Inevitably the most incarcerated boy in Britain found his way there as if by psychic radar. David Windsor, next in line to the throne and international heartthrob, lived in a correctional institution called Buckingham Palace. Neglected and bullied as a child, he was a lost soul trapped in the body of a prince. Wallis held the master key. The moment he met her, she cut through the ceremony and protocol and answered his polite inquiry about British heating with a sharp wise-crack: “Every American woman who comes to your country is always asked the same question. I’d hoped for something more original from the Prince of Wales.”
After that she became his “oxygen”; he “could not breathe without her.” He dropped his beautiful mistress and practically moved in with the Simpsons. In Wallis’s company he bloomed; her frank country bluntness dissolved pretense, her relaxed style dispelled inhibitions, and her risqué jokes and parodies of the royal family made him laugh out loud. Sexually he was reborn. Underendowed and prey to obscure dysfunctions and perversions, he’d never been fully satisfied until Wallis came along with her Fang-Chung Shu and Taoist Kegels. To commemorate a particularly raunchy session in the bathtub, he gave her a gold bracelet inscribed with intimate code words.
But her chief fascination for David was her maternal allure. Famished for parental affection, he basked in her motherly ministrations and affections. On his visits to her London flat she treated him like a favorite son: She plumped his cushions, concocted special highballs, and led him to the kitchen for home-cooked midnight treats. Later she micromanaged his health with the solicitude of a supernanny, bundling him up against the cold and leaving a typed schedule of his daily activities on his plate each day. With her deft ego massage and empathetic ear, she released him from the stranglehold of his neuroses. “Home,” he always said, “is where the duchess is,” and he died in Wallis’s arms with the word “mother” on his lips.
After David’s abdication of the throne in 1936 to marry “the woman he loved,” their life together devolved into a long café society odyssey signifying nothing. Night bird that she was, Wallis dined and danced her evenings away with titled swells. Without the visionary faculty of
intelletto,
without the rebellious punch of her youth, she succumbed to a dreary status grope and reinvented herself as a “beautiful person.” Unlike most seductresses, she shirked the job of self-growth and wasted her substance in bridge, shopping, best-dressed lists, seating charts, and superhousekeeping. As to be expected, such betrayal took its toll. With age, the “rending beak and flashing eye” of the owl goddess grew more prominent. She became testy and shrill with the duke and subjected him to a sordid five-year passade with the bisexual Woolworth heir Jimmy Donahue, noted for such pranks as placing his penis on restaurant tables and requesting the chef to cut it thinly.
Yet despite all this—Wallis’s ferocity, infidelities, and developmental failures—the duke remained “as much in love with her as ever” for forty years. He showered her with one-of-a-kind jewels, catered to her wishes, and called her “the perfect woman.” With typical seductress conceit, she agreed with him and regarded herself as a “surrogate queen.” She weathered royal censure, media smears, and banishment to Eurotrash purgatory with her ego unfazed. “It would take four ordinary duchesses,” she said airily, “to make one Duchess of Windsor.”
Of course she asked for it. Yet she’s been savaged more brutally than almost any woman of the twentieth century. Like the bad wife of Welsh folklore turned into an owl for her adultery, Wallis has been villainized as “the ugly, miserable bird hated by all the others.” She and the original owl goddess were demonized for the same reason—too much female sovereignty, in too strange a vessel. “She got him by witchcraft,” snorted her beautiful female rival; “there’s no other explanation.” True, Wallis wasn’t the “perfect woman,” but there was an “explanation”: the mythic Owl-Headed Madonna with her beak, jewels, sharpshooter eyes, and captive boy child clasped to her chest.
Tullia d’Aragona, 1505-1556
An earlier avatar of this Cypriot Madonna escaped Wallis’s failings and surpassed her on every count. Truer to the owl goddess’s archetype, Tullia d’Aragona was the “Intellectual Queen” of sixteenth-century Italy and “the most celebrated” of Renaissance courtesans—a fully realized seductress. Without Wallis’s social and erotic myopia, she saw clearly the lay of the land and homed in on her own happiness, freedom, and self-actualization.
The unsightly Tullia chose her time and place badly. Renaissance Italy, seized by beauty mania, believed looks mirrored the soul and enshrined lovely women as divinities. “Overly tall,” Tullia had no curves and a long face with a large, thin-lipped mouth and hooked nose. Beauties of the idolized variety—petite, bosomy Botticelli blondes—crowded her chosen métier, the sex trade. But she outstripped them all. Nearly every important figure of the cinquecento fell in love with her, poets lauded her, and the populace treated her like a celebrity.
Tullia was born to Giulia Ferrarese, “the most famous beauty of her day,” and the cardinal of Aragon. Her mother, herself a courtesan, must have wept bitter tears over her homely daughter, but the cardinal took her in hand and educated her as a boy, permitting Tullia to pass “her childhood in diligent study.” She proved an infant prodigy; when her mother’s “very learned” guests visited, they listened to her “arguments and disputations” with nothing short of “stupor.”
Mental precocity, however, didn’t pay the bills. As Tullia matured, her mother supplemented her studies with master classes in the arts of seduction—a dynamite combination. Her first foray into the field at eighteen couldn’t have been worse timed. Rome, just sacked by Charles I’s marauding army, was swept up in a tide of penitential prudery, and swarmed with pretty girls from the provinces. Amazingly, though, Tullia prospered in this miserable climate. With shrewd perspicacity, she niche marketed herself as the “intellectual courtesan” and reached the top of the profession within four years.
More than cerebral fascinations alone accounted for Tullia’s astonishing rise. Like other
belles laides,
she worked her fashion sense, an age-old substitute for natural beauty. When pile-it-on excess—fringed high clogs, gold brocades, and stem to stern jewelry—was in vogue, she dressed more “divinely” than anyone. As Moretto da Brescia’s portrait of her illustrates, she cultivated signature elegance: She wears a pale blue dress with an ermine throw knotted roguishly on one shoulder and holds a royal scepter like a quill. Instead of earrings or ornaments, ropes of pearls and blue ribbons enlace her braided coiffure.
Her eyes, as befitted an owl goddess, were her strongest feature. Sparkling with “devilish” animation, they “skipped about [and] inflamed men’s hearts.” Although she lavished maternal succor on lovers, who hymned her as “home,” “womb,” and “repose,” Tullia had a sharp beak. In seduction she played rough. She lured senior intellectuals to her salon, charmed them with her conversation and lute playing, then refused to deliver in bed. She made all her clients suffer a “thousand trials.” The maximum difficulty principle paid: Suitors and beaux followed her around town “like hungry greyhounds,” and the most distinguished thinkers, poets, and diplomats besieged her. “She knows everything,” they proclaimed, “and she can talk about anything that interests you.”
In 1531 Tullia landed the beau ideal of the Renaissance world, Filippo Strozzi, a Florentine banking magnate who’d broken the heart of Italy’s loveliest courtesan, Camilla Pisana. With Tullia, however, he met his match. She so unstrung him that he shared state secrets with her, neglected his diplomatic negotiations in Rome, and had to be recalled to Florence. None of his “other mistresses” ever exerted more “influence” over him. Other picky womanizers followed Filippo. Ippolito de’ Medici adored her and wrote her love sonnets, and a young hotspur, Emilio Orsini, founded a Tullia Society of six cavaliers for her honor and protection.
After six banner years Tullia left Rome and moved to Firenzuola, where she had a child of unknown paternity. Her next venue was Venice, easily the most competitive stage in Europe. Almost a hundred thousand courtesans cruised the canals, catering to the Venetian taste for the “bottom, breasts, and body” of fifteen-year-olds. Tullia, at thirty, was thinner and uglier than ever.
Once more, though, she prevailed and bagged the top artistic gun of the city, poet Bernardo Tasso. When a local dramatist featured them in a dialogue (then the literary rage), Tullia gained nationwide fame as the penultimate courtesan, renowned for her brains and “charm of manner.” Her part in the dialogue puts her in a ravishing light. Tart, smart, and salty-tongued, she carries her learning lightly and debunks her partner’s high-flown theories of love and courtesanry. “Let’s leave out the poetry,” she chides, then details the hazards of the job and proposes a sense-based love philosophy.
The next year Tullia tackled an equally brutal theater of operations, Ferrara, the festive capital of arts and culture. In this siege she displayed her genius for public relations. She saturated the city with advance publicity, rented the finest villa, and talked, sang, and entertained so magnificently that citizens raved that no “man or woman in these parts [was] her equal.”
On the first Sunday of Lent she stopped traffic by sweeping into church in penitent’s robes with a retinue of adolescent boys and followed it up with a rebuke in verse to the priest for his invective against pleasure. The campaign worked. Italy’s two literary lions, Girolamo Muzio and Ercole Bentivoglio, both fell in love with her. Muzio regarded her as the woman of his life and wrote five passionate eclogues to “Thalia,” his “beautiful Nymph.” When Muzio left Ferrara, Bentivoglio stepped in with perfervid verses of his own, carving Tullia’s name on every tree on the Po River. By the time she left Ferrara four years later, at least one man had attempted suicide over her.
Tullia finally ended up in Florence after a brief marriage to a nameless Sienese. Now dispossessed of her wealth and approaching forty, her luck seemed to have run out.
Volupté
blondes on the make overran this brilliant banking and cultural center, and she was without letters of introduction, with a daughter and mother to support.
Tullia, though, astutely targeted the intellectual kingpin of Florence and bombarded him with flattering sonnets. Benedetto Varchi bit and was soon joined by the rest of the cultural elite. Once more the “Queen of Courtesans,” Tullia filled her coffers and turned her home into a philosophic academy for the cognoscenti. She took up serious writing and published a dialogue and two well-received verse collections.
So much concentrated power—intellectual, social, and erotic—in a woman who desecrated aesthetic sanctities cried for punishment. Twice enemies denounced her to the authorities, and twice friends got her off, but a third time she wasn’t so lucky. Only an abject appeal to a Florentine duchess saved her from disgrace and the stigmata of the yellow veil. Still, most people thought her a witch; a famous poet claimed to have seen her in a black robe, throwing handfuls of salt on a fire and incanting the names of the hearts she wanted to incinerate.
Tullia, without a doubt, worked magic. A shot of her primordial voodoo and lovers saw her as a raving beauty. “You are young and beautiful,” one wrote in her late thirties; “your face resembles that of the first angel.” That “first angel” was the prehistoric bird deity.
Tullia, “more queenly than the queen,” prided herself on her long, noble lineage, not guessing how long or noble. “Monster, miracle, sibyl!” a poet called her. Descendant of the earliest monster goddess and later sibyl, she was a miracle of her time, an ugly stepsister who englamored herself, won all the princes, and transcended her age and feminine destiny.
Thérèse Lachmann, 1819-1884
No one has ever found an explanation for the paranormal sex appeal of the Second Empire courtesan La Paiva, née Thérèse Lachmann. “Fierce and hawk-like,” she was thick-waisted and grim-visaged without a shred of standard female charm. But she exercised a fatal fascination on nineteenth-century men, becoming the “queen of kept women” and the beloved wife of the richest man in Europe. Her uncanny sexual pull ran deep; like other
belles laides,
she tapped into the primitive wellsprings of the male libido.
Just as her critics charged, she was a “monstrous archetype”—an-other death deity, the carrion-eating she-vulture. Her Neolithic icon, the Bird-Headed Goddess of 6000 B.C., is not meant for calm contemplation. “Ugly, elegant, and remote,” it has the chilling aspect of a thief in a nylon stocking mask: torpedo breasts, a fat phallic neck, and a bullet-shaped face with slit eyes. Yet this eerie creature paradoxically incarnated the “lusts of the flesh”; “desire [was] her charioteer.”
While the she-vulture personified the erotics of death—the link between sex ecstasy and extinction—she also served a host of positive functions. With the ur-goddess’s characteristic ambivalence, she transmuted base metal into gold, epitomized the maternal spirit, and raised men from the dead. The goddess Isis beat the breath of life into her dead husband with her flaring hawk wings. Carrion divinities too could transform themselves; the crows, hawks, and vultures that wheeled over battlefields often assumed the shapes of beautiful young maids.
La Paiva looked just as forbidding as her mythic noir counterpart. She had jet black hair and a crudely modeled face with a male jawline, froglike eyes, and a thick, bulbous Mongolian nose. She hated dogs, cats, and children, worshiped Mammon, terrorized employees, and bored guests with her vulgar braggadocio. She came almost literally from the gutter, where she was conceived, said enemies, by a witch and a broom handle.
Her parents, poor Jewish weavers, raised her in a squalid Moscow ghetto without education or prospects and married her off at seventeen to a consumptive tailor. After the birth of her first child in 1837, Thérèse broke and ran. She moved to the red-light slums of Paris where thousands of prostitutes scrambled like crabs in a bucket for survival. Without entry-level looks, she faced certain ruin. Thérèse, however, believed in the spoon-bending power of will. She spent three years locked in concentration in her garret, willing her success into being. “All of my wishes,” she said, came “to heel, like tame dogs.”