Seductress (42 page)

As she grew into a national attraction, a superstar commanding a “king’s ransom” for a single night, poets and painters enshrined her as the goddess made flesh. Her lover, Praxiteles, used her for his Cnidian Aphrodite, the first sculpture to depict the love deity both nude and “full of joy and pleasure.” As immodest as her mythic model, Phyrne invited Praxiteles to copulate with her beneath the statue, which had made her “worthy to stand among the gods.”

That was precisely what the city fathers feared—female sexual power run wild in the pantheon and all hell to pay. They charged her with blasphemy and would have executed her if her lawyer hadn’t saved her with an eleventh-hour reprieve. When the case seemed lost, he tore off Phyrne’s
deplos
and exposed her breast to the judge and jury. Filled with the “holy awe of the divinity,” they voted to release her as a “prophetess and priestess of Aphrodite.”

Granted divine immunity, Phyrne lived to enjoy a happy and prosperous old age. With her immense fortune, she offered (though rebuffed by the town worthies) to rebuild Thebes after Alexander the Great destroyed it. She died, according to report, with her forehead resting on the marble foot of the statue of Eros.

This was the only time “rest” was ever applied to her. An avatar of the “mobile” “active” Aphrodite, Phyrne coursed through the courtesan ranks, outran her captors, and attained Olympian autonomy and liberty. Worse than her harlotry, worse than her strip show, this was the unpardonable crime: “mobility,” the rank violation of female quiescence and containment. “Phyrne had talents for mankind,” sniped the poet Alexander Pope, “open she was, and unconfined,/Like some free port of trade.”

Mid-nineteenth-century France marked another nadir of feminine enfeeblement and home quarantine. Bruised and bloodied in the capitalist marketplace, men required balm in Gilead, a sainted housekeeper who devoted her life to male succor and domestic peace. She was quiet, timid, and submissive and epitomized immobility—even in bed. If she were loveworthy, she lacked “sexual feeling of any kind” and lay “motionless [during sex] . . . as passive and inanimate as a flower.” Frigid was fashionable; the style setter of the age, Empress Eugénie, proudly flaunted her
froideur.

But just as female claustration in Greece coexisted with (and subversively promoted) hetaerae, so this cult of the domestic nun brought with it the Grand Horizontals. These hell-fired courtesans, mirror opposites of angelic
femmes au foyer,
held undisputed sway over Paris for almost twenty years and behaved like a tribe of female Neros, glutting themselves on pleasure, hemorrhaging money, turning marquis into sex slaves, and princes into frogs.

Motion was their middle name. They lived on parade, public spectacles in constant transit from one hot spot to another. Each afternoon at five they rolled through the Champs-Élysées in their custom carriages, while the mob gawked from the sidelines. Ostrich feathers bobbed from their cartwheel hats, priceless lace trailed from their ruffled gowns, and mascara and rouge lay thick on their haughty faces.

Tabloids recorded their adventures in avid detail: their masked balls, dinners of peacock galantine, and preposterous stunts. Blanche d’Antigy bathed in two hundred bottles of Montebello water, Mademoiselle Maximum lit her cigarettes with bank notes, and La Barucci dropped her dress when she was introduced to the duke of Wales. “I showed him the best I had,” she cracked, “and it was free.” Like the hetaerae, the Grand Horizontals were fleet of mind and tongue, with black belts in the arts of fascination. “A love affair is like a war,” said the redoubtable Mogador; “tactics help you win it.”

Of these arrogant love commandas, one outrivaled the rest in hype and glamour: the “Queen of Outrage,” Cora Pearl. She dyed her dogs to match her gowns, wore nothing to a costume party, dueled a rival in the Bois de Boulogne, caned a Russian count, and pitched Prince Napoleon’s vanload of orchids on the floor and danced a hornpipe on them. Parisians repeated her mots and drank a cocktail called the Tears of Cora. She devastated men. Every New Year’s they lined up at her door and presented her with gift offerings like a high priestess. One prince said he’d “try to pilfer the sun if that would satisfy a whim of hers.”

Her story followed the classic rape-to-riches plot of nineteenth-century courtesans, driven by a rage for personal freedom. From earliest childhood she was a breakout artist and insurgent. Born Eliza Emma Crouch in Plymouth to an indigent music teacher and his wife, she had the extraordinary luck to be sent to a French convent by a charitable grandmother after her father deserted the family.

But the scrappy girl blew it. Dead set against virtuous femininity, she bucked the program and sowed pandemonium with her tomboy pranks and insurrections. Once back in England, she had to take one of the semistarvation jobs reserved for unskilled girls, assistant to a milliner.

On her way home from work one day, a prominent diamond merchant offered to buy her a sweet, then drugged and raped her. Effectively “ruined” for the marriage market and faced with a lifetime of twopenny grunt labor, Eliza split for Paris with a dance hall proprietor for a life of sin.

Paris in 1855 was sex city central, one big “brothel and gambling hall,” with as many as a hundred thousand prostitutes competing tooth and nail for a place in the elite
garde.
Only 1 percent made it, and Eliza’s chances seemed slim. For starters, “she was plain.” She had a round, freckled “clown’s” face, with small, piglet eyes, a large mouth, and unfashionably red hair.

Like Phyrne, though, Eliza knew how to spin her product. An audacious self-publicist, she rechristened herself Cora Pearl and invented a head-turning style that put her assets on display. She wore second-skin gowns with bustles (the first in Paris) that showed off her curves to perfection—a wasp waist with breasts so round and high-sprung she had them molded and cast into a golden goblet. Adopting a “new look every evening,” she popularized wigs and pioneered modern makeup. She dyed her eyelashes and used bright lipstick, silver face powder, and “slap,” a foundation borrowed from London dolly-mops.

Cora’s personality was no less original. A coarse vulgarian with a “sewer of a mouth,” she released men from their devil’s bargain with the angel of the house. In her company they knew the corset-loosening ecstasy of “barriers broken down,” “organic relief,” and “the ease of existence!”

She gave transvestite balls, waltzed with her pet pig, and once wagered a group of men she could serve them a dish they’d be unable to cut. After raising the bets to astronomical sums, she hired waiters to carry her out nude on a silver platter, sprinkled with parsley. Insanely extravagant, she inverted the house saints’ parsimony and bought out the store. In memory of her rapist, she stockpiled diamonds and paved her shoes with them in her one stage appearance, giving the ones that rolled away to the dressers.

Such prodigality did not come cheap. But Cora could afford it. Around her neck she wore a “chain of gold” hung with the coats of arms of her twelve biggest providers. Her first link, the duc de Rivoli, funneled a small fortune into her for six years. He supplied her with stables, servants, chefs, closets of gowns, and a vast mansion, where she sat fifteen to dinner each night and served violet garnishes to the tune of fifteen hundred francs.

Bounty, however, of whatever proportions couldn’t buy her quiescence or fidelity. She tooled around town on a velocipede (precursor of the bicycle) in male drag and availed herself of a toothsome side dish, her lover’s nephew Prince Achille. She and the prince bounded off on hunting trips and wanton weekends together, stirring up duels, dramas, and scrapes with bad checks. When the duc found out, Cora struck first. As soon as “a liaison was finished it was finished,” she insisted, and “she herself would terminate it.”

Wealthy replacements quickly picked up the slack. The names include the face cards of the Second Empire: William, Prince of Orange, the Turkish emir, Gustave Doré, the duc de Mornay, and the emperor’s brother Prince Napoleon, who kept her in luxury for ten years. Dozens of lesser lights danced around her as well, inundating her with presents. One sent her a box of candy, each wrapped in a thousand-franc note; another, a silver horse crammed with gold and jewels. In eight weeks an Irish scion squandered his entire inheritance on her.

Amid the gifts and adulation Cora kept her cool. Disciplined against the perils of “uncontrollable passion,” she played off her lovers against each other and led them in crazy eights. Men, she believed, preferred the “chase” to “the kill,” and she obliged them with obstacle courses of the dizziest detours and roughest terrain. That is, until her fatal miscalculation in 1871.

One of her lovers, a young restaurant heir, lacked the stomach for her extreme love sports. When she gave him his congé, he stalked out, seized a loaded gun, and barged into Cora’s drawing room. He fired wildly in her direction, then turned the barrel on himself and collapsed in a bloody heap on the floor. Although he recovered and became a pillar of bourgeois society, Cora was condemned as his murderess, driven from Paris, and hounded throughout Europe.

Demonized, blacklisted, and ostracized, she drifted aimlessly for several bleak years. She lost her whole fortune—some to the roulette wheel—and called herself “Cora minus the Pearls.” But her luck turned in middle age. Her old admirers joined forces and set her up in genteel comfort, with a full-time maid and good Parisian address. Her “merry disposition” never deserted her. Physically and mentally active, she wrote her memoirs and studied an early version of Esperanto which she called Corapuk. She died of intestinal cancer at fifty-one “without fear of the other side” and “confident of forgiveness.”

Her confidence in worldly forgiveness was misplaced. By the time of her death in 1886 the Grand Horizontals, blamed for all the French fin-de-siècle moral, financial, and military woes, had gone out of favor. Her memoirs didn’t sell. But, then, she’d never “cared a fig for public opinion.” She laughed at the concierges who turned her from hotels and the women who iced her. As a result, she shunned female organizations, the early feminists in particular.

Cora, though, “was a movement on her own,” with the emphasis on movement. Panicked by domestic incarceration, she fled the nineteenth-century “temple of the hearth” and set up her own temple, where she lived at liberty and collected her reward. She claimed she’d known “no other happiness” than “independence.” But she did.

When most women were imprisoned in parlors or sweatshops, she knew the thrill of adulation, goods, services, action, and the band striking up the waltz for one of her
transvesti
balls. “Let us live and enjoy life,” she used to say—a motto no Second Empire “lady” ever stitched on her petit point stool.

“Spell sex,” said Maurice Chevalier, “with capital letters when you talk about Otero. She was the most dangerous woman of her time.” The last of the Grand Horizontals, La Belle Otero led out the age of the great courtesans with a bombs-away fireworks finale. Known as the Suicide Siren, she drove eight men to their deaths and provided the best show in town for twenty-five years. Tangoing around the world like a “lusty, uncontrolled panther in heat,” she conquered five kings and countless plutocrats and made and lost more money than almost any courtesan in history.

Her appearance was just as superlative as her exploits. Besides her sultry Carmencita face, she had a body to make men faint—runway legs and voom-voom measurements of thirty-eight, twenty-one, thirty-six. Her breasts, which wags said “preceded her by a quarter of an hour” when she entered a room, inspired the Cannes Carlton to name its twin domes
les boîtes à lait
[milk bottles]
d’Otero.
Even Colette waxed poetic; they looked like “elongated lemons,” she said, “firm, and up-turned at the tips.”

Otero attributed her sensational endowments to heredity: a lovely Gypsy mother and Greek aristocratic father, who died in a duel defending his wife’s honor. Honor in fact was her mother’s least virtue. The village
puta,
she had seven children by an array of men in a forlorn mountain town in northern Spain. Carolina Otero Iglesias, her second, grew up unsupervised, unschooled, and neglected in desolate poverty.

At eleven she was abducted by the shoemaker, held captive, and raped until her pelvis broke. Thus began her obsession with her “
liberté.
” A year later she ran away from home and lived by her wits and body until she met a dancer named Paco. He taught the fourteen-year-old how to dance, and for the next seven years he pimped and hustled jobs for her as they crisscrossed Spain on the cabaret circuit.

By chance one night she landed a gig at a waterfront bar in Marseilles. An American impresario, Ernest Jurgens, dropped in, watched her dance, fell “madly hopelessly in love,” and recruited her for his dance hall in New York City. Never mind his wife and three children at home. He took her to Paris for lessons and costumes, renamed her Caroline de Otero, and launched her as an Andalusian aristocrat and the “International Queen of Dance.”

His gamble paid off. On opening night Otero swiveled out in a plunge-back white satin gown and brought down the house with her eye rolls and lascivious gyrations to flamenco guitars. Flowers rained down on the stage,
ole
’s filled the press, and the haut monde packed the theater night after night. Soon Jurgens found himself at the end of a long stag line of wealthy suitors.

One of the first words Otero learned in English was “Tiffany’s.” Merchant princes like William Vanderbilt whisked her off to glamorous locales and wooed her with matched pearls, heirloom diamonds, and emerald bracelets. Desperate to stay in the running, Ernest embezzled the show’s receipts and fled abroad to beat the rap; there he went from bad to worse and finally killed himself.