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Archive for the ‘Harlotography’ Category

Klondike Kate

Posted in Biography, Harlotography, Perception, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 19, 2013| 8 Comments »

I wouldn’t have known what I know now if I hadn’t lived the way I have.  –  Kathleen Rockwell

Though there have always been women who made a career of directly accepting money for sex, the majority of those who have taken money for it – perhaps as high as 90% of them – did so casually or infrequently, and never thought of themselves as whores per se.  Indeed, it wasn’t until the 19th century that any woman who had ever done so was judged to be as “fallen” as those who made a career of it and eschewed marriage and domesticity.  But like all new ideas, this one did not catch on everywhere right away; though it was popular in the “social purity” movement and later became the standard definition among American Progressives, many women of the transitional period continued to take money for sex on an irregular and unpredictable basis, leading to considerable controversy among both contemporary and modern bean-counters as to whether or not they were “really” prostitutes.

Klondike Kate, circa 1901Case in point: Kathleen Eloisa Rockwell, born in Junction City, Kansas, in 1873 (though she later claimed 1876).  Her parents had both divorced their spouses to marry each other, then in turn divorced after a move to North Dakota.  By the time Kate was five her mother Martha had again remarried to a wealthy businessman; until she was 15 she lived in a mansion in Spokane, Washington.  But after her stepfather’s business failed the marriage did as well, and Martha dragged Kate off to Chile, where her son from her first marriage was living; on the voyage there Kate accepted a young officer’s proposal of marriage.  Since Martha had entirely failed to grasp that “do as I say, not as I do” is an ineffective parenting strategy, she was aghast; she ended the engagement and upon arrival in Valparaiso enrolled Kate in a convent school.  No sooner had she graduated and started teaching kindergarten than she accepted another proposal, this time from a Spanish diplomatic attaché; she soon ended that one at the insistence of the school’s principal.  In later years, she claimed to have accepted over 100 proposals in her life, and broken all but a few of them; I suggest the reader view this as akin to courtesan’s claims of men committing suicide over them, or modern strippers’ staggering incomes that never seem to translate into actual bank balances.

Only three years after her arrival in Chile, Martha decided to return to New York; she soon asked Kate to join her there, but when she arrived in November of 1892(?) she found that her mother was both broke and too old to attract another rich husband.  Kate supported them both with a number of chorus-girl gigs until an old friend invited her back to work in a vaudeville theater in Spokane; there she not only sang and danced, but also made a cut from drinks customers bought her (it seems likely that her first tricks were picked up there).  When the Klondike gold rush started in the summer of 1897, Kate recognized it as a matchless opportunity; within a year she had put together the money to resettle her mother in Seattle and pay for passage to Canada.  She arrived in Victoria, BC late in the autumn, and discovered that the RCMP would not let women go any farther because the winter was “too dangerous”.  But like any good harlot, she refused to let the arbitrary declarations of cops deter her when there was money to be made; she therefore disguised herself as a boy and sneaked onto a cargo ship headed for Whitehorse, Yukon.

Klondike Kate, circa 1900She worked as a tap-dancer in Whitehorse for most of 1899, then joined the Savoy Theatrical Company when its new theater in Dawson opened in 1900.  Since she stood out in looks, talent and sex appeal from the other girls she soon attracted the attention of Charlie Meadows, who offered her $200 a week (about $5500 today) and star billing at his Palace Grande Theater, where she immediately became a huge hit.  Her show-stopper, the “Flame Dance”, included her twirling a huge swath of red chiffon about while singing and dancing; men threw money at her during the act, and she charged them to dance with her afterwards.  She is also known to have charged for company, but was extremely discreet about it; altogether, she later estimated she made about $500 a week beyond her salary, a total of about $30,000 ($815,000 today) by the end of 1900.  On Christmas Eve she was crowned “Queen of the Yukon” by her fans, and a miner named Johnny Matson (more on him later) fell instantly in love with her.

Unfortunately, she had recently begun a relationship with an ambitious Greek immigrant named Alexander Pantages, a former boxer and current bartender with plans to open a chain of theaters.  They opened the Orpheum together early in 1901, and with Kate as its headliner they were soon rolling in money.  But in the spring of the following year, Pantages realized that the gold was running out and suggested the two of them move to Seattle; Kate did not wish to leave Dawson, so they embarked upon a long-distance relationship.  Even after she finally came back to the US in 1903 or 1904, she wanted to tour while he was stuck in Seattle working on his dream of a theater chain.  While she was performing in Texas, Alex took up with a violinist named Lois Medenhall, whom he married on March 12, 1905; though their relationship had clearly been cooling for a long time Kate was furious and filed a breach-of-promise lawsuit against him in May, seeking the return of the $60,000 she had invested in his theaters plus another $25,000 in damages.  The affair upset her terribly, however, and she started drinking heavily; she settled out of court in April 1906 for a paltry $5,000, then moved to Fairbanks, Alaska, opened a hotel and performed at a nightclub called the Floradora.  Luck was not with her; the uninsured hotel burned down in 1907 and she left Alaska flat broke.

Klondike Kate, circa 1906Since she was only 34, she easily built up another career in vaudeville.  But there was not nearly as much money to be made in Seattle as there had been in the Klondike, and besides she was depressed and drinking; after a knee injury ended her dancing career for good in 1914 she had a nervous breakdown, and left Seattle to open a boarding house in Bend, Oregon (at which some of her boarders seem to have been whores).  Though money was tight, she preferred to do most of the menial work herself rather than sell any of her expensive jewelry; as she later told a biographer, “I can remember the queer looks on the faces of customers, seeing me up to my elbows in soap suds, with a thousand dollars’ worth of diamonds in each ear.”  She eventually built her business into a profitable enough venture to make large donations to the town’s volunteer fire department, but made the mistake of selling it in the early 1920s to start a restaurant in California…which promptly failed so badly she was forced to borrow money from the now-successful Alex Pantages.  The latter’s fortune did not last long after that, however; in 1929 his wife Lois was tried for killing a man while driving drunk, and Alex was charged with raping a young actress.  Though his conviction was overturned after two years in prison, he was financially ruined and died of a heart attack in 1936.

Kate married a cowboy named Floyd Warner in the late ‘20s, but that was over by the time she received a letter from Johnny Matson, who had never stopped loving her; he had read a newspaper account of the Pantages trial (during which Kate had been subpoenaed by the prosecution as a character witness) and decided to look her up again.  In that letter he proposed, and she married him in Victoria, BC on July 14, 1933.  He was still a miner and very solicitous of her welfare, so he insisted she spend the winters in Oregon rather than at his remote claim.  During this time she began to be invited to appear at miner’s reunions in Portland, and spent her winters training young Hollywood actresses in vaudeville techniques.  They lived happily this way until the winter of 1946, when she was notified that Matson had been found dead in the woods miles from his cabin.  Two years later she married another old admirer, an Oregon accountant named W. L. Van Duren, and was still with him when she died at the age of 83 on February 21, 1957.  Though she is not well-known in most of the US, she is still remembered fondly in Alaska and Oregon; in the former as the glamorous showgirl of her youth, and in the latter as the generous civic benefactress of her later years.  And despite what moralists like to believe, they were one and the same woman.

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Hwang Jini

Posted in Biography, Harlotography, History, Perception, tagged , , , , , , , , on November 14, 2013| 21 Comments »

Mountains are the same as in the old times,
But streams are never the same;
They keep flowing day and night,
So they can not be the same.
The men of fame are like the streams;
Once gone, they never return.  –  Hwang Jini

My column on the kisaeng, theHwang Jin Yi movie poster Korean equivalent of geisha, opened with a sijo poem by Hwang Jini, the most famous and beloved of her profession.  In recent years, she has essentially become the archetypal kisaeng, and as in the case of Western courtesans her life has provided the inspiration for novels, a television show  and a movie; of course, these fictional treatments are considerably embellished and dramatized, and it’s difficult to tell history from folk legend from deliberate “improvement”.  In this case, the task is further complicated by the dearth of English-language sources on the subject, but there is still enough to enable a sketch of a most unconventional woman of almost superhuman charisma who made her own way in a society where that was simply not allowed.  Hwang Jini’s extraordinary presence and strength of will is a large part of why modern Korean women find her so fascinating; she is a splendid example of what I call an archeofeminist, a woman who uses her femininity to advantage rather than rejecting it.

She was born about 1506 in Kaesong, which lies in what is now North Korea.  Her mother, Chin Hyungeum, was of the cheonmin caste, but her exact profession is unknown; some sources say she was a kisaeng herself, though this seems unlikely given her poverty.  She was, however, extraordinarily beautiful, and attracted the attention of a young yangban (nobleman) named Hwang Chinsa, who took her as a mistress for a time.  They had one daughter, Jini, who from a very early age was recognized as exceptional both in beauty and in musical skill; it is said that she made the decision to become a kisaeng after a young man killed himself or pined away over her, and she realized such powerful appeal would win her fortune.  Now, it is very likely that the decision to send her to a kisaeng house was actually her mother’s; training started very early (sometimes as young as eight), so it hardly seems credible that she was already breaking hearts and making major life-decisions at such a tender age.  However, the very fact that the legend portrays her as choosing her own destiny demonstrates the strength of the impression she made on people.

In Jini’s day, Confucianism was still solidifying its hold on the upper class, and different schools of thought were still vying for control.  Though the kisaeng were technically of slave status, the government did not claim ownership of them until almost a century after her death; she therefore enjoyed a freedom later generations of kisaeng were denied.  After her training was complete she set out to earn a living, taking up almost immediately with a gibu named Yi Saeng.  Though some gibu were jealous or behaved pimpishly, this does not seem to have been the case with Yi Saeng, who appears to have been almost a father-figure to her.  The two took a long sightseeing trip to Mount Kumgang, with Jini (who by then was using her stage name, Myeongwol [“Bright Moon”]) obtaining their needs via casual prostitution.  This story illustrates several important points about her character: first, her ability even at so young an age (she was probably about 15 then) to deal with men as an equal, the hallmark of all great courtesans; second, her willingness to use her sexuality to obtain what she wanted; and third, her total lack of artificiality.  The latter was her most striking characteristic: she spoke her mind freely, with little of the formality which was the norm in Korean society; she generally went without makeup at a time when most kisaeng painted their faces elaborately; and she often dressed attractively but plainly, with very little jewelry.

Hwang Jini (portrait from Korean textbook, c. 1910)But her beauty, personality, intelligence, musical talent and skill at poetry allowed her to seduce men almost without conscious effort, and when she actually applied herself she was practically an irresistible force.  One of her conquests was a misogynistic government official named So Seyang, who bragged he would keep her for a month and then dismiss her without regret; at the end of the time he begged her to stay and she refused, composing a poem to tell him goodbye.  Another of her famous clients was a noted musician named Yi Sajong, with whom she is said to have lived for six years; given the extremely short professional lives of the kisaeng, this was presumably in her thirties, after she had made her fortune.  And a fortune it was; though it could not compare with the wealth of a yangban or even that of a successful European courtesan of her time, it was more than enough to support her in comfort until her death in 1560.  One of the reasons for this success was her ability to deal with men in a completely unsentimental manner, which allowed her to always pursue the most lucrative arrangement available without hesitation or regret; this has been romantically explained as the result of a tragic love affair in her youth resulting in an inability to fall in love again, but that is almost certainly a mere fiction invented by male biographers unable or unwilling to grasp just how pragmatic a whore can be.

There was only one man in her life who seemed to rise above the level of friend or valued client, and that was the philosopher Seo Kyung Duk, under whom she studied for a time.  He was the only man said to have been impervious to her charms, and though she may have at first viewed him as a challenge she eventually came to admire his strength and steadfastness:  she is known to have described him as one of the “three wonders of Kaesong”, the other two being the Pakyon Falls and herself (modesty was clearly not among her virtues).  Though she left her home at a young age, she returned for a number of visits over the years; it was a place of great natural beauty, and her appreciation for such is demonstrated not only in her poetry and her trip to Mount Kumgang (at a time when she could have been occupied far more productively), but also in the fact that she asked to be buried in a simple grave on a riverbank in Kaesong.  She wished to die in the same way she had lived:  practically, honestly, and without the ceremony and pretense which was the norm in her society.

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Aileen Wuornos

Posted in Biography, Harlotography, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 10, 2013| 26 Comments »

I killed those men, robbed them as cold as ice.  And I’d do it again, too…I have hate crawling through my system…I am so sick of hearing this “she’s crazy” stuff…I’m trying to tell the truth.  I’m one who seriously hates human life and would kill again.  –  Aileen Wuornos

In my harlotographies, I’ve tried to cover as broad a range as possible: from the ancient to the recently-deceased, from streetwalkers to courtesans, from the noble to the self-centered, from the wise to the deranged and from the famous to the infamous.  Three years ago this month I presented short biographies of the victims of the first known serial killer, and today the first woman to be herself so labeled:  Aileen Carol Wuornos.

Aileen Wuornos as a childShe was born in Rochester, Michigan on February 29th, 1956 to 17-year-old Diane Wuornos, who had married Aileen’s father, Leo Pittman, less than two years before.  Aileen never met him; he was in prison when she was born, and her mother had already filed for divorce.  Pittman was a schizophrenic with a long history of violent behavior, and hanged himself in prison in 1969 while serving another sentence, this time for child molestation.  In January of 1960, Diane abandoned Aileen and her older brother Keith, leaving them with her parents Lauri and Britta Wuornos; they immediately adopted the children and for many years allowed them to believe they were their parents.  Unfortunately, they were just as bad as the real parents; Lauri sexually abused his granddaughter, and Britta was both physically abusive and an alcoholic.  Like many incest victims, Aileen became sexually precocious; she had sexual contact with boys at school in exchange for drugs, cigarettes and other things she wanted, and when she turned up pregnant at 14 she named Keith as the father.  As was typical in 1970 she was sent to a home for unwed mothers, and the baby was given up for adoption.  A few months later Britta died of alcohol-induced liver failure, and Lauri threw his granddaughter out soon afterward.  Though she and her brother were placed in foster homes, Aileen ran away almost immediately and lived in a patch of woods near her old neighborhood, supporting herself via prostitution.

But she did not stay there for long; by 16 she started hitchhiking around the Midwest, working mostly at truck stops, and was arrested for drunk driving in Colorado in May of 1974.  By the beginning of 1976 she had made it to Florida, where she was picked up while hitchhiking by Lewis Fell, the wealthy 69-year-old president of a yacht club.  He immediately fell in love with her and soon proposed; she accepted, and their marriage announcement even appeared on the local paper’s society page in May of 1976.  There the story might have ended had Aileen been merely the victim of a difficult life; as should be clear, however, mental and emotional instability ran deep on both sides of her family, and she was completely incapable of settling down to the comfortable situation of a trophy wife.  Instead, she insisted on drinking at bars and getting into fights; when she was jailed for attacking a bartender while on a trip home to Michigan (after her grandfather’s suicide), Fell came to his senses and had the marriage annulled.  She was arrested July 14th; her brother died of throat cancer three days later, and the annulment went through on the 21st.

Aileen blew through her brother’s $10,000 insurance policy in only a few months and returned to truck-stop prostitution, working her way back down to Florida.  But while she had been quite pretty in her teens, hard living and her volatile temper had faded that luster; it thus became increasingly difficult for her to make a living as a whore.  She was arrested for robbing a convenience store in May of 1981, and again for passing forged checks in May of 1984.  By 1986 she had just about hit bottom: she was arrested for car theft in January, then for attempted armed robbery of a client in June.  Soon after that, however, she met a hotel maid named Tyria Moore at a lesbian bar in Daytona Beach, and they moved in together; for a while Wuornos seems to have been happy in her way, and her earnings picked up enough for Moore to quit her job and let Wuornos support both of them.  But slowly, over the next several years, the chaos which followed Wuornos like a cloud returned and worsened.  In July of 1987, she got in a fight at a bar, then in March of 1988 with a bus driver.  And by the end of the following year, she had returned to where she was when she met Moore, and started robbing her clients…this time, killing them in the process.

Aileen WuornosThe particulars of the case are discussed in exhaustive detail all over the internet if you’re interested, so there’s no need to repeat them here.  Suffice to say that between December 1st, 1989 and November 19th, 1990, Aileen Wuornos murdered seven men – Richard Mallory, David Spears, Charles Carskaddon, Peter Siems, Troy Burress, Charles Humphreys and Walter Antonio, all with the same delicate little .22 caliber purse gun.  Moore was still with her at least until the fourth murder, but sometime after that they broke up and Moore went home to Pennsylvania.  She later admitted to knowing about the first murder, but claimed to have deliberately avoided asking about the others because she didn’t want to know.  Wuornos was a terribly sloppy criminal; she left a string of witnesses, fingerprints and pawned loot across Florida, and had the police been competent she would have been caught much earlier.  Wuornos was finally arrested on January 9th, 1991, and Moore the next day; she agreed to testify in exchange for immunity from prosecution, and even talked Wuornos into confessing on the phone.  In that confession, Wuornos claimed that every single one of the men had tried to rape her, and that she had killed them all in self-defense.

Predictably, credulous feminists swallowed every word and touted her as some kind of heroine; remember, this was the height of child sexual abuse hysteria.  But she was neither a heroine nor the “man-hating lesbian” some pundits claimed; she was merely an unstable sociopath whose restless, violent life had exacerbated her existing problems.  At first, she seemed to enjoy the publicity and continually retold her story to recast herself more and more as the victim, ignoring her public defenders’ entreaties that she remain silent and insisting she be allowed to tell her story in court.  When the jury at her first trial (for Mallory’s murder) compared her absurdly-embellished version with the original videotaped confession, any credibility she may have had disintegrated; it took less than two hours for them to convict her of first-degree murder, and she responded by screaming “I hope you get raped!” at them.  She was sentenced to death.  Before her next trial could start, she decided to “get right with God” by pleading no contest to the murders of Humphreys, Burress and Spears, claiming in her statement that though Mallory (who had a previous conviction for the crime) did indeed rape her, she had only feared the others would and killed them before they could do so.  She was given three more death sentences.

Wuornos spent the next decade on death row, her mental health deteriorating the entire time.  In 2001 she fired her legal counsel and stated that she was giving up appeals, but then insisted that the prison staff were torturing her by contaminating and even poisoning her food so as to drive her to suicide before her execution; she also claimed that they intended to rape her before she died.  During the last few years of her life she gave a a series of interviews to Nick Broomfield, who had already made a documentary about her in 1993 (Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer) and was in the process of making another (released in 2003 as Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer); the video below is the last such interview, made the night before her death.

She was executed by lethal injection on October 9th, 2002 after declining a last meal (she wanted only a cup of black coffee).  Her last words were, “I’d just like to say I’m sailing with the rock, and I’ll be back like Independence Day, with Jesus June 6th.  Like the movie, big mother ship and all, I’ll be back.”

There are some women I’m proud to share a profession with, and others I’m not; women like Theodora and Skittles show whores at our best, while women like Aileen Wuornos show us at our worst.  But I think her story is an important part of the picture, because it demonstrates once again that there is no one type of woman who sells sex, nor any consistent pattern to our lives and fates.

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Jane Shore

Posted in Biography, Harlotography, History, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , on September 5, 2013| 15 Comments »

Proper she was and fair…yet delighted not men so much in her beauty, as in her pleasant behaviour.  For a proper wit had she, and could both read well and write, merry of company, ready and quick of answer, neither mute nor full of babble, sometimes taunting without displeasure and not without disport.  –  Charles Ross, Richard III

All through history, many a famous or important man has met his downfall through careless or indiscreet relations with whores; I’ve featured the stories of many of them in these columns, and I’m sure you can think of a few on your own without my assistance.  But sometimes it happens the other way around, and a whore is ruined by her association with the wrong client; Elizabeth “Jane” Shore was one such case, though the beauty and charm which had placed her in harm’s way eventually secured her escape from it again.

Jane Shore (18th century engraving)She was born in London about 1445 to John and Amy Lambert; her father was a wealthy dry-goods dealer who helped to finance King Edward IV’s wars against his Lancastrian cousins, and so the future courtesan was exposed from a young age to noblewomen from whom she learned courtly manners.  She was also well-educated, and though these preparations may seem to have been meant to prepare her for her future profession, it was actually unintentional; in fact, the constant and ardent attention paid her by wealthy and important (but married) men (including William Hastings, later King Edward’s Lord Chamberlain) seems to have inspired the Lamberts to choose a husband for her hastily and unwisely.  She was married sometime after 1460 to a wealthy goldsmith named William Shore, but the marriage was a loveless one; in fact, it appears to have been a sexless one as well, because the grounds for her eventual annulment was that the marriage was never consummated.  Given his wife’s beauty and the fact that he never remarried, it seems safe to conclude that Shore was a closeted homosexual; he certainly never interfered with Elizabeth’s social life, and sometime soon after Edward’s restoration to the throne in 1471 she became his mistress.

Though Edward IV was a notorious womanizer, Elizabeth quickly became his favorite; he described her as “the merriest harlot in the realm” and after the annulment of her marriage in 1476 he formally extended his protection to William Shore.  This favor was probably asked of him by Elizabeth, who unlike most royal mistresses used her influence not to gain favors or gifts for herself, but instead to win mercy for deserving men who had incurred the royal wrath.  As Sir Thomas More wrote of her many years later, she “never abused [her influence] to any man’s hurt, but to many a man’s comfort and relief.”  Even the Queen, whose name was also Elizabeth, liked and accepted her; in fact, it is likely that she changed her name to Jane around this time as a show of deference to her.  This nobility of character won the lasting respect of the King; though he generally discarded his mistresses as soon as he tired of them, he remained close to Jane until his death on April 9th, 1483.

It was after that death that her troubles began, however.  She briefly became the mistress of the late King’s stepson, Thomas Grey, Marquess of Dorset, but it was not long before William Hastings renewed his two-decade-old suit and she took up with him instead.  She also remained friendly with the Queen, and carried messages between her and Hastings.  The subject of these messages was undoubtedly her brother-in-law, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who had been declared “Lord Protector” over her young sons (and the kingdom) by the dying Edward IV.  Anyone who is familiar with Shakespeare knows why the Queen was afraid:  Richard immediately imprisoned the young princes “for their own protection”, then had them declared illegitimate and set about destroying everyone whom he thought might be loyal to his brother and the boy Edward V.  On June 13th he accused Jane and the Queen of trying to destroy him via witchcraft at Hastings’ request; the women were imprisoned, while Hastings was immediately beheaded in the courtyard of the Tower of London.  In some way which is unclear to history, Richard was persuaded to relent slightly on the witchcraft charges; they were never pursuedThe Penance of Jane Shore by William Blake (c. 1793) against the Queen, and Jane’s charge was reduced to “promiscuity”.  She was forced to do penance by walking through London barefoot in her petticoat, carrying a candle and singing hymns.  But if Richard hoped to humiliate her by this treatment, he was sorely disappointed: the crowds who had gathered to gawk were instead struck by her beauty, moved to pity by her condition and impressed with the dignity she displayed during her ordeal.

One of the admirers she won that day was Thomas Lynom, Solicitor General to the newly-crowned King Richard III.  After her penance Jane was confined in Ludgate prison, where Lynom visited her often and soon fell in love with her.  He asked the King to free her so he could marry her, and though Richard tried to dissuade him from what he considered a foolish action (and even wrote a letter to John Russell, the Lord Chancellor, asking him to persuade Lynom to give up the idea), he eventually gave his permission; Jane was pardoned, married Lynom, and bore him a daughter named Julianne.  And though Lynom lost his high position in August of 1485 (after Henry Tudor defeated Richard and became Henry VII), he got a new (though lower) government job, and Jane lived the rest of her days in middle-class comfort.  Sir Thomas More met and befriended her in her old age, and wrote that she was still a merry companion with a quick mind and a tender heart, and that one could still discern traces of her youthful beauty.

She died at last in 1527, at about the age of 82, and was buried at Hinxworth Church in Hertfordshire.  Some biographies erroneously claim that she spent her declining years in poverty, but this is not so; it is the fate of her character in an Elizabethan play named The True Tragedy of Richard III, which predated Shakespeare’s treatment by several years.  This confusion of historical dramas with history is not unusual; historians are still trying to untangle the historical Richard III from his wholly-villainous portrayal by Shakespeare and other Tudor dramatists.  Jane is mentioned frequently (as “Mistress Shore”) in the Richard III of Shakespeare, and is a major character in many other works of the period (plays, novels and even poems).  There was also an 18th-century drama about her life, and three different silent movies (though oddly enough, no talkies).  But as we have so often seen in the lives of the courtesans, truth is stranger than fiction, and real historical events more fascinating than the attempts of authors to improve on them.

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Lais of Corinth

Posted in Biography, Harlotography, Perception, tagged , , , , on August 2, 2013| 7 Comments »

I Lais, once of Greece the pride,
For whom so many suitors sigh’d,
Now aged grown, at Venus’ shrine
The mirror of my youth resign;
Since what I am I will not see,
And what I was I cannot be.  –  Julian the Egyptian

Lais of Corinth by Hans Holbein the Younger (1526)As I’ve written many times before, it’s difficult to know which details of the lives of courtesans are true and which are false, and which of the latter are embellishment or exaggeration and which outright invention on the part of the lady herself, her admirers, her enemies or her biographers.  And that’s just the modern courtesans; the biographies of those of the ancient world often trail off into legend and myth.  But the problem with writing about Lais is simultaneously simpler and more maddening: there may have been two hetaerae by the same name living at almost the same time, whose biographical details became confused with one another; or, there may have only been one Lais who sometimes looks like two because stories about other courtesans became mistakenly attached to her.  So though I’ll do my best to straighten things out, I cannot promise to fully untangle a skein it has taken over twenty-three centuries to tangle.

Some sources say she was born in Hyccara, Sicily in 421 BCE, and died in Thessaly in 340.  That’s a long lifespan, but not impossible even for the time; however, if she was only one woman the legend about her death – that she was stoned by the native women out of jealousy –  would certainly have to be false, since I hardly think even the greatest beauty of her age (as she was reputed to be) would still be capable of inspiring murderous jealousy at 81.  If the story of the murder is true, she would either have to have been born at least forty years later or to have been two women.  However, I am highly suspicious that it is indeed true, because it sounds a lot more like a tall tale men would make up than actual female behavior; while women are certainly capable of murder, we generally don’t do it in big groups unless there’s some sort of ritual involved.  If the death date is accurate, I think it’s much more likely Lais died of old age in her bed…but that makes a much less lurid story.

The account of her origin is no less interesting, but far more credible: her birthplace, Hyccara, was conquered by the Athenians in 415 BCE and its entire population sold into slavery.  Lais ended up in Corinth, and as she matured into a beauty won her freedom in much the same way Rhodopis did.  Some modern authors claim that the elder Lais was born in Corinth and the younger in Hyccara, but since the town was depopulated years before the birth of anyone who was still young in 340, this hardly seems likely.  The two-Lais theory is undermined still further by the fact that though there are solid contemporary references to her in the early 4th century BCE, those which take place later are entirely anecdotal.  The philosopher Aristippus (435-356 BCE) was one of her clients and mentions her in two of his writings, and in his play Wealth (388 BCE), Aristophanes states that she was kept by a man named Philonides.  By contrast, the accounts of famous men who were said to have sought her out in the mid-4th century (such as Demosthenes and Myron) are unverified by contemporary sources; furthermore, the story that she set an absurd price for one man while giving herself to the philosopher Diogenes for free is also told about Phryne, with Demosthenes playing the part of the King of Lydia.

There is one last factor which makes the one-Lais theory far more likely than its rival: the woman who died in 340 (and was buried in a tomb decorated by a statue of a lioness holding a ram in her forepaws) was supposed to have moved to Thessaly to live with a handsome young man named Hippostratus, with whom she had fallen in love.  Now, poets adore the romantic notion of a successful courtesan giving it all up for love, but in truth this rarely happens; most often, it’s older, retired courtesans who take up with much younger men rather than young ones running off with boys their own age.

So though we cannot be sure, the facts of Lais’ life seem to be these: she spent her later childhood and early teens as a slave, and was trained as a hetaera; after a while one of her admirers bought her freedom and she quickly became popular.  She charged very high fees and indulged herself in many of the extravagances common to her profession; she even developed her own exclusive perfume.  But by her early thirties she began to slow down, allowing herself to be kept by a succession of wealthy men rather than accepting a large number of short-term clients.  As she got older still she took up with Hippostratus and moved to Thessaly, and eventually died of old age.  But her legendary beauty and reputation attracted stories as honey attracts flies (even stories that were also told about others), and eventually there were too many of them for just one woman’s lifetime to contain…so some not-quite-as-clever-as-they-imagine historians decided to split her into two.Lais in Hades by Gustave Cortos, print by Luis Falero (1902)

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Marie Duplessis

Posted in Biography, Harlotography, Perception, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on June 27, 2013| 27 Comments »

[She was] the most elegant of women, having the most aristocratic taste and the most exquisite tact:  she set the tone for a whole area of society.  –  from her obituary

Marie Duplessis by Édouard ViénotAs we have seen before, it’s not unusual for the lives of whores to become the stuff of legend, often to the point where the real woman is either lost under the embellishment  or people forget there was ever a real woman in the first place.  Such a woman was Marie Duplessis, whose real story was far more interesting than the romantic legend later created from it.  She was born Alphonsine Plessis on January 15th, 1824 to a ne’er-do-well Norman father and a mother who was the last of an impoverished noble family which had been reduced to servility; her mother died when she was six and her father raised her alone until she was fourteen, when he sold her to a band of gypsies.  Yes, this is her actual story, stranger than the fiction by which most modern people know her, and as you will see it only gets better.

The gypsies took her to Paris and put her to work in a dress shop, but by fifteen she discovered that prostitution was far more lucrative and allowed her to pay off her indenture in less than a year (many “trafficked” women still make the same choice for exactly the same reason today).  Her exceptional beauty and charm won her a devoted following, and at 16 she attracted her first important client:  Agénor de Guiche, later one of Napoleon III’s ministers.  It was at this time she took the name Marie Duplessis (the “Du” prefix connotes a noble family, an honor she felt her mother’s ancestry entitled her to) and wisely invested in tutors who taught her not only to read and write, but also educated her in history, geography and other subjects she needed to converse intelligently with men of the ruling class.  By the age of 17 she was involved with Comte Edouard de Perregaux, but because he could not give her all she needed she did not devote herself to him exclusively; another patron, the Count Von Stakelberg (a Swedish diplomat in his eighties) bought her a house in the Boulevard de la Madeleine.

Marie Duplessis at the Theatre by Camille RoqueplanLike so many other courtesans, she established a salon in her residence, and many of the Parisian cognoscenti gathered there; among them was Alexandre Dumas fils, the as-yet-undistinguished son of the famed adventure novelist.  The two fell in love in September of 1844 (only a few months after the publication of his father’s most famous work, The Three Musketeers), but the relationship was not to be; Dumas was far too poor to support her, and by August of 1845 she had had quite enough of his jealousy toward those who could.  But as we will see, the relationship actually worked in reverse, and Marie brought Dumas far more wealth than he ever gave her.  Her next lover was the famous composer (and infamous womanizer) Franz Liszt, but by spring of 1846 he had moved on and she entered into a marriage of convenience with Perregaux.  Because this was an English registry-office marriage transacted without benefit of clergy it was not considered binding in France, which suited Marie just fine: she could share her husband’s title without having to observe any of the restrictions that come with matrimony.

Her brilliant career was not to last, however; like so many 19th-century children of poverty she had contracted tuberculosis (or as it was called in those days, “consumption”), and by the summer of 1846 she knew she was dying.  She visited every specialist in Europe, but there was no cure.  By September she was no longer able to work, and none of the clients who eulogized her after her death did anything to ease her suffering; as Nickie Roberts wrote in Whores in History, she was “abandoned by all her former lovers and friends except her faithful maid Clothilde – and her creditors.”  She died on February 3rd, 1847, less than three weeks after her 23rd birthday.  And though her lavish funeral (paid for by Perregaux and Von Stakelberg) was attended by hundreds, her possessions still had to be auctioned off to pay her debts.

camille deathThat was the real story: a motherless young woman, “trafficked” at 14, who paid for her own education and became one of the most successful members of her profession at an age when modern women are still called “children”, then died of an incurable malady which would have claimed her no matter what because antibiotics had not yet been invented.  But a spurned lover decided to twist that into a morality play, making Marie – or as he renamed her, “Marguerite Gautier” – a “fallen woman” who dies young as a result of her dissolute life; he also created a fictional version of himself named “Armand Duval”, who convinces her to give up her life as a courtesan and thus saves her “virtue” before she dies.  The lover was of course Alexandre Dumas fils, and the novel was La Dame aux Camelias (“The Lady of the Camellias”), published only a year after Marie’s death.  It soon made him far wealthier than she ever was; it became a bestseller, then an extremely popular play, then in 1853 a Verdi opera named La Traviata (“The Fallen Woman”).  The book has remained constantly in print since then, the play and opera have been performed innumerable times, and there have been three different ballets and a dozen movie adaptations (the most famous being Camille (1936), with Greta Garbo as “Marguerite”).  I’m sure most of you have seen or at least heard of one or more of these fictional representations of Marie Duplessis (especially if you read Tuesday’s column), yet I doubt more than a few of you – if any at all – knew anything of her real story before today.  Some things never change:  today, as in the 19th century, most people prefer to embrace romantic nonsense about “fallen women” and how awful it is to be a whore, than to recognize the simple, unvarnished truth.

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Mary Ann Hall

Posted in Biography, Harlotography, History, Perception, tagged , , , , , , , on May 23, 2013| 14 Comments »

With integrity unquestioned, a heart ever open to appeals of distress, a charity that was boundless, she is gone; but her memory will be kept green by many who knew her sterling worth.  –  obituary, Washington Evening Star

Prohibitionists who vomit out nonsense about whores “selling our bodies” demonstrate by their use of the phrase that their comprehension of male sexuality is an absolute vacuum.  Their lurid description of the mythic “john” who “hates and dehumanizes women” and thinks of harlots as disposable collections of holes is as far removed from the typical client as the average neofeminist is from a normal woman; if it were true there would be no regulars and very few happy hookers.  Furthermore, a creature such as the “antis” imagine would pay as little as possible for his pleasure, yet in reality bargain-hunters are no more common than men who are willing to pay as much as they can comfortably afford; this is why good brothels have always been lucrative.  And while the women in such places may be among the most beautiful available and the accommodations the most luxurious, one of the most important features of the expensive bordello is its discretion; most men who can afford luxury prices cannot afford publicity, so the success of a madam who can both run a fine house and keep her clients’ secrets is a virtual certainty.  And Mary Ann Hall, who ran the most successful brothel in 19th-century Washington, D.C., was so exceptionally discreet she actually vanished from history for over a century after her death.

Washington view 1852She was born in 1814, but nothing is known of her life before she arrived in the capital in the mid-1830s.  She prospered in her profession, though, catering to the Washington elite, and by 1840 had saved enough money to build a large, three-story brick house at 349 Maryland Avenue.  The residence was shrewdly placed; though she got the land cheap because of the proximity of a flood-prone canal, it was also only four blocks from Capitol Hill, near the Smithsonian Institute.  As her business flourished and traffic to the area increased, her property value soared; by the time the Federal Provost Marshal cataloged the city’s 450 brothels in 1862, Hall’s was the finest and most respected.  And due to the patronage of countless politicians, it was protected from the periodic revenue-trolling raids conducted by corrupt police on equally-legal but less-well-connected houses.

The aforementioned catalog estimated there were 5000 prostitutes in the city, the majority working for brothels of various sizes (Mary Ann had the most at 18) and the rest streetwalkers or courtesans in private residences.  It cannot be assumed that this number was in any way representative of the harlot population either before or after the Civil War; many of them were probably transients and camp followers there to capitalize on the massive buildup of troops, contractors and other war-related temporary residents, and most of those “brothels” were probably nothing more than incalls shared by at most two or three girls.  Many of them were located in the same general area as Mary Hall’s, which was also home to a number of industries and businesses catering to the nearby military encampment.  After the war, a severe housing shortage resulted in the entire district being redeveloped with tiny, cheap houses called “alley dwellings”, mostly occupied by former slaves and recent immigrants.  Unsurprisingly, the crime rate skyrocketed in the ‘70s, and though Hall’s business continued to be profitable the area’s blackened reputation surely dissuaded some of her clientele.  At the same time the “social purity” movement arrived in Washington, and busybody socialites descended on the district to “rescue” their “fallen sisters” from degradation (undoubtedly making their husbands even more reluctant to visit the neighborhood). By 1878 she had had enough and retired, renting the house first to another madam and later to a women’s clinic; she died of a cerebral hemorrhage on January 29th, 1886, at the ripe old age (for the time) of 71.

graves of Liz and Mary Ann HallWithin a few years, her name lapsed into obscurity and it is unlikely any historian would ever have put together the few records which specifically named the prominent and highly-eulogized lady buried in an expensive tomb at the Congressional Cemetery as a madam.  Ironically, the factor which eventually brought her story back into the light was the same thing which made her last few  years of business more difficult: the descent of her neighborhood into a slum.  An acrimonious family dispute over her estate forced the sale of the brothel, which in 1892 was purchased by the Institution for the Education of Colored Youth (a school for black children).  By the turn of the century the “progressives” were blaming all of Washington’s crime on the “bawdy houses” and “degraded negroes” in the southwestern part of the city; in 1914 prostitution was criminalized and the police (at the instigation of First Lady Ellen Wilson) launched a crusade to “eliminate” the problem by repeated raids and throwing the poorest residents of the district out of their homes.  At the beginning of the Great Depression the government bought up nearly all the land in the area, and by 1934 had razed most of the buildings (including Mary Ann Hall’s); eight years later a temporary building for wartime office space went up on the site, and after it, too was razed in the 1960s the area became a park.

Finally, in 1989 Congress decided to build a new Smithsonian wing, the Museum of the American Indian, on the site, and dispatched a team of archeologists to excavate it before the work of construction was to begin.  And though the building’s foundation revealed nothing of interest, the contents of its trash heap caught the archeologists’ attention; they included “gilt-edged porcelain, corset fasteners, seeds from exotic berries and coconuts and bones from expensive meats, including turtle,” plus hundreds of corks from an expensive brand of champagne.  Archival research then unearthed the history of the place and its mistress, and though we now know her name and a little of her fame, the identities of her clients and the details of their preferences and activities will forever remain her secret.

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Skittles

Posted in Biography, Harlotography, tagged , , , , , , on April 18, 2013| 17 Comments »

She had the most capacious heart I know and must be the only whore in history to retain her heart intact.  –  Henry Labouchere

Of all the grandes horizontals of the 19th century the one I feel I can understand the most, and for whom I have the greatest affinity, is Catherine Walters.  While other courtesans went through money like water, she was relatively thrifty; while others affected gaudy displays of jewelry and ostentatious wealth, she was known for her style and taste; while others made spectacles of themselves, she always behaved naturally; while others extracted all they could from their clients, her fairness earned her a number of lifetime incomes; while others exposed their clients in tell-all memoirs later in life, her discretion was legendary.  And while others used exotic stage names or titles that made them sound more like institutions than women, Catherine was simply “Skittles”, a nickname derived from her first job:  setting up pins in a Liverpool bowling alley named the Black Jack Tavern.

equestrian SkittlesShe was born on June 13th, 1839, the third of five children of Edward and Mary Ann Walters of 1 Henderson Street, Toxteth, Liverpool.  Her mother died giving birth in 1843, and her father was a customs official who eventually drank himself to death in 1864.  Beyond the bowling alley job, little is known of her early life except that she ran away from the convent school to which her father sent her sometime after her mother’s death, and that she also worked in her early teens for a livery stable, where she learned the equestrian skills that were her passport to success.  Though she was petite, charming and very beautiful (with grey eyes, long chestnut hair and an 18-inch waist), the fact that she could outride most men set her apart from other beauties and gained her the public and press attention a courtesan needed for advertisement in those pre-internet days.

She left Liverpool at the age of 16 as the mistress of Lord Fitzwilliam, who set her up in London and remained with her for two years; when he tired of her he gave her a gift of £2,000 and an income of £300 a year.  This set the pattern for her later relationships; her wealthy patrons knew that she would never reveal their names, and the annual payments they provided helped to ensure she was never tempted.  In fact, the £500 pension from her second lover, Spencer Cavendish (Marquess of Hartington and future Duke of Devonshire), was continued by his grateful family even after he died in 1908.  Of all Skittles’ admirers, Lord Hartington was the one who had the most profound effect on her life; their relationship lasted from 1858-1862, during which time he put her in a townhouse in Park Street, Mayfair, gave her a stable of thoroughbreds, introduced her to the tailors (Henry Poole & Co) she was to do business with for decades, and hired a tutor to give her the education she had missed.

The Shrew Tamed by Edwin Landseer (1861)It was during this time that she first became famous as a “horse breaker” on Rotten Row in Hyde Park; her beauty and skill attracted so many fans that she started drawing crowds of onlookers, and her clothes were so perfectly tailored (and skin-tight) that it was rumored she wore them without underwear.  Noblewomen and others who could afford it copied her style of dress, but even after she became a fashion trendsetter she never forgot her roots; the majority of her tailors’ bills were for maintaining and mending her clothes rather than buying new ones.  Her horsewomanship was admired by men and envied by their wives, and though she called herself “Anonyma” when riding in public everyone knew who she really was; she is mentioned by name in The Season by future poet laureate Alfred Austin, and she was said to be the model for The Shrew Tamed by Edwin Landseer (though that was actually a woman named Annie Gilbert, who resembled her).  Unfortunately, all this attention was seen by Hartington’s family as an impediment to his future in politics (which was, as it turned out, quite distinguished), so despite the fact that they had very strong feelings for one another he was obliged to break the relationship off in the autumn of 1862.

Skittles was quite upset by the end of what had been the happiest time of her life, and though she made no attempt to hurt Hartington she wanted to start over again somewhere else.  She eloped to New York with Aubrey de Vere Beauclerk, but this relationship was short-lived and by early 1863 she had moved to Paris.  But while Cora Pearl and most of the other demimondaines of the time attracted attention by over-the-top theatrics, Skittles preferred just to be herself; her only really unusual behavior was driving her own carriage followed by two mounted grooms, all in impeccably-tailored outfits.  Her reputation for discretion had preceded her, however, and it is rumored that her clients during this period included both the Minister of Finance, Achille Fould, and Emperor Napoléon III himself.  One whose identity is known for certain is the diplomat and poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, who fell obsessively in love with her and was prone to jealous behavior which attracted unwanted attention; the affair ended when it was discovered by Lord Crowley, Ambassador to France and father of Blunt’s fiancée, who dismissed Blunt from his post and sent him back to England in disgrace.  Though he later married Lady Anne King-Noel, daughter of Ada Lovelace, he never did get over Skittles and wrote the poem “Esther” to her thirty years later.  Around that time he also began writing letters to her, and they became friends and corresponded until her death.

Catherine Walters by Pierre PetitWhen the Franco-Prussian War began she returned to London, and in 1872 moved to 15 South Street, Park Lane, where she lived for the rest of her life.  She returned to riding and hunting and instituted a tradition of Sunday afternoon tea parties for important men; future prime minister William Gladstone was known to have been a regular attendee, though it is unknown if he was a client.  Her most famous patron from this time was the Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VII, who fell in love with her and sent her over 300 love-letters; after his infatuation waned he not only paid her an allowance, but also sent his own physician to care for her when needed.  A few years later the doctor reported to his royal patron that Skittles was grievously ill, and fearing she might die the Prince asked for the return of his letters; she gave them back without any fuss, and His Highness was so grateful he raised her pension.

At some point in the early 1880s, she began a relationship with Alexander Horatio Baillie which was serious enough that called herself Mrs. Baillie for the duration, but there is no documentary evidence that they were ever legally married.  She continued to see clients throughout the ‘80s, finally retiring about the age of 50 as a wealthy society lady.  Sometime after her retirement she had a love affair with the much-younger Gerald de Saumarez, whom she had first met years before when he was only 16 (and she 40), and though they parted as lovers after a time they remained friends ever after, and she left her entire estate (valued at £2764 19s 6d, over £60,000 today) to him when she died of a cerebral hemorrhage on August 5, 1920.  In her last few years she had become something of a recluse after being crippled by arthritis, but there is no evidence her mind was anything other than sharp until the very end.  Though she left no diary or memoirs which could have betrayed her clients after her passing, they and many others who knew her have painted a clear picture of her charisma, honesty, loyalty, fairness, good sense and capacity for love, and that is as fine a legacy as anyone could wish.

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Tullia d’Aragona

Posted in Biography, Harlotography, History, Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , on March 13, 2013| 40 Comments »

It is not holiness, but arrogance displayed
to take away the greatest gift—free will—
bestowed by God from the beginning of time.  –  Tullia d’Aragona, Sonnet XXXV

The existence of courtesans is a glaring refutation of neofeminist dogma about objectification, the eternal victimhood of whores, etc; the fact that the most celebrated, successful and highly-paid harlots of all time were often those who were educated and could match or surpass men in intellectual pursuits throws a huge spanner into the catechism that prostitution is a manifestation of male dominance over women, that our clients hate us, and so on.  Whenever possible, neofeminist historians deny that courtesans were prostitutes, pretend that accomplished women were not really courtesans, or describe them with circumlocutions like, “she chose to cohabit with several men who supported her financially.”  And when all else fails, they simply ignore them.  Fortunately neither male historians nor female ones with less parochial views feel the need to dissemble about such women, and among them Tullia d’Aragona is rightfully viewed as worthy of respect and study.

She was born in Rome sometime between 1508 and 1510 to the courtesan Giulia Ferrarese, who was considered the most beautiful woman of her time.  Giulia was married sometime before that to Costanzo Palmieri d’Aragona, but the marriage seems to have been a family subterfuge to cover up for Costanzo’s wealthier and more important cousin, Cardinal Luigi d’Aragona (who was the illegitimate grandson of Ferdinand I, King of Naples); since cardinals of the Catholic Church were not supposed to hire hookers, his poorer cousin’s marriage of convenience to his favorite lady gave him excuses to be at their house often.  Tullia believed herself to be the cardinal’s daughter and he apparently agreed, because he paid for her education and when he died suddenly in 1519 the family immediately relocated to Sienna (though the exact reason for this is unknown).  She was a brilliant girl, and over the next few years her mother trained her to be a courtesan; in Renaissance Italy it was a trade often passed from mother to daughter, with the mother taking over as guardian, housekeeper and advisor once the daughter was old enough to start working (generally in her late teens).

Salome by Moretto da Brescia (late 1530s)Tullia’s career began when she and her mother returned to Rome in 1526, but unlike most courtesans of her time she preferred to “tour” rather than staying in one place; obviously her stays were much longer than those of modern escorts, but very much shorter than was typical in those less-mobile times.  She is known to have resided for periods in Venice (1528 and 1540), Bologna  (1529), Florence (1531), Adria (1535), Ferrara (1537), and Siena (1543 and 1545), and when she wasn’t anywhere else she was in Rome.  She was able to do this because, though she lacked her mother’s legendary beauty, she had a reputation for intelligence, learning and wit which started literally in childhood, and which had spread throughout northern Italy.  Though she had her share of clients who were nobles, bankers and the like, she was always most popular among the cognoscenti, especially poets and philosophers; she held salons at her residences from at least 1537 on, and her clients and guests encouraged her literary development and helped to popularize her work.  Chief among these was Girolamo Muzio of Ferrara, a courtier who acted as her editor.  Because mind and personality inspire men more than mere beauty (and probably in part because so many of her clients were poets), Tullia’s following was extremely devoted even by a great courtesan’s standards; Emilio Orsini founded a “Tullia Society” of six clients sworn to defend her honor, several men were supposed to have committed suicide for love of her, Filippo Strozzi was recalled from his diplomatic post for divulging Florentine state secrets to her, and Ercole Bentivoglio was said to have gone about carving her name on every tree he could find.

The 16th century was a time of great unrest in Italy; what is now one country was then divided into a number of city-states who were often at war with one another.  The Pope, several city-states and France were at war with the Holy Roman Empire during Tullia’s first few years in the profession, and this and the growth of Protestantism in Germany had created a climate of fear in northern Italy.  Such times always breed conservatism and usually lead to an explosion of authoritarian laws enacted in the name of “safety” and “morality”; just as in our own era, many of those laws were directed against whores.  At that time, nobody was deranged enough to believe that prostitution could be stamped out, so most of the laws merely intended to stigmatize and marginalize harlots by forcing them to live in red-light districts and wear certain kinds of clothes to differentiate them from “good” women.  In order to get around these laws, Tullia decided to follow in her mother’s footsteps by entering into a marriage of convenience to one Silvestro Guicciardi on January 8th, 1543.  We know practically nothing about this man other than that he died young and one of Tullia’s few enemies accused her of complicity in the death; the whole purpose of the arrangement seems to have been to make her officially a married woman so she could ignore the restrictions on courtesans.

By the end of 1545, the political turmoil was so bad that Tullia returned to Florence and placed herself under the protection of Cosimo I de Medici; there she once again established a salon and entered into correspondence with several poets.  But the busybodies just wouldn’t leave her alone; in 1547 she was charged with refusing to wear the harlot clothes demanded by a brand-new law.  This time, however, she appealed directly to the Duke and Duchess, and she was granted an exception due to her skill as a poet and philosopher (ah, whorearchy!)  Soon afterward she dedicated her new book, Poems of Madam Tullia de Aragona and Several Others, to the Duchess; later that year, she dedicated Dialogue on the Infinity of Love to the Duke.  The former was a collection of poems by and about her, many by Florentine nobles and respected literati; the latter was the first neo-Platonic dialogue ever written by a woman.

Tullia d'AragonaBut despite her comfort and literary success in Florence, she felt drawn back to Rome and returned there in October 1548; she seems to have semi-retired as a courtesan at that point, and devoted her remaining years to writing poetry and to hosting an academy of philosophy in her home.  Her son, Celio, was born around this time; like her daughter, Penelope (born 1535), his father is unknown (though some sources erroneously assume it to be her husband, who was already dead).  Her last work was an epic poem entitled Il Meschino, altramente detto il Guerrino  (The Unfortunate, also called Guerrino), a poetic version of the 14th-century prose tale of a nobleman who is captured by pirates as a baby, sold into slavery, escapes and then wanders the world (even venturing into Hell) in search of his parents.  Despite the fact that this is the earliest known epic poem by a woman and that it touches on many strikingly modern philosophical subjects (including gender identity, homosexuality and “otherness”), it has never been translated into English.  She died of unknown causes in 1556, and Il Meschino was published posthumously four years later.

Even in a staunchly patriarchal country and era, the genius of Tullia d’Aragona was recognized and respected, and her work has been periodically reprinted in Italian (several times since the early 1970s).  She was largely unknown in the English-speaking world until quite recently, however; the only English-language reference to her I could find before 1990 was a chapter in Courtesans of the Italian Renaissance from 1976.  Given her intellectual accomplishments, one would think that feminists would be at least as eager to call attention to her as they have to far less accomplished and deserving women…but of course those women were not prostitutes.  Like the Italians of the 1540s, neofeminists would prefer to stigmatize Tullia and consign her to a ghetto for her unrepentant whoredom rather than to admit that prostitutes are just as capable of intellectual and social contributions as anyone else.

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Cora Pearl

Posted in Biography, Harlotography, History, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on February 7, 2013| 14 Comments »

I have never deceived anybody for I have never belonged to anybody.  My independence was all my fortune, and I have known no other happiness; and it is still what attaches me to life.  –  Cora Pearl

Cora PearlThose of you who have read many of my “harlotographies” have probably noticed that few of the great courtesans were astonishingly beautiful.  To be sure, pictures often fall short of reality; some women’s beauty is based less on body contours and facial structure than on personality, style and presence, none of which can be captured by the camera.  In courtesans there is also a further component of sexual magnetism which, though impossible to depict on film or canvas, is equally impossible to ignore in person.  And what separates the fantastically successful courtesans – Les Grandes Horizontales as they were called in Cora Pearl’s time and place – from the merely successful ones was then, as now, marketing.  And though Cora was lovely, it was her ability to create an image which won her fame and wealth…and her inability to sustain that image which precipitated their loss.

The details of her birth are a litany of “probablies”; she was probably born in Plymouth, England on February 23rd, 1835, but that may be the date of her christening and she later claimed the year to be 1842.  Her birth name is usually given as Emma Elizabeth Crouch, but her death certificate calls her “Eliza Emma” instead.  Her father was a cellist named Frederick Nicholls Crouch who was the composer of “Kathleen Mavourneen”, a song which was extremely popular in the United States during the Civil War period.  Unfortunately, Crouch was a “one-hit wonder”, but never learned to live within his means; he fled his creditors in 1847, abandoning his wife and six daughters and moving to America (where he is known to have remarried several times before dying in 1896).  Lydia Crouch was an attractive woman and soon found a live-in boyfriend who was willing to support her children, but Emma did not get along with him and so was sent to a boarding school in Boulogne, France to be educated by nuns.  After eight years (and numerous lesbian relationships mentioned in her memoirs) she returned to England in 1855, moved in with her maternal grandmother and went to work for a milliner in London.

Emma chafed under the strictures imposed upon middle-class Victorian girls and one day she ditched her chaperone, accepted a man’s invitation to have cake with him, and drank a bit too much gin…with predictable consequences.  In the morning she found he had left her a five-pound note (about £250 today), and though she later claimed to have been “horrified” by the experience, the truth is that she used the money to rent a room for herself and immediately began hooking.  It wasn’t long before she started working at a brothel called The Argyll Rooms, whose owner Robert Bignell soon recognized her potential and asked her to be his mistress, moving her into a suite of her own.  Within a year he took her on holiday to Paris, and she so fell in love with the city that she decided to remain; she adopted the stage name “Cora Pearl”, took a cheap room, and made her living as a streetwalker until she met a pimp named Roubisse who set her up in better quarters.  He paved the way for her future success by teaching her the business and insisting she develop her professional skills, and by the time he died of a heart attack in 1860 Cora was already well-established with Victor Masséna, Duc du Rivoli (later Prince of Essling).

Cora Pearl photoIt was the Duc who first introduced her to extravagance:  besides the money, jewelry and servants (including a chef), he gave her funds for gambling and bought her the first horse of the sixty she would eventually own.  She quickly became an excellent rider, and her equestrian skills attracted the attention of many a French noble.  Though the Duc remained her primary patron until 1862, she had many other clients including the Prince of Orange, the Duc de Morny (Emperor Napoleon III’s half-brother) and Prince Achille Murat, grand-nephew of Emperor Napoleon I.  In 1864 she bought the gorgeous Chateau de Beauséjour and began to hold the parties for which she became renowned, including the one at which she had herself presented to diners on a huge platter; she was fond of dancing naked before her guests, and even had a custom-made bronze bathtub in which she would bathe with clients in champagne.  And when she wasn’t naked, she wore only the finest clothes by Charles Worth, the first superstar designer.

In 1865 she became the mistress of Prince Napoleon, the Emperor’s important and fabulously wealthy cousin.  He supported her for nine years, usually for about 10,000 francs per month, and also bought her many expensive gifts and several houses (including a small palace, les Petites Tuileries).  And though he frowned on her seeing other clients, she secretly did so anyway and charged them that much more for the risk.  It isn’t that the Prince didn’t give her enough; it’s just that she was incredibly extravagant and regularly sent money to both her mother and father.  She became a very popular celebrity and was well known for wearing heavy makeup and dying her hair outlandish colors to match her wardrobe.  In 1867 (the same year a cocktail was named for her) she took the role of Cupid in Offenbach’s operetta Orpheus in the Underworld, dressed in a costume which consisted of little more than a diamond-studded bikini; she only appeared twelve times, but the jewels brought 50,000 francs at auction.

Cora’s downfall began with the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, during which she allowed her homes to be used as hospitals and paid for doctors and medical supplies for wounded soldiers out of her own purse.  But the disastrous defeat of the French meant the end of the Empire; Prince Napoleon fled to England along with the Imperial family, and though Cora went with him the Grosvenor Hotel refused to let her stay for fear of scandal (ironically, the hotel’s modern management has capitalized on the incident by unveiling a “Cora Pearl Suite” last year).  Within a few months she returned to Paris, but the postwar mood was no longer conducive to the social climate in which a courtesan thrives; so, when the wealthy young Alexandre Duval became obsessed with her, she did not discourage him despite the fact that she despised jealousy in her patrons.  In less than a year he had spent literally his entire fortune on her, and when his family refused to give him any more she refused to see him any longer.  On December 19, 1872, he went to her house with murderous intent, but the gun accidentally discharged while he was trying to force his way past her servants, shooting him in the side.

Cora Pearl photo 2Though he eventually recovered the public disapproved of the way Cora had handled the affair, and the government ordered her to leave France.  She spent some time with a friend in Monaco, and after a time returned discreetly to Paris.  But the party was over for good; in 1873 she started to sell off her properties, in 1874 Prince Napoleon sadly informed her that he could no longer support her, and by 1880 she was down to just her chateau, which she finally sold in July of 1885.  In 1883 she rented an incall on the Champs-Elysées and returned to middle-class harlotry, then published her memoirs in 1886; unfortunately she was too discreet for her own good and the tame result with disguised names did not sell well.  By that time she was terminally ill with colon cancer and died on July 8, 1886.  She did not end her days in abject poverty as some accounts claim, but neither did she have anything put aside for a funeral; her meager plot and small service were paid for by some of her old clients.

After her death she passed into obscurity, and would barely be remembered today if not for a curious epilogue which occurred almost a full century after her death.  Apparently, Cora wrote an earlier version of her memoirs during her slow decline in the ‘70s, containing real names and many juicy details; it was released by a British publisher in 1890.  The few who knew about it assumed it to be an English translation of her bland 1886 memoir, but when a modern collector named William Blatchford got ahold of a copy he realized that this was not the case.  Blatchford publishing the find in 1983 under the title Grand Horizontal, The Erotic Memoirs of a Passionate Lady, and its vivid, on-the-spot  descriptions of the gay life during the Second French Empire rekindled interest in its author and has given her, albeit posthumously, another chance at the fame she so enjoyed in life.

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