new country. 

Wanting and needing to become financially independent, and inspired by a famous dancer at the time who did "Latin" dances, Lola decided to give dance a try, studying in London with a Spaniard and then going off to Spain, where she called herself Dona Lola Montez, and claimed Maria de Los Dolores was her real name.  She would change names many times in her life in attempts to reinvent herself. She put on a Spanish accent.  She claimed to be a widow.  But by 1848 she was back in England with a story of being widowed in Spain and selling mantillas. Possibly then she was kept by the Earl of Malmesbury. Too bad for her, an audience member outed her as just plain Betty James, the runaway wife of an army man.

She went to Berlin. There she attended a review held by King Frederick William to honor Nicholas I of Russia.  Did her horse bolt right into the parade because of gun fire or did she ride him there to gain attention?  Well, instead of being arrested, she was invited to visit Saint Petersburg. 

Then there was Warsaw, where she met Liszt.  (He already had a mistress for nine years, Comtesse d'Agoult, but Lola had a passionate week with him.)

Then off to Paris, where she was accused of doing a strip tease of sorts by throwing her garters and other clothing items to men. Her affair with Alexandre Dumas Sr, took place there.

She was still considered an amorist rather than a cold hearted man eater at this point. In Paris she even got herself engaged.  But her fiancee soon died in a duel that wasn't even about her.  She mourned.  She testified.  She brawled with another girl in a theater. She moved on.

In 1846, Lola traveled to the Grand Duchy of Baden and met Henry LXXII of Reuss.  They were lovers but she got thrown out for the offense of having walked across his flower bed! Never mind. Soon King Ludwig I of Bavaria, the married father of nine children, then 60 years old to her 29 years, would become her greatest conquest.  It was a conquest that changed history.

Lola was outspoken and let her opinions be known. She was aware of her power over the King. King Ludwig I's goal in life was to make Munich the center of architecture and art and spent lavishly to build and decorate.  But was he really "mad"?  Lola's presence and the King's unwillingness to give her up challenged the social order and his regime. So controversial was she that protests erupted. She was anti Jesuit/Catholic and sided with the Protestants. It wasn't just his family who wanted her out. Other aristocrats wanted the infamous affair to end. 

By 1848 there were student protests and Ludwig closed down the university for a year.  She was involved with a young Protestant noble.  Soon she was denying rumors of orgies while working on the King to give her a title.  |

"He made the Irish poseur Countess of Landsfeld, Baroness of Rosenthal, and a cannoness of the Order of Saint Therese, of which Ludwig's humiliated Queen was the head." page 40  He also demanded she be respected for her new position and that she receive a lifetime income and a new palace be built for her.
The protests against her became violent. Rocks were thrown at the King.  Lola left town thinking King Ludwig would catch up to her snf when he didn't she tried to come back.  Then she went to Switzerland and awaited him.  He didn't show. 

Lola left Munich because he sent her to Frankfurt where 500,000 florints awaited her at the Rothschilds bank.

Ludwig was forced to cancel her citizenship and all those titles.  

To Londen Lola Montez went, there calling herself Marie, Countess de Landsfeld.  She misjudged that the English didn't know what had happened with Ludwig or that they would accept her. She married a new heir - 21 year old George Stafford Heald, who was a decade younger than she.  Bigamy charges followed.  Divorce was highly unusual.  Had her first husband died in India?  As things got complicated the newly married couple left the country and then fled to France. They lived there quarreling for a couple years - domestic violence. He fled to England alone.  She changed her name to La Comptess de Landsfeld Heald.

Though she got money from Heald and had some of what Ludwig gave her, she spent too much.  So in 1851, she decided to write her memoirs, and they were published in Le Pays, serially.  Like other mistress memoirs, the stories may have been an attempt at extortion.

Affairs and rumors of affairs continued.  Finally she took a steamship to America.  Was she revitalized or broken?  When she arrived in New York in December 1851 crowds were there to greet her.  A book had already been written about her.  Broadway embraced her but the reviews of her dancing skills were not good.  Still, she was learning to market herself and manipulate the press... better than she had before.

More to come!

Missy

C 2019 Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot  All rights reserved.

PAID FOR by RACHEL MORAN is DEVASTATING MEMOIR about HER LIFE THROUGH PROSTITUTION

One of the questions I have - we have - here at MISTRESS MANIFESTO BLOGSPOT - is the question of sex for pay and how that may or may not relate to being a Mistress.  I feel that the stereotype of a Mistress is that she is much like a Belle Epoch Courtesan, which is to say, if we consider our Mistress of the Month Valtesse de la Bigne and her 19th century contemporaries as an example, a high class prostitute.  However, this is a stereotype that I do not believe fits the contemporary Mistress who is more likely to have a relationship founded in a love affair with one married man (at least one at a time!) and consider herself to be married to him even if he's legally married to another.  One of the purposes of this blog is to look at the grey areas.  For there is an argument that relationships, including legal marriage that might accommodate a Mistress, are of choice, and that not everyone is a serial monogamist.  While I believe it is true that sexual attraction is a strong reason for becoming Kept, I also do not think that sex keeps a relationship together.  More has to happen and that more is often love.

The word "devastating" in the title of this post, is not hyperbole. I read this one by listening to an e-book and the reading was intense, as was the sophistication of the understanding Rachel Moran came to about herself, her life, and her profession. This woman's testimony will grab your heart and cut it into little pieces, as you read about the terribly impoverished childhood she had in a large family with parents who were both mentally ill.  You can feel that ache.
Listen up, please!
Like so many of today's teenage runaways and street children, Rachel's entry into prostitution was one of survival out of homelessness. She left an intolerable home life (which did not include being molested by her dad).  At fifteen she got a boyfriend, also a homeless person, and well, she saw the logic in becoming a prostitute, which she was by age fifteen, and she says telling men how old she was excited them.  For two years she managed to limit her sexual repertoire with paying men so that she did not have intercourse with them, but you will be riveted to hear of some of the perversions she encountered and complied with, including S and M relationships.  It was dehumanizing and she lost her self worth.
While there are a full range of sexualities to identify with, including asexuality, and some prostitutes are going to, like Valtesse, move forward into being the Mistress of just one man or a wife, Rachel Moran has a mission.  To let the world know that "real men" do not pick up prostitutes, even if they are called "call girls" or "escorts," or "exotic dancers."  She is a brave woman, and she has achieved freedom from her past as best as she can, after years of having her lack of self esteem reinforced through degradation.  Her advocacy against legalization of prostitution, includes the honest of this book, the many interviews she has done, videos ... in 1998 at age 22 she got out of the life.


Go to her website SPACE INTERNATIONAL RACHEL MORAN in order to learn more about her advocacy, her prestigious speaking engagements.... From that site, "In the millennium year she returned to education and completed a degree in Journalism from Dublin City University. She has been involved in the political push for the Nordic Model in Ireland since she first addressed the crowd gathered at the launch of the Turn Off The Red Light campaign in February, 2011. She has spoken at numerous international locations, including the United Nations Plaza in New York and Boston’s Harvard University. She works in conjunction with the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women and the European Women’s Lobby."

BLACK DIAMONDS : KATHLEEN "KICK" KENNEDY and PETER WENTWORTH, 8th EARL FITZWILLIAM : WAS THEIR AFFAIR THE GRAND FINALE OF THE FAMILY?

 In BLACK Diamonds, author Catherine Bailey reveals the unusual story of the Fitzwilliams, one of the richest families in Great Britain, the owners of one of the biggest houses ever built in the world to that time, and their coal fortune that made them but was broken when  Great Britain took over during World War II, stripping their land for coal. 


This is the grand family that American socialite Kathleen "Kick" Kennedy wanted to marry into, and the hell with the fact that this second marriage would not only be into another Anti-Catholic family, but to a man who was married with a child and not divorced when she met him.


Though we know from previous reading that Kathleen was being supported by her inlaws after her first husband was killed in the War, and had independent means as a child of the rich American Joe Kennedy family, she aimed higher in her desire to marry another risk taker, Peter Wentworth - 8th Earl Fitzwilliam. 


There was no talking sense to her.


It's clear to me from reading this book that the Fitzwilliams would not be an easy family to belong to. They had their secret scandals, including questions of who was qualified to be heir, and, had she not died in that plane crash, after receiving the assurance that her father would not completely abandon her if she did marry Peter, one wonders if she really would have done well to marry him.


In our desire to better understand Kick and what drove her, BLACK DIAMONDS provides more perspective.  


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