Princesses Behaving Badly (25 page)

Clara’s sizable fortune—at least $50,000 a year from her father’s estate—and voluptuously Victorian figure made her an instant sensation. “Lips like a pomegranate and the heart of a saint,” one enthralled contemporary declaimed, though neither of those things rings true. “As beautiful as she is wealthy,” as another paper reported, sounds about right.

When Clara met Prince Joseph de Caraman-Chimay, son of a Belgian foreign affairs minister, he was about $100,000 in debt and owned a crumbling chateau in desperate need of repair. He was not, it appears, a handsome man. He was 15 years older than Clara, and his personality barely merited a mention in even the most gossipy newspaper reports about the couple. But he had a title, and that’s what mattered. He proposed, and the two were married in Paris on May 20, 1890. Clara, wearing a $10,000 dress, was only 17 years old; she had just become the Princesse de Caraman-Chimay, one of only a handful of American women to gain a royal title (see “The Dollar Princesses,”
this page
).

The newly minted princess and her husband spent their time traveling among his estates, the Belgian court, the Riviera, Paris, and every other fashionable European hotspot. Though she had a daughter, the countess Marie, in 1891, followed by a son in 1894, rumors persisted that Clara was involved with other men and that the prince didn’t care enough to stop her.

Life as a princess wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Speaking to the press after her divorce (it’s probably not a spoiler to reveal the couple did separate), Clara claimed that she had no choice but to leave the Belgian court after King Leopold II “showered” her with attention, neglected his other guests in favor of her beauty, and made her a social pariah. Sure, she said, she encouraged him. But in so doing, she earned herself the wrath of the court, especially the queen. Clara’s humiliation was complete when she “stood alone on one of the steps of the great staircase leading into the palace conservatories. As I entered the great hall, every woman there turned her back, or gazed at me contemptuously.” She warned other American women not to be dazzled by the promise of a title: “Few American-bred women could feel themselves really happy in the high European, especially
Continental, society,” she declared.

No longer welcome at court, Clara and the prince spent time in Paris, which was then in the grips of a fin-de-siècle passion fueled by scandalous dancing, champagne, and art nouveau. Clara seized upon life with reckless abandon, making a name for herself as the wildest American that side of the Atlantic.

All this raucous living put her on a collision course with a scandal involving the affections of a Hungarian gypsy fiddler named Rigo Janczy on that November night in 1896. A diminutive man with a massive handlebar mustache and much-pomaded hair, Rigo was not classically handsome. The
Chicago Tribune
sneered that he was a “monkey-faced brute,” and a Scottish newspaper wrote that “he is said to be pock-pitted, of small stature, and everyone wondered what she saw in him.” He was also already married.

None of that mattered to Clara. The first night she saw her Rigo, she turned from her husband to smile at him and never looked back. Ten days later, according to Rigo, the pair ran off together “like gypsies” in the dead of night. The press went crazy—papers across Europe, Britain, and America carried news of the princess’s flight.

Armed with his wife’s notoriety, Prince Joseph won a divorce by January 1897, less than two months after Clara abandoned him and their children. At the hearing—which saw all of fashionable Brussels fighting to get into the courtroom, but no Clara—even her lawyer declared her a “fiery untamed steed” with a “wild, savage, eccentric nature.” The prince retained custody, and Clara was forced to pay him child support; she was never allowed to see her children again.

Clara had fallen so far so fast that there would never be any going back. Not that she cared. As she declared in a statement made at the divorce hearing, “I am done with it all. I wanted to be free. I am at least out of the rotten atmosphere in which modern society lives. It does not want me and I do not want it—so we are quits.” The loss of her children may have been collateral damage in Clara’s quest for freedom, though in the absence of any letters or comment, we cannot know for sure how she felt.
Whatever her true feelings, she certainly threw herself into her new peripatetic lifestyle with gusto.

The first place the illicit couple went was the mountainside cottage of Rigo’s mother, a far cry from the royal court and Parisian nightclubs the princess had known. Supposedly Clara was so grateful to the Hungarian woman that she bought the mountain and gave Rigo’s mother a pearl necklace, which she hung on a nail by the fireplace.

Once back in Paris, Clara’s scandalous behavior had gotten her ostracized from respectable society. But the former royal had money, and money fixes everything. When the local worthies succeeded in pressuring hotels and innkeepers into refusing to rent her rooms, she simply got herself a house. She took to riding a bicycle down the boulevards, clad in bloomers and “low socks like a man.” She smoked cigarettes in public and was featured frequently in articles in the foreign press lamenting the city’s moral decline.

Emboldened by this most bohemian of lifestyles, in April 1897 Clara began earning money posing in skin-tight flesh-colored costumes on the stages of the Moulin Rouge and Folies Bergère. She called her art “
poses plastiques
”; she was accompanied by Rigo, playing the violin and dancing around her like an organ-grinder’s monkey. Somehow Clara managed to scandalize even the worldly Parisians. Her first show was canceled after police learned that friends of the prince were planning to show up to pelt her with “live rabbits, rotten eggs, and other equally objectionable missiles,” according to one newspaper report. Paris might have been outraged, but locals still ponied up to see Clara Ward sort-of naked, as did art lovers in other European capitals. When the couple played in Berlin, they reportedly brought in $6,800 in one month (about $181,000 today).

Clara also posed for postcard pictures wearing her
poses plastiques
body suit, with her wavy brown hair tumbling past her rather sturdy bottom, and topped by a crown seemingly fashioned out of light bulbs and coat hangers. More scandal ensued: in August 1897, her ex-husband demanded that police raid several photographic shops and seize pictures of Clara in, according to the newspapers, “all sorts of costume.” Clara’s naughty photos were reportedly banned in the German Empire because Kaiser Wilhelm II found her “beauty” so disturbing. That’s probably an
exaggeration, but it is true that people were arrested for peddling and mailing the taboo images of the ex-princess.

This was about the time that Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, the famous Belle Époque painter of prostitutes, created a lithograph of Clara and Rigo. The two are sitting in an orchestra pit in a Paris nightclub, Clara’s hair an impossible yellow, Rigo mustachioed and swarthy. Called “Idylle Princière,” it captured them at their most fashionable, amorous, and interesting. Things pretty much went downhill from there.

The couple lived in sin until 1898, when Rigo was finally granted a divorce, setting him free to marry Clara, which he then did. Their passion was intense; supposedly, during a trip to Japan they had each other’s portraits tattooed on their biceps. Clara showed her devotion by spending ridiculous amounts of money on her new husband. A grinning Rigo told reporters that she bought him a menagerie of baby elephants, lions, and tigers, just to amuse him, as well as a new violin and a casket full of jewels. They traveled across Europe and spent two years in Egypt, literally building palaces wherever they wished.

Eventually, all this prodigious spending came to the attention of Clara’s mother. Scandalized by her daughter’s behavior, she was even more worried about the state of the family finances. So she moved to have Clara cut off, asking that the wayward ex-princess’s uncle be appointed conservator of her estate. In 1898 the court agreed, and Clara was given a yearly income of £12,000 (nearly $2 million in today’s money), out of which £3,000 went to her ex-husband to pay for the children’s living expenses. But Clara’s spending continued unabated. In 1901 she was officially declared a spendthrift after her uncle was forced to dip into her capital to pay off her debts. He revealed that over the course of seven years Clara had spent $750,000 (about $20 million today), the bulk of it “frittered away in company with the sparkling-eyed Rigo,” according to the
Detroit Free Press
.

Meanwhile, life with Rigo wasn’t all zoo animals and palaces—the two fought often, loudly and publicly. In January 1897, right about the
time her husband was divorcing her in Brussels, Clara and the gypsy violinist had a violent quarrel at a Milan hotel, stunning guests with their shouting and screaming and door-slamming. Clara left Rigo in the lurch, paying only her share of the bill and putting him, as the
New York Times
noted, “in an awkward position.” Little else is recorded about their life together, but it couldn’t have been easy. Even “loose” society rejected them: in 1902, the couple was viciously booed at the Folies Bergère when Rigo was performing with his orchestra. The strain may have been too much for their marriage; they were divorced by 1904, and Rigo moved to America. He claimed that Clara left him because she’d taken up with a grubby railway worker.

At least part of Rigo’s statement appears to be true, because in the same year of her divorce, Clara married her third husband. Guiseppe “Peppino” Ricciardi was a waiter on a train, or a baggage clerk, or a canvasser for an Italian tourist agency, or a manager of a railway station of the Mount Vesuvius Funicular—his professional situation remains unclear. What is certain is that he was very good-looking, known as the “handsomest man in Naples.”

Throughout her new marriage, Clara remained a mainstay of society and gossip column reports, with varying degrees of accuracy. The press reported that she was performing on the vaudeville stages in America (she wasn’t), had been declared insane by her family (nope), was completely cut off from her family’s fortune (not exactly), and had been marrying and divorcing (yep). In 1910 her unerring bad luck in men made headlines once again. Ricciardi left her, claiming she was having an affair with the butler. Clara declared herself innocent, saying, “These Neapolitans are so jealous!” The pair was officially divorced by July 1911.

Clara wasn’t lonely for long. Upon her divorce from Ricciardi, she supposedly said, “I cannot be alone. I am unhappy like that. I shall marry yet once again.” She did, although even less is known about her fourth husband; it seems he was one Signore Abano Caselato (or Cassalota, Casselletto, or Casaloto) and was possibly a butler, or a chauffeur, or a station
manager, or an artist. The first her family heard of the man she’d been married to for at least five years was when he telegrammed to say that Clara had died of pneumonia on December 9, 1916, in Padua, Italy; she was only 43.

Reports claimed that Clara was penniless, but in fact the money that had buoyed her through her scandalous life never deserted her, even when nearly all of her husbands, family, and friends did. Her $1.2 million estate was split among her children, Ricciardi, and a cousin in America. Her last husband was not included in the will, which had been drawn up in 1904.

Clara’s life was a study in rebellion. One paper declared, “From her earliest youth, Clara Ward seems to have had a loadstone desire to scandalize the world; to break down all the baririers [sic] of convention and be at least [as] bizarre and unusual for one woman to be.” Another wrote that some would say the “devil stood sponsor when Clara Ward was born and that she had always been more or less proud of her godfather.” Her fabulously embroidered obituary in the
Detroit News
lamented, “She died a woman without illusions. She had gone the pace. She lived intensely, a slave of her desires; she died an outcast, an old woman of 43 years, just when she should have been in her prime.”

Clara did burn bright and fast—but she did it on her own terms. Talking about her flight from the Belgian court, she once said, “I defied them, as I have all my life defied everyone.” She certainly did, for better or for worse.

Clara Ward was just one of many American heiresses who married European royalty in a mutually beneficial partnership that saw the Americans gain social standing while the Europeans refilled their empty coffers. Called Dollar Princesses, these young beauties kept Old World aristocrats afloat for decades. Sometimes the union of old nobility and new money worked, and sometimes it didn’t. But without the wealth of these women, the noble houses of Europe surely would have been crushed under the weight of their own history.

W
ANTED
: A
MERICAN
M
ONEY

The first American woman to become a princess by marriage was Catherine Willis Gray, great-grandniece of George Washington. In 1826 she wed Prince Achille Murat, son of the former king of Naples and Napoleon’s sister Caroline. Her entrée into European royalty didn’t exactly open the floodgates, but by the time the nineteenth century came to a close, the number of American princesses had risen exponentially.

That was for two reasons. First, the old order in Europe was crumbling in slow motion, shaken by revolutions, abdications, assassinations, and social unrest. Second, businessmen in America were getting rich, and fast. The era saw the rise of American men of industry, many of them barely a generation removed from poor immigrants who’d left Europe in search of fortune abroad. They wanted their daughters to have access to the place in society they hadn’t enjoyed, and so they purchased status along with everything else. The practice was so acknowledged that American newspapers published articles instructing hopeful millionairesses where to set their sights: “Dukes are the loftiest kind of noblemen in England,” one
printed in 1886, going on to detail which of the 27 such men in the United Kingdom would be available for marital conquest. On the other side of the Atlantic, the British sense of decorum didn’t stretch so far as to keep one “English Peer of a very old title” from advertising in the
Daily Telegraph
in 1901 that he was looking for a “very wealthy lady” to marry: widows and spinsters okay, no divorcées need apply.