Spider Dance (67 page)

Washington, D.C., November 3,1854.
My Dear Lola, Since our last meeting in San Francisco,
I have been most actively engaged in securing aid from wealthy
Southern gentlemen in our project . . . . When we succeed,
and we will, remember you are to be Empress of California. Have
sent by vie Steamer $50,000 to San Francisco
.
—LETTER FOUND IN 1914 AMONG THREE NEEDLEWORK SAMPLERS
BELIEVED TO HAVE BEEN DONE BY LOLA

Mr. James Gordon Bennett was still in New York, though not for much longer, we were warned. He was only too glad to receive Mrs. Irene Adler Norton. And myself, as an afterthought.

This time we sat down in that busy office off the madhouse room of shirtsleeved men spitting streams of liquid tobacco into brass vases on the floor.

“Paris?” He eyed Irene as if she did the cancan there. “That’s right. You reside near Paris, too?

’Perhaps we’re neighbors,” Irene suggested, just what such a lascivious man liked to hear, and didn’t she know it!

“I run the paper from Paris proper or from my yacht.”

“Then we can’t possibly be neighbors.”

“We still might be. My yacht is three hundred feet long. You only have to bring your own sweet little yacht alongside and drop anchor.”

“I don’t like getting my feet wet.” Irene refrained from the
Lola trick of flouncing up the hems of her skirts, although Mr. Bennett obviously would have enjoyed it. “My current interests don’t involve Paris, however, but New York City. Have you heard of a woman named Lola Montez?”

“Heard of her? I’d give my right . . . elbow to have known her. What a pistol! Unfortunately, I was off at school in France when Lola took New York by storm, so my father had that honor.”

“What did he think of her?” I asked, for surely a newspaperman would be a reliable source.

“He dined out on stories about Lola for years. Some lads like to hear tales about giant-slayers, but I preferred the works of Lola. My father met her in Paris in the early ’50s, where she was queen for a season, just after the Jockey Club gave her a splendid dinner where she was the only woman among a hundred fifty men. He went to one of her Saturday night soirees. How I longed to be among the East Indian princes, Russian officers, French and Spanish noblemen and diplomats that my father described.”

“She ran a salon?” Irene asked.

“She ran a circus. She was showing off her pair of inch-and-half-long pistols that evening. I’d give a lot to have that souvenir. A jeweled box to keep them in, complete with tiny bullet molds, ramrods, cap and ball box. The young East Indian princes shot them off at a wax candle the whole night. There was a German pianist and a Neapolitan vocalist, and Lola herself singing and playing the piano when she wasn’t smoking one cigarette after another and casting it away after a few puffs. Apparently her habit with men as well.”

“I wonder,” Irene said, “given the lung ailment and pneumonia that killed her, which was the most dangerous, men or tobacco?”

“Men, madam, always men.”

“Did your father say anything else about her?”

“Oh course. At length. Let’s see. He said she spoke seven languages that night, including Persian, that she was a dainty lady to her fingertips, even when smoking. That her knowledge of human nature and politics would provide her
keep if she simply lectured on European affairs, in any language.

“Her beauty and air of camaraderie rendered her ‘irresistible.’ He praised the ‘startling brilliancy’ of her eyes, the grace of her motions, and the harmonic proportions of her form. I tell you, I dreamed of her many a night. My father was quite the booster of La Lola, although after she came to New York she managed to irritate him at times. Still, the
New York Herald
usually treated her right. Father had an eye for the comely ankle himself. Why are you interested?”

“We’re thinking of writing a new biography.”

The “we’re” caused him to glance in my direction, then quickly away again. I suspect I was not a candidate for the cancan in his mind.

He chuckled and leaned back in his chair. “Lola Montez. Now, there’s a woman who couldn’t have too many biographies. As if taking old New York by storm in the early ’50s wasn’t enough, she had to dash off to the gold fields of California, and later Australia.”

“The gold fields offered many opportunities to entertainers in those days,” Irene said. “The exclusively male society of miners made for a rough, violent life. Many longed for influences of the softer sort. I hear they threw bags of gold dust and nuggets at the performers’ feet, especially the children.”

“There was plenty of gold to throw around in those days. But New York is not the place to inquire into Gold Rush Days.”

“No,” Irene agreed. “I just wondered if when Lola first hit New York . . . first appeared here, if she encountered other prominent men of your father’s era.”

“Lord, yes!” He leaned back in his golden oak office chair, grinning. “All of ’em. Meeting prominent men was her God-given talent.”

“And was the Commodore among them?”

“The Commodore? You mean old Cornelius the First? Of course. He was of my father’s generation. Rich as Croesus, whoever that was, and a randy old goat with pockets lined in
solid gold. The old fellow was not one to miss pinching a garter of Miss Lola’s.”

The word “randy” was unknown to me, but it didn’t make Irene blink an eyelash. She stood hastily, though, as Mr. Bennett’s hands edged across the desk towards hers.

“Thank you so much, Mr. Bennett. Biography is such a demanding art form. I appreciate your candor.”

“And I appreciate your . . . interest.”

He would have risen to see us out, but Irene left in a whirlwind of skirts and hat brim, with me fast on her retreat.

“What a strange, oblique man,” I said when were we once again in the smoke-choked outer office. “Yet this is the second time we’ve encountered a second-generation heir of a family tradition here. The other was the second Bishop Potter.”

“This is the second Mr. Bennett the newspaper man, all right, and not an improvement on the first. A playboy,” Irene declared. “Why do you think he lives in Europe? Too hot for New York. And despite what he implies, far more profligate than his upright founding father or even the Commodore, who I imagine was more inference than action.”

“Oh. I read in one of the news articles about a Bennett who drove a coach and four, well, naked up Riverside Drive and was horsewhipped on the steps of the public library.”

“Were the four horses naked, or Mr. Bennett? It makes quite a difference.” Irene smiled. “And one wonders if the whipper was Lola. I suppose not. Those incidents might have done to send him abroad, all right. But it’s not his father I’m interested in.”

’If it’s Commodore Vanderbilt, he sounds almost as bad as Bennett the Younger.”

“The Vanderbilt founding father was a crude old coot, as we say in America.”

“That doesn’t sound at all respectful, Irene.”

“Why do you think it took until the third Vanderbilt generation and daughter-in-law Alva, that steely southern belle, to make the family socially acceptable to the New York Four Hundred? But I rather relish the honest frontier flint of the
Commodore that refused to bow to pretension. And so, I think, did Lola Montez.”

“They knew each other well?”

“Evidently. And I believe that they served each other well.”

“She was his mistress . . . and you think you’re their daughter!?”

“No. Even better! I think she was his means, and that I shall be their unexpected progeny of opportunity. They both would love it, I’m sure.”

Irene winked at me as we waited for the cab she’d “whistled up” to reach the curb.

“We must stop at Brentano’s again, Nell, and read up on the late Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt. You
will
be kind to the young clerk who was so taken with you the other day? I know you pooh-pooh such advantages, but I’m never one to let a promising lead slip past me . . . .”

Irene continued to muse about these unpleasant subjects without consulting my state of mind as we established ourselves in the hansom’s cozy boxed compartment.

“Ah, Nell,” she said finally with a sigh as she settled in. “Pink will be purple with jealousy when she learns the truth of the story we’ve been pursuing without her. And without Quentin.”

“Perhaps,” I said, “but what has
she
been pursuing
with
Quentin?”

Bly, in the meantime, was back from her summer of playful
reporting and ready to claim her piece of the juiciest scandal yet . . .
with a harrowing report on the baby-buying trade in New York . . . .
Bly posed as a would-be mother . . . found in at least four
locations that she could buy a newborn from a broker for anywhere
from ten to twenty-five dollars with no questions asked
.
—BROOK KROEGER, NELLIE BLY: A LIFE

F
ROM
N
ELLIE
B
LY’S
J
OURNAL

“You seem tired,” I commented to Quentin as we took a horsecar to the bottom of the island to finish our loathsome transactions.

“In the service of milady,” he answered with a little ironic bow.