Princesses Behaving Badly (24 page)

So who wrote the letters? The person at the top of the list was the one who’d thrown the sexy shindig: a chain-smoking princess named Viktoria Elisabeth Auguste Charlotte, granddaughter of Queen Victoria, daughter of the Prussian rulers, and younger sister of Kaiser Wilhelm II, the last German emperor.

Princess Charlotte, as she was called, was the oldest and least promising daughter of the Prussian crown prince and princess. Growing up, she’d had no head for learning, was inclined to be snobbish and rude, and frequently butted heads with her mother. By the time she reached her teen years, Charlotte had earned herself a reputation as the “most arrogant and heartless coquette at court.” As her mother lamented, “that pretty exterior and the empty inside, those dangerous character traits! Everyone is initially enthralled, and yet those who know her better know how she really is—and can have neither love nor trust nor respect!” Ouch. (As for Charlotte’s “pretty exterior,” well, she was short, with a long body and stubby limbs,
an immense bust, and one shoulder higher than the other. She also suffered from thinning hair. Maybe you had to see her in the right light?)

In February 1878, 17-year-old Charlotte married Bernhard III, duke of Saxe-Meiningein. He was nine years older than she and had a “finicky and old-maidish” air, but Charlotte felt herself to be in love with him. In May of the next year, she had a daughter named Feodora, her only child. Not much into mothering, Charlotte soon left the child in the care of a nurse and returned to Berlin to inflict herself on the social scene.

Charlotte was a typical mean girl—she pretended to be friends with people only to gain their confidence, learn compromising things about them, and then tell everyone. Her own brother called her “Charley the Pretender,” for her two-faced nature. She had a wicked tongue and aimed to rule Berlin’s court as its gossipy queen bee. At the same time, Charlotte was admired for her sense of style, her French dresses, her cleverness, and her taste in horses, music, and flowers. She also threw great parties. And when her brother became Emperor Wilhelm II, Charlotte was suddenly highly sought after in Berlin society.

Soon after Wilhelm II’s ascension came the sex party and blackmail scandal. Charlotte, with her love of malicious chatter and trouble-making tendencies, was the first to be suspected of writing the letters even though she received several, too. Her enemies, of which she had a few, claimed she wrote the letters to herself and that she’d thrown the party to entrap the guests.

In all, some 246 letters passed between blackmailer and victims. Despite censorship laws, a lot of the dirt came out in the press, prompting much moaning about moral decline. And because politicians also love gossip, heated debates broke out in the Reichstag, triggering a police investigation and a round of incriminations. But although she loved passing on tittle-tattle, it turns out that Charlotte was
not
the letter writer. After the spotlight left her it then landed on the unfortunate Count Leberecht von Kotze, one of her former friends; in June 1894, he was arrested. Although eventually cleared of all charges, he never felt fully vindicated and challenged
everyone involved to duels. In 1896 he fought and killed Baron von Schrader, the man who had ordered his arrest.

A police investigation lasting several years ultimately revealed that the real culprits were none other than the kaiser’s brother-in-law, Duke Ernest Gunther of Schleswig-Holstein, and his French mistress. The duke had long been the black sheep of the empress’s family, and he’d been at the sexy swingers’ ball. After his role was revealed, he was essentially banished from court. His mistress, meanwhile, was escorted to the German border under armed guard and kicked out with a warning never to return.

But Charlotte was not entirely innocent. Much of the material for the letters had come from her diary, which she lost while on holiday with the Kotzes (the dueler and his wife). In it, she’d recorded scandalous secrets about her own family and members of the court; the diary somehow landed in the hands of the duke’s naughty mistress (possibly via the Kotzes, with whom Charlotte had quarreled), who passed it on to her lover. The police found the diary during the investigation and handed it over to Wilhelm. The kaiser was incensed—relations were already tense between him and his sister, owing to Charlotte’s hatred of his wife (and his wife’s for her). Charlotte’s husband was transferred to a regiment stationed in some dull German backwater and she went with him, suffering a de facto banishment from the society she so loved. The kaiser and his sister never reconciled. (Remarkably, the sex party scandal was almost immediately forgotten. It wasn’t until 2010, when a German historian cracked the Prussian State Archives, that the story came to light.)

For all her cattiness, Charlotte does deserve some sympathy. After all, she had grown up an unloved child, afflicted with a nervous tendency to bite her nails and suck on her clothing, tics that were only exacerbated by her mother’s constant criticism. Victoria (Queen Victoria’s daughter) genuinely seemed to dislike her daughter, calling her “stupid,” “backward,” “naughty,” “very troublesome,” and “ungraceful”; Charlotte’s natural quick wit was taken as rudeness. Years later, when her mother was dying of cancer, Charlotte was the last of the children to learn the news.

Given such a fraught relationship with her mother, perhaps it’s not surprising that Charlotte turned out to be a pretty crappy mother herself. She hated being pregnant, not to mention the restrictions that it and motherhood imposed on her. After Feodora’s birth, Charlotte decided to have no more children. Feodora grew up as unloved as her mother had been, abandoned to nurses and governesses and with few other children to play with. By the time Feodora was a teenager, her grandmother complained that the girl would be “her Mama over again,” that all she cared about were dresses and what people wore and that she had a tendency to tell lies. Relations did not improve after Feodora married (at age 17, to Prince Henry XXX Reuss, a relatively poor aristocrat 15 years her senior). When Feodora, who desperately wanted children, was unable to conceive, Charlotte was less than sympathetic. To the idea of grandkids, she snapped, “No thanks, I can live without the damned brood!”

Charlotte found Feodora increasingly “incomprehensible,” saying, “It’s of no use, so I must keep aloof & let her go her own way.” She alienated her daughter and son-in-law to such a degree that public insults were the accepted form of communication between them. Feodora’s father, Bernhard, complained with a startling lack of awareness about his daughter’s “passion for gossip and calumny which she has certainly not inherited from us.” Not even Feodora’s failing health could elicit maternal feelings from Charlotte, who bitched about how “pale, thin, [and] ugly” her daughter was, declaring, “I could hardly believe this curious, loud personage had been my Child!… I cannot love her!” By the turn of the century, Charlotte had even begun telling people that her son-in-law had given her daughter a venereal disease, and she demanded that Feodora submit to a doctor’s examination to prove that he hadn’t. The vitriol was so shocking that gossipmongers in Berlin began to question the mental health of both women. And with good reason.

Charlotte’s behavior had long been put down to a willful, malicious nature and her insatiable appetite for drinking, smoking, and gossip. In reality, Charlotte may have been suffering from porphyria, the same painful and rare blood condition that was behind the “madness” of her maternal great-great-grandfather, King George III (though recent evidence suggests that George may have been mentally ill, after all). Later in her life, Charlotte
was plagued by ill health—rheumatism, aches, kidney pains, colds, bowel issues, swollen joints, and weird blood conditions that doctors thought were severe anemia. She was also depressed, unable to sleep, and plagued by itchiness. And it probably didn’t help that she smoked, known to exacerbate porphyria. Her mother once described her complexion as “yellow” and claimed that “she smells like a cigar shop, which for ladies is not the thing.”

Feodora suffered from the same condition, which manifested in her around age 11. By the time she was in her thirties, her medical complaints, which were frequent and very real, were dismissed by her family as hypochondria and “mental apathy.” Her husband claimed that she was too lazy to take care of herself: “She grossly exaggerates her illnesses and causes me and others quite unnecessary anxiety.” In addition, Feodora was likely manic depressive or bipolar, swinging daily from ecstatic joy to “depressed unto death.”

On October 1, 1919, Charlotte died of a heart attack at the age of 59. She and her daughter never reconciled. Feodora spent the next 25 years in and out of sanatoriums, a victim of horrible health, infertility, and her husband’s insensitivity. She committed suicide on August 26, 1945, by sticking her head in a gas oven at the clinic where she was a full-time inmate. Fifty years after she was buried, her body was exhumed, and researchers confirmed that she had indeed suffered from porphyria.

Where her mother’s death had occasioned a short sentence in the
Times
’s News in Brief column, Feodora’s went completely unremarked. Both women lived through a tumultuous period of upheaval in what had been for centuries the “natural order”; neither managed it with particular grace, but neither had it easy, either. We could write off Charlotte and her daughter as vain, self-centered women who cared only about themselves. But that’s sort of all they could be—princesses like Charlotte and Feodora were expected to be meek, docile creatures who did what they were told. The problem with that life is that it’s boring and limited, and doesn’t allow for untreated mental illness or swinging sexual experimentation. Being born in a palace may be great, but it isn’t terribly free.

Clara Ward

J
UNE
17, 1873–D
ECEMBER
9, 1916
G
OSSIP PAGES ON TWO CONTINENTS

P
aris, 1896. A young, beautiful, vivacious princess and her much older husband are seated at a smoky café, a notorious nightclub patronized by the wealthy and fashionable. Despite the November chill, it’s almost too warm inside, and the princess’s round white shoulders are nearly bare, her ample bosom only just contained by
her corseted dress. Bored, she toys idly with her glass of champagne. As the band strikes up a haunting gypsy melody, the keening wail of a violin pierces the air. The violinist, a small man with black hair and dark flashing eyes, sizes up the audience as he moves through it. The princess catches his attention. He walks toward her, playing more intensely. She smiles.

Ten days later, the gypsy violinist and the princess flee Paris, leaving behind her indifferent husband and two young children and the pressures of high society. It wasn’t the first time this princess made headlines across the globe, and it certainly wouldn’t be the last.

The Princesse de Caraman-Chimay, also known as Clara Ward, wasn’t born a princess, but she was as close as most Americans got. Her father, Captain Eber Ward, known as the “King of the Lakes,” was a wealthy shipping tycoon and lumber industry magnate. Michigan’s first millionaire, he’d scandalously married Clara’s mother after his first wife (and mother of his seven children) divorced him on the grounds of serial infidelity.

Clara was born in Detroit in 1873. Her father died when she was barely 18 months old, leaving most of his $6 million fortune to her mother and their children together. (Pointedly, he left much less to the children from his first marriage.) Clara’s mother moved the little girl and her brother to New York and then, after marrying a Canadian, to Toronto. When Clara was 15 years old, she was sent to a London finishing school.

Actually,
several
finishing schools. According to a contemporary newspaper, Clara’s reputation in London soon “became anything but what a mother could desire,” and she was obliged to find a new school. One story claimed that she disappeared from her school in Paris and was found 18 days later in the garret of a starving student; another claimed she escaped school by hitching a ride on the roof of her mother’s carriage. Yet another account describes how Clara was sent to an Italian convent school, where she “shocked the good nuns” and had to be removed. Take these stories with a big block of salt—turn-of-the-century newspapers were not exactly devoted to accuracy. But though she had earned herself a reputation before being launched on the polite society of Europe, Clara’s
wildness would by no means get in the way of the good old-fashioned husband-hunting her mother had in store.