Seductress (43 page)

Caroline, on the other hand, thrived. Flush with cash, jewels, men, and theatrical success in America, she booked a European tour and vanquished the magnificos of the Continent. While Vanderbilt and others continued their largesse, she plundered the hearts and bank accounts of titled swells from Paris to Moscow. One young Russian prince sent her a million rubles wrapped in a scrawled note, “Ruin me but do not leave me.”

Leaving, however, was Caroline’s signature. A fly-by lover, an “austere and merciless” sex goddess, she told Colette that a man became yours not the moment you spread your legs, but “the moment you twist his wrist.” This treatment was often too fortissimo for the fainthearted. Her drama coach’s son drowned himself in the Seine, an art student threw himself under a coach, two noblemen blew their brains out, two more leaped from windows, and a schoolteacher hanged himself from the tree in the Bois de Boulogne where he’d first seen her.

The trail of bodies notwithstanding, men followed her, she said, “like flies” and paid her “whatever she want[ed].” Her tour of Russia was a long looting expedition. Gorged with riches, she fought off royal satyrs. At the castle of one overheated duke, she jumped from the bedroom in her peignoir into the snow and sledded off with her rescuer for a three-day sex marathon. As a St. Petersburg farewell she entertained guardsmen with a tabletop temple dance, swirling around the candelabrum and snuffing out candles with her fingers. “The flames,” she exclaimed, “do not consume Otero.”

Nor did they. When she wrapped up her show in Paris, she hit the glory sweeps. One night she found a gingerbread loaf in her dressing room tied to a string (the traditional method of propositioning dancers) with an attached rope of pearls and the single name Albert.

The new conquest was Albert, Prince of Monaco, a jillionaire playboy with deep pockets and sexual problems only Caroline could cure. He set off a regal stampede. For her thirtieth birthday, five monarch-lovers (Prince Albert, King Leopold of Belgium, Prince Nicholas I of Montenegro, Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, and Edward, Prince of Wales) chipped in and threw her a gala surprise party at Maxim’s.

Among them, they kept Caroline in Babylonian opulence. Caparisoned in head-to-toe emeralds, rubies, and diamonds, she looked “like a precious idol decked with gifts of the faithful.” Her gowns were designer extravaganzas cut within an ace of her nipples, embellished with gold net sleeves, chiffon overskirts, and tight satin-embroidered belts. Newspapers breathlessly reported the minutiae of her wardrobe, equipage, and outrageous mansion. She bowled down the Bois in a gilt barouche driven by black mules and owned an angel-frescoed bedroom like the Sistine Chapel, with a carved bed in the center festooned in blue silk damask.

But no matter how gilded, it was still a cage. “I wasn’t meant,” gibed Otero, “to be domesticated.” With Paris as her pied-à-terre, she spent most of the year on the road with her flamenco show, expanding her repertoire to include pantomime and
Carmen
vignettes and tripping out on novelty. Like the “advancing, assertive” Aphrodite, she actively solicited her pleasures and propositioned men and women, including Maurice Chevalier.

Her pulse ran high. After work she downed massive mounds of corn and chorizo, stripped to her chemise, and danced until dawn with “perspiration running down her thighs.” This quest for extra-life led her into dangerous territory, the casino, where she grew increasingly caught up in a cliff edge flirtation with ruin.

A fire-breathing sensationalist, she was a notorious troublemonger and short fuse. She sued everybody who miffed her, flung urine at an impudent waiter, slugged a tiresome woman in a hotel lobby, and stomped out of the opera when an escort looked at another woman. “When one has the honor of being with La Belle Otero,” she exploded, “no one else exists.”

Yet beneath the Latin
furia,
Otero had a level head. She retired at the top of her game at forty. Still in possession of her sex appeal, still murder with men, she held enough liquid assets to set herself up in style. Although besieged with marriage proposals, she couldn’t bear the prospect of being “monotonously matron,” bought a fourteen-room mansion near Nice, and freelanced as the spirit moved her.

She weekended with a Peruvian grandee, traveled to Madrid to help the young Alfonso XII “relax,” and received a few army officers. For routine sex, she slept for ten years with Aristide Briand, a statesman with a libido fully equal to Otero’s, who made love eight times a night. But no man, even one so remarkably endowed, could compete with Monte Carlo next door, and finally Caroline lost everything—the jewels, a villa, and a Pacific island—in the fever of play.

Reduced circumstances, however, couldn’t graze her self-grandeur. At sixty she promenaded up and down the rue d’Anglais in sumptuous furs like a grand duchess. Men continued to find her the incarnation of “unadulterated” sex and made pilgrimages to her Nice apartment, where she amused them with war stories and one-liners.

“The king of Monaco,” she reminisced, “wouldn’t give anyone the sweat off his balls.” She wrote a highly colored version of her life and made a stink when a movie about her came out in the fifties with an actress who “wasn’t nearly as beautiful as [she].” Supported by monthly checks from a mysterious benefactor, this “sensual, soulless creature” grew religious and died at ninety-six preparing a rabbit stew.

Although vilified by respectable society, Otero bollixed the stereotype. She was snubbed as a “degenerate,” ejected from theaters, accused of nymphomania, and attacked in the face by a matron with a bottle of vitriol. But she didn’t fit the satanic mold.

She felt real affection, albeit polygamously, for her lovers, and mentored many women, including Colette and a guttersnipe whom she trained and married to a lord. Presciently she saw the positive uses of her trade for feminine empowerment. She once said if she won the jackpot at Monte Carlo, she’d endow a university for prostitutes. “Think of the variety of courses,” she quipped, “the possibilities are infinite.”

She was only half kidding. If she’d wished, this whizbang seductress could have wised up and rescued her contemporaries—dutiful wives embalmed in feminine “virtues,” dead-bolted at home, and bullied and two-timed by their lords and masters. She might have something to teach modern women as well. One who visited her in 1938 thought so but couldn’t put her finger on her secret. Otero was “impossible” to grasp; she had “the quality of a goddess,” she said, but was “earthy at the same time.” Had she known the right goddess, it would have been easy—the earthy
kar-kid,
queen of the cosmos, wanderer, adventuress, and the “ultimate femme fatale.”

With the twentieth century the great siren-adventurers dwindled away. They lost their goddess swank, style, machisma, and rule. The “terrible maneater” Mata Hari, for instance, was really a pathetic pretender, eaten alive by every man in her path. Neither a spy nor a seductress, she performed tacky pseudo-oriental stripteases, slept with faceless soldiers for peanuts, and concocted her secret agent yarn to get attention and improve business. Everything went smash. Her true love jilted her, and she accommodated the French search for an anti-maternal scapegoat with a string of suicidal blunders.

By mid-century the Betty Crockerization of women had almost extinguished the race. Herded into suburbs and terrorized into domestica, the adventuress tried and failed to crossbreed with June Allyson.

The reputed courtesan queen of the age, Pamela Harriman, was an admitted “backroom girl,” a supermenial to important men who wiped their feet on her. Riches and respectability came at the price of domestic subjection, vicarious achievement, and the bread of humiliation. And she didn’t even “particularly enjoy going to bed with men.”

Her contemporary, the World War II spy-seductress Aline de Romanones, was made of sterner stuff. Known as Tiger, she cast off domestic trammels for a life of high “adventure” in the OSS. She careened around the Costa Brava in breakneck car chases, killed a man with a Beretta .25, and played a tough hand in love with matadors and Eurotomcats. But she too caved to the feminine mystique when a Spanish lord bought her off with titles and jewels and incarcerated her in the zenana of corseted Hispanic high society.

Not until the new millennium did women finally break the
vagatio
chokehold and reclaim the siren-adventuress. Before that, seductresses went one way, and action divas the other, with neither operating at full sexual potential. Persuaded of the incompatibility between sex appeal and adventure, macha lionesses downsexed and/or blew their love lives. Drag race champion Shirley Muldowney lost her heart to a cheating scoundrel, and Air Force bomber pilot Kelly Flinn became the doormat mascot for the nineties, sleeping with barflies because she wanted “to be loved” and whimpering that “she had no idea how to protect [her]self ” when her boyfriend betrayed her and ruined her career.

The sex professionals lost altitude too. Assimilated into the system and assailed by amateur competition, they succumbed to drugs, airheadism, titty bars, and trophy wifedom. The cream of Hollywood, escort empress Heidi Fleiss, did jail time on felony charges, compliments of an informer lover with a Svengali “hold on her.” Higher-end courtesans traded their strut and independence for tycoon husbands. Modeling themselves on society matrons, they struggled through elocution and etiquette lessons, toned down, girdled up, and learned to navigate narcoleptic lunches in gated compounds.

All that has changed. Now the “one who roams about” is off and running. Babes with black belts are box-office gold and centerfold athletes rack up men with the medals. Free spirits everywhere are bringing their libidos with them into the action zone—into sports, “gotta sing gotta go” rock bands, exploration, and high-risk jobs. The coast is clear as never before for women with the need to move and a
horreur du domicile.
We have independence, mobility, economic parity, and the social license to rove.

Yet many remain stuck in neutral, mired in fear and defunct ideologies. As the “Surrendered Wife” and nesters’ movements illustrate, a huge contingent has rushed back to the domestic corral, panicked over abandonment, divorce, and loneliness. They’re under the delusion, instilled in women for millennia, that the spoils go to the good shut-ins. They’re terrified their inner wild woman will lead them over the brink into the howling void of male rejection and radical isolation. As Leslie Blanch warns, travel “begins when love leaves off.”

Of course some women will always prefer home port to the high seas. But siren-adventurers provide hope for the bold and restless. Not only is there life beyond the picket fence; it can be life with a capital
L:
adventure, knowledge, self-actualization, space to stretch, and the erotic jackpot.

With a few seductive smarts, she-rovers can get and keep all the men and marriage proposals they want. Loneliness isn’t the price of liberty, nor is iniquity. One cultural critic warns that “the beginning of a woman-adventure is always ‘going to be bad.’ ” But badness has nothing to do with it; action vamps cross the moral wires just as they cross the threshold of the future.

Admittedly they were the bad-attitude sistas of their day. With even greater racket than other seductresses, they staged break-the-china revolts against feminine norms and repressive custom. Endowed with colossal egos and vitality (sometimes owing to early “spoiling”), they came through adversity with flying colors. Hardship only toughened them up and honed their fighting edge. Since lax caregivers failed to inculcate gender roles or respect for rules, they broke from the starting gate unimpeded. Heroines-in-space, they were free to heed their hormones, invent themselves to taste, flex their feminine advantage, and blaze their own trails—with or without helpful mentors.

Whatever path they took, they instinctively followed the Seductive Way. As the most primal exemplars of the breed, they fired up seduction to archaic pitch. They dramatized the heart’s core of the erotic arts, the defeat of stasis and ennui. Since antiquity, this has been the goal of the
ars amatoria:
not simply to incite passion (the easy part) but to keep it alive and in motion, to maintain the dynamic rapture of the early magico-sexual rites. These least civilized of seductresses cut through the cultural frills to the chase, leading men through a time warp to the first cave ceremonies.

They were exhibitionist priestesses of gaud and nudity, with temple-to-eros settings, full of animals, gilt, and
volupté.
Wired to move, they specialized in the kinesthetic voodoo of the shamans—hot-limbed sensuality on horseback, on promenade, and on the dance floor. As befitted deputies of the sensation seeker goddess, they ramped it up in the bedroom with go-getter lust and polished skills.

In their psychological lovecraft, they aimed square at the subpsyche, the deep memory well of sexual myth where goddesses laid men out with terrorjoy. They occasionally dispensed mother balm, but exclamation points were their chief business: the strong wine of praise, conversational dazzle, peak exploits, and the euphoria of loosened stays—unbound license and carnival.

Their labyrinths should have carried a health advisory. And the suitors who survived them found no pillowed breast at the end. These feisty, proud love queens required men on their toes, awestruck and anxious to please. If they enrapt and transfigured lovers with holy eros, they exacted a price, the steepest of all seductresses—kings’ ransoms, duels, even insanity and death. None of which guaranteed a thing. Siren-adventurers, like the “whirlwind” Inanna, couldn’t be contained; they were fizzing dynamos of change, mystery, and contradiction, with heavyweight, clear-the-tracks goddess identities.

Because they burned down the house of matrimony and worked so much mischief on male libidos, they drew the special wrath of the established order. They were the terroristas of sirens. They broke the oldest taboo, sequestration, and unleashed the repressed sex deity of roving lust and rolling conquests on society. Both men and women (their special nemesis) went for blood. They stigmatized them as heartless whores, ostracized and persecuted them, and wrote them out of history books.