Spider Dance (22 page)

I sat there as the music surged around me, my mind adazzle with Africa! California!

Watching eyes showered disdain on the prince and myself but whenever could outward disapproval quench the inner fire?

During the intermission, the audience murmured its disapproval of an actress in the piece who smoked a cigar. I mutely applauded her, though I had stopped the smoking habit I had learned from George Sand. For a while.

The prince returned to Nepal and all Paris talked. He had abandoned me, I was penniless and broken. The prince sent me a box dripping with precious stones and a shawl worked in diamonds and gold as a “mark of his esteem.”

Still Paris gabbled. I was weak and penitent and would soon retire to the Carmelites at Madrid.

Their gossip made me angry. My Nepalese prince was not
the only royalty I could appeal to. I wrote Ludwig, and he restored my pension. I shopped the boulevards for carpets and paintings and furnishings for a new house on the rue Blanche.

They called me Lola Noir and said I was in my decline. It was only a matter of time.

It was only a matter of time before the countess of Landsfeld sent out invitations for a grande soiree. Every distinguished personage in Paris attended. I set aside my mourning black to don the color that named the street I now dwelled upon: a white watered silk gown slashed across by the grand cordon from King Ludwig, with a white camellia in my black, black hair.

Paris declared me a great lady and clamored for another soiree. I was, it seems, fashionable.

Then influenza laid all Paris flat, including myself. I kept to my house for three months, as into my fever dreams came Dujarier. He clasped my hands, whispered to me. When I awoke after many weeks, he was gone. Fate has torn many lovers from me, but only one love.

Paris shook off the influenza like a bad dream. Its gay, heedless life resumed. I arose from my sickbed and found myself still a phenomenon though I felt like a phantom. A horse named after me won the grand prize in the races at Chantilly. I barely had the strength to walk to the corner.

Sick to my soul and facing new debts, I sought out the dance master Mabille. Now I was truly weak, if not penitent. Every day for three months he drilled me like a soldier at Jardin Mabille. I emerged with six new dances, fine notices from a circle of friends, and returned to the stage. I suppose it was a triumph but the ghost of Dujarier danced with me.

I was, of course, rumored to have taken a host of new lovers. If I had bothered to collect all these falsehoods about myself they would form a mountain higher than Chimborazo in Ecuador.

“Lola Montez bathes in lavender water and dries herself
with rose leaves,” wrote a San Francisco reporter in the
Pacific News
.

All these fairy tales found their way to me via my agent, M. Roux, who passed them on in hopes of getting his 25 percent for every page.

I was past thirty, though I could pass myself off as twenty-five, and did. The influenza had taken my hair by handfuls, and I was forced to wear a wig. When the actress who had smoked at the opera burst in upon me without notice backstage and found me wigless, she cried, “Imagine you wearing another woman’s hair!”

Vicious civet! I eyed her cashmere shawl, and retorted, “Imagine you wearing another sheep’s clothing!”

I did not tell her that I myself smoked again, incessantly, for my nerves were as ragged as my hair.

I went to other cities in Europe that would welcome me until I had danced away my old fever dreams of entrancing a king and liberating a country and . . . of Dujarier. Then I went to America, and, finally, California.

New Orleans is the most European and thus the Queen of Cities in America. It was both the scene of my finest stage triumphs during my American tours and of my most volatile fracases, in court and out.

So it was that, forfeiting $500 bail but not the goodwill of the New Orleans citizenry for my travails, I set sail from Jackson Square April 22, 1853, on the U.S. mail ship
Philadelphia
, bound for Aspinwall on the coast of Panama, and from there for the gold fields of California.

In those days only three routes offered passage to California: Overland for months. Or by sea around Cape Horn at the notoriously stormy tip of South America, often used for freight, for months. (Being notoriously stormy myself, this route appealed to me, although I did not like the notion of being confused with baggage. . . .) Or across Central America via Panama or Nicaragua by rail, riverboat, and pack
mule, more often used for people and their luggage, for weeks.

As I had told the court in Louisiana about a gentleman who had accosted me in a theatrical fracas: I would rather be kicked by a horse than an ass. The Central American route, and its mules, appealed to me despite tales of steamy jungles and resident insects and fevers.

After all, I had survived many jungles before, most of the them man-made. Or woman-made in one case. My reasons for going to California were many. First, performers followed the gold, and my brother and sister acts were already tackling the gold fields. For another, I was weary of these court battles, not just the latest in New Orleans but that atrocity in 1849 that ruined my marriage to George Heald, a charming young man who offered me the protection of his name after I’d fled Bavaria to Switzerland and then returned to London. His zealous aunt did not even allow us a month of marriage before she sent an inspector to arrest me for bigamy! We fled to London, then Spain, where he abandoned me. That is what one gets for marrying a boy of twenty-one, no matter how charming and devoted. Although I assured my dear “Luis” by letter that the marriage was merely one of convenience, he was most grumpy about it and cut my pension in half. Alas, Ludwig had been a king and couldn’t understand that a woman on her own must make accommodations, even if her heart is breaking, and especially if her bank account is.

As my funds ran low, I was forced back to the footlights of Paris, where I was always welcome. A foray into Prussia ended when the police director banned my appearance, saying the Countess of Landsfeld’s presence might incite public demonstrations by liberals, socialists, and communists. Of course it was the cursed Jesuits again.

Luckily, I’d met a most charming man in Paris, a brother of James Gordon Bennett, publisher of the
New York Herald
. He was much taken with me and suggested I follow Fanny Eissler and Jenny Lind in conquering American audiences.

I considered the matter. Meanwhile Mr. Bennett and his
brother raised so much speculation about my possible arrival in New York that the
Times
commented, “We shall be sadly disappointed if this creature has any degree of success in the United States. She has no special reputation as a dancer. She is known to the world only as a shameless and abandoned woman.”

I’d been abandoned by my husband, Heald, all right, and “this creature” was indeed shameless about flying into the teeth of her enemies. I resolved to go, for the
Times
couldn’t have given me better advance publicity had I paid for it!

My New York performances were well attended and lucrative, but after a year or so of touring most of the major northeastern cities and the middle of America, I longed for fresh challenges. That niggling suit by a variety hall manager in New Orleans forced me to take over my own defense on an assault and battery charge. The spectators in court applauded me as if I were dancing. Indeed I danced out the courtroom door and straight onto a steamer to far California.

The
Philadelphia
plied the Caribbean Sea’s aquamarine waters for a full week before landing at Aspinwall. The first two days featured would-be gold miners hanging over the rails. When they recovered, they hung over the rails to discharge their new-bought Colt revolvers at the dolphins capering beside the steamer. These huge, smiling fish seemed protected by the water, but I didn’t hesitate to draw my own pistol, far better used than theirs, for I had been a crack shot for years, to dissuade them from troubling the sea life.

These men had read and heard the same siren call to the gold fields and thus resembled a scruffy band of brothers: all wore red flannel shirts and slouch hats, and had hung themselves with a least one revolver and a Bowie knife, and most were beginning to grow beards.

One could not even take a walk around the deck, it was so occupied with idiotic contraptions for the quicker mining of gold these gullible fellows had bought with their last cash.

Naturally, prices at every step of the journey were exorbitant, and I had a larger party than most: myself, my manager, my new maid, Hyacinth, whom I renamed Periwinkle after her blue-gray eyes, and my lapdog, Flora.

Naturally, I did not ascribe to the extortion that was common.

Ladies, I may point out, rarely made this brutal journey. Especially not ladies with entourages. Or ladies with daggers in their boots, pistols in their pockets, and whips in their hands.

Aspinwall proved to be a shantytown built on stilts over a swamp. The hotel could sit two hundred for a meal, but accommodations were so cramped that most men slept on cots on balconies in the humid night air buzzing with insects.

I was fascinated by the towering coco palm trees and the airy vines which intertwined like lace above the matted jungle growths.

Even the lowliest cot in Aspinwall was a prize. I required a private bedroom, and a cot for poor little Flora. The hotel manager claimed that men were sleeping on the floor, and he couldn’t spare a cot for a dog.

“Sir,” I said delicately around the cigarette that much more pleasantly occupied my mouth than arguments with craven and greedy innkeepers. “I don’t know where or how your guests sleep, but I’d have you know my dog has slept in palaces. Get the cot, and say no more.”

Of course in the morning the miserable worm presented a bill of five dollars for Flora’s bed. I was forced to draw my pistol to negotiate a reasonable compromise.

Indeed, I saw many men treated worse than coatless dogs on that journey, all these hopeful fools, mortgaging everything they could lay their hands on to head for the fabled gold fields.

Pistols were prominent in their belts, along with sun-shading hats and bravado. None had the nerve of Lola to use them.