The Lady in Gold (7 page)

But when Klimt dined with her family on his first night in Italy, “we devoured each other with our glances,” Alma wrote in her diary. Alone with Klimt in a covered horse-drawn carriage on a rainy afternoon in Florence, Alma let Klimt caress her under a blanket, and couldn't sleep that night for “
sheer physical excitement.” At their hotel, Klimt ran his hands through her waist-length hair, abruptly stopping because “
he would have lost control of himself and done something foolish.” At the Bridge of Sighs in Venice, “
my heart missed a beat. He wanted to feel my breasts!”

Klimt slipped into Alma's hotel room in Genoa, “
and before I realized it, he'd taken me in his arms and kissed me.” It was “indescribable.” In Verona, Alma volunteered to take Klimt's ironed shirts to his room, and they kissed until “
we were both terribly agitated.” Later, on a stairway, “he stood behind me and said: ‘There's only one thing for it: complete physical union.' ” Overwhelmed by desire, Alma “staggered and had to steady myself on the banister.” Klimt insisted: Surely God wouldn't mind if they physically consummated a union inspired by love.

The heated glances became obvious. Carl Moll ordered Klimt to stop. Klimt got Alma alone for a feverish last kiss, “
with such force, such frisson,”
that it “fulfilled a physical instinct.” Now, Alma wrote, “I know what a kiss is.”

Then Klimt was gone. As Alma brooded over his absence, her family welcomed a visitor who had shared a train compartment with Klimt on his way to Italy. In dark tunnels, this woman told them, Klimt slid toward her, his “eyes aglow.” Alma was furious. “
Animal lust,” she wrote, “on the way to see me!”

But she continued to burn for Klimt.

As Alma pined, Klimt's personal life erupted in crisis. Klimt was entering his most creative period, and the intensity coincided with an increasingly complicated love life. When Klimt returned from Italy, he wrote a long emotional letter to one of his young models, Maria Zimmermann, known as Mizzi. Mizzi's parents lived far from the magnetic world on the Ringstrasse.
Her stepfather was a stern, low-paid officer in the royal guard of Emperor Franz Joseph. Her family was poor and Catholic, with many children. Her mother had high hopes for Mizzi, who spent hours in museums and dreamed of being an artist. Her mother mistakenly saw Klimt as a conspicuously eligible bachelor. She encouraged Mizzi to stroll the leafy street in the Josefstadt district where Klimt had his studio.

The future Alma Mahler, the daughter of Vienna painter Jakob Emil Schindler, ca. 1898. She was tempted to surrender to Klimt at the start of her famous love life with brilliant men. (
Illustration Credit 7.1
)

Klimt opened the garden door one day and noticed the teenager with golden braids lingering under the chestnut blooms. He invited Mizzi in.

As Mizzi told her mother breathlessly, Klimt delicately arranged her heavy red-gold hair, gently turning head and shoulders with his large hands as he sketched her. Klimt told Mizzi he would like her to be in a painting of Franz Schubert playing piano by candlelight.
A wealthy Klimt patron,
Serena Lederer, lent Mizzi a whispery silk gown to model for the painting, and Mizzi eagerly shed her unfashionable street clothes.

Mizzi felt honored to be taken seriously by a great man.
Klimt asked her to model nude for the
Naked Truth
of the Secession. Mizzi introduced Klimt to her mother, raising expectations.
Klimt wangled Mizzi a role on a holiday parade float representing Vienna, and her family cheered with the crowd.

Teenager Mizzi Zimmermann, at left,
1899
. She became pregnant with Klimt's son while she modeled for his painting of Schubert playing the piano. (
Illustration Credit 7.2
)

Klimt unveiled his painting of Schubert, playing one of his sensual piano compositions. But he didn't invite Mizzi to the Dumba Palace on the Ringstrasse to join the guests admiring his rendering of her as a delicately lit, mysterious beauty by the piano, her hair a russet halo. The critic Hermann Bahr called it “
the most beautiful painting that was ever painted by an Austrian,” saying that “this tranquility, this placidness, this radiance on the civic modesty—this is our Austrian character.”

But Mizzi was desperate. Mizzi was pregnant. “
Is it possible that your dear good mother doesn't have a clue?” Klimt wrote, when he returned from his steamy encounter with Alma.

He didn't tell Mizzi he was expecting another child in two months, with a poor Czech washerwoman named
Maria Ucicka.

The odds were against Mizzi from the start. Klimt was deeply attached to his unmarried sister-in-law,
Emilie Flöge, and her family. He would never give up this relationship, or the summer idylls at mountain lakes with the warm, close-knit family that his late brother Ernst had had the good fortune to marry into. They were the only real family Klimt had ever had.

Mizzi took Klimt's advice. She told her family. Her stepfather threw her out, enraged she would jeopardize her sisters' slim marriage prospects. Mizzi moved into a small hotel and begged Klimt for financial support. Marriage was not just a convention for most women in those days; it was
the arbitrator of their destiny. It could determine comfort or poverty, companionship or abject loneliness. For a girl like Mizzi, an affair with Klimt was a high-stakes endeavor.

Mizzi was ruined.

Like the Bauers, many members of the Jewish elite considered themselves quintessentially Viennese.
Freud donned lederhosen to stroll in the Vienna Woods with his daughter Anna. The Bauers celebrated Christmas and Easter as they did the balls of the opera season. In the eyes of Vienna wit
Alfred Polgar, even the classic Viennese
feuilleton,
or short funny sketch, blended “
the melancholy of the synagogue and the alcoholic mood of Grinzing,” the medieval winery district in the Vienna Woods.
The Viennese
Fiakerlied,
or “Coachman's Song,” a favorite of the crown prince, was composed by a Hungarian Jewish immigrant. Jewish bon vivants like Budapest-born
Felix Salten seemed
über wiener,
more Viennese than the Viennese.

Yet a wall of social prejudice stubbornly defined them as Jews. One of the more unusual Vienna residents to point out the virulence of this tenacious
anti-Semitism was Samuel Clemens, the American writer known by his pen name,
Mark Twain.

Twain moved his family to Vienna in September 1897. He was depressed. The previous year, his family had lost their beloved daughter Susy to spinal meningitis, at twenty-four. Twain desperately needed a change of scene. He was suffering from paralyzing writer's block when he checked in to the Hotel Metropol, on the Morzinplatz overlooking the Danube Canal. He brought his God-fearing wife, Olivia, and his daughter Clara, the belle of the family.

Twain was already something of a philo-Semite. “
The difference between the brain of the average Christian and that of the average Jew—certainly in Europe—is about the difference between a tadpole's and the Archbishop's,” Twain wrote a few weeks after arriving in Vienna, to the Reverend
Joseph Twichell, an old friend. “It's a marvelous race—by long odds the most marvelous the world has ever produced, I suppose.”

Mark Twain, sitting for a sculpture by Theresa Federowna Ries in Vienna. Twain had so many Jewish friends in Adele's milieu that he was called “the Jew
Mark Twain” in the anti-Semitic press of 1897. (
Illustration Credit 8.1
)

The Vienna literati invited Twain to address the
Concordia club in October. He found himself face-to-face with the crème de la crème of Jewish society. Nearly half the Concordia's 348 members were Jews. The audience included nearly every prominent member of Adele Bauer's Jewish milieu, from
Gustav Mahler, Alma's future husband, to the handsome and picaresque
Felix Salten, a journalist who was writing a sexually explicit fictional memoir of a teenage Vienna prostitute, but would someday be better known as the author of
Bambi,
the children's classic.
Viktor Leon was the librettist of
The Merry Widow.
The great Vienna newspaper editor
Moritz Szeps found a seat at the august all-male club; and his daughter, the pioneer female journalist
Berta Zuckerkandl, likely watched from a special balcony for women. Vienna journalist
Julius Bauer, a close friend of Adele's family who penned a libretto for Johann Strauss the Younger, wrote a picaresque song about Twain's exploits that was sung, opera-style, by
Alexander Girardi, the star of the wildly popular Strauss opera
Die
Fledermaus.

Then Twain stood up before these Vienna wits and confided that he had always wanted to deliver a speech in German, but people
“thwarted my
desire, sometimes violently. Those people have always said to me: ‘Be still sir! For God's sake, be quiet! Find another way to make yourself tiresome.' ”