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Archive for the ‘Harlotography’ Category

The Princess de Caraman-Chimay

Posted in Biography, Harlotography, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on January 22, 2012| 29 Comments »

The celebrity is a person who is known for his well-knownness.  –  Daniel J. Boorstin

Though the popular conception of the Victorian Era is that it was a time of very repressive sexual morality, one must never lose sight of the fact that this was only among those of the middle class.  The upper and lower classes were every bit as randy as they had ever been; roughly 8% of the female population of London were prostitutes, and the 19th century saw the third great flowering of courtesans in Europe (the previous two being Golden-Age Greece and 16th-century Venice).  And in the second half of the century the advent of mass communications, rapid transit and the modern financial system made it increasingly possible for strong-willed women like Lola Montez and Mata Hari to capitalize on their sex appeal, attracting wealthy patrons as actresses had since ancient times:  on the stage.

Clara Ward was born in Detroit, Michigan on June 17, 1873; her father was Eber Ward, a millionaire who made his fortune in lumber, mining, steel, shipping and rail.  He died of apoplexy (brain hemorrhage) when Clara was two, and the bulk of his fortune passed to Clara’s mother Catherine (née Lyon), his second wife.  Since she was only 31 (Ward was thirty years her senior) she soon remarried to Alexander Cameron, a Canadian lawyer she met in New York City.  The family moved to Toronto, and at 15 Clara was sent to school in London.  In the autumn of 1889 her mother took her on a tour of Europe in order to find her a noble husband, and in Nice they met Prince Joseph de Caraman-Chimay of Belgium, whom she married in Paris on May 19, 1890.  This sort of arrangement was not unusual at the time; an impoverished European noble married a wealthy (but common) heiress, and she gained a title while he gained a fortune.  It was a mutually beneficial match; Clara became only the second American-born princess (the first was George Washington’s great-grandniece Catherine Gray, who had married Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew), and she paid off her husband’s debts (to the tune of $100,000) and repaired his crumbling chateau (a further $300,000).

Clara bore her husband two children, Marie Elizabeth and Joseph Anatole (in 1891 and 1894 respectively), but this quiet, settled period was not to last long; she was beautiful, voluptuous and inconstant and had attracted the attention of King Leopold II.  As one might expect, the Queen was unhappy about this and the Princess de Caraman-Chimay soon found herself persona non grata in Belgian society.  The Prince therefore moved his family to Paris, where things only got worse; while dining at a fine restaurant, Princess Clara became enamored of the Gypsy violinist, Rigó Jancsi.  After only a few secret trysts she ran away with him in December of 1896, and her husband was granted a divorce on January 19, 1897.  The paparazzi, who had been intrigued by her since her engagement to the Prince was first announced, followed the couple across the continent to Budapest, where a pastry chef named a rich chocolate dessert after Rigó in order to capitalize on the publicity.

Her mother, on the other hand, was deeply ashamed by the press’ attention to her daughter’s escapade and disinherited her; Rigó (whom she married in 1898) had no money, and the divorce court awarded her abandoned husband the children and alimony of $15,000/year (half of her income from her father’s estate).  The Princess (she used the title until she died) had to come up with a way of making large sums of money fast, and like most women throughout history she relied on her sex appeal to do it.  Capitalizing on her notoriety, she contracted with the Folies Bergère and Moulin Rouge to pose on stage wearing skin-tight costumes while Rigó played the violin.  Though she literally did nothing but stand absolutely still (the general term for such a performance is tableau), the novelty, her fame and her beauty attracted sufficient attention for her to take the act on tour, and she made $6800 ($176,000 in 2012 dollars) in Berlin that April.  She modeled for photographers, licensed her image on postcards, and accepted money for “private performances”, which caused frequent and bitter arguments with Rigó; they separated in 1900. Her next husband was Giuseppe “Peppino” Ricciardi, an Italian tourist agent in Paris whom she married in June of 1904 and divorced in 1911.  Her last husband was her chauffeur, Abano Caselato, to whom she was still married when she died of pneumonia at her Italian Villa on December 18th, 1916.

Idylle Princière by Toulouse-Lautrec, depicting Clara and Rigó Jancsi

Like so many courtesans, the Princess died very young (only 43), but unlike most the names of her lovers (other than Leopold II and her four penniless husbands) are completely unknown.  They must have been quite wealthy, though; despite her enormous expenses, steep alimony and lack of visible income after about 1906, she left a fortune of $1,124,935.96 in cash and about $50,000 in real estate (over $23 million in 2012 dollars).  Ironically, her will dated to just after her marriage to Ricciardi and she had never changed it after their divorce, so he inherited a third of her estate (her two children got one-third each).  In a way, she was like the Paris Hilton or Kim Kardashian of her time:  a wealthy sex symbol with no discernible talent who parleyed her highly-publicized sex life into a career as a model and “reality star”.

One Year Ago Today

“Walking Stereotype Sues Whore” may be the most self-explanatory column title I’ve ever used.

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Édith Piaf

Posted in Biography, Harlotography, History, Music, The Dark Side, tagged , , , , , , , on December 19, 2011| 13 Comments »

For me, singing is a way of escaping.  It is another world.  I’m no longer on Earth.  –  Édith Piaf

Édith Giovanna Gassion was born in Paris on December 19, 1915 to Anita Maillard, an alcoholic French/Italian/Moroccan street singer and part-time prostitute whose stage name was Line Marsa.  Legend has it that the future French cultural icon was born on the pavement in front of 72 Rue de Belleville, but her birth certificate names the Hôpital Tenon; this was practically the most conventional aspect of her short, tempestuous life.  Maillard appears to have been entirely lacking in maternal instinct, and when the child’s father (Louis-Alphonse Gassion, a Norman street acrobat) was drafted two months after Édith’s birth, she left the baby with her own mother, Aïcha Saïd ben Mohammed.  The grandmother badly neglected the child, and at some later point (sources vary as to the child’s exact age at the time) either her father or his sister (a tightrope walker named Zaza) took the child to her paternal grandmother, who owned a brothel in Bernay.  Here at last she had a real home; the whores doted on the tiny girl, and when she lost her sight to an attack of conjunctivitis (at an age somewhere between 3 and 7) they pooled their money to send her to the shrine of Sainte Thérèse de Lisieux, where she was supposed to have been miraculously cured.  As Édith later said, “Miracle or not, I am forever grateful.”

Sometime between 1922 and 1925, her father reclaimed her and took her on the road with him through the rest of the decade; he performed on street corners and in circuses and nightclubs, and employed Édith to pass the hat among onlookers, counting on her forlorn appearance to elicit sympathy.  She also began to actively contribute by singing, and even at the tender age of ten could draw a crowd.  Her father had various girlfriends during this time, but about 1929 he settled down in Paris with a sweet young thing named Yéyette, who bore him a child in March of 1931; 15-year-old Édith apparently decided the house was becoming too crowded, and so set off with her friend Simone “Mômone” Berteaut to live on the street.  Édith sang and Mômone passed the hat, and when that didn’t raise enough money for a squalid room, meager food and cheap liquor they begged, turned tricks or just slept in parks or alleys.  In 1932 she fell in love with a delivery boy named Louis Dupont and moved in with him, bearing him a child named Marcelle in February of 1933.  Dupont had tried to domesticate Édith, insisting she take “normal” (i.e. menial and low-paying like his) jobs, and the baby was the last straw; she left Dupont for a soldier, abandoning Marcelle as her own mother had abandoned her, and returned to street life in Montmarte and Pigalle.  She did stay in contact with Dupont, however, and when Marcelle died of meningitis at the age of two Édith turned tricks to pay for the funeral.  In the process she became involved with a pimp named Albert, who took a cut from her earnings whether they were from singing or hooking.  She seemed unconcerned with Albert’s usual modus operandi of beating and robbing streetwalkers, but when he started slapping her around and held a gun to her head she left him.

Given the chaos of her life, it is virtually certain she would have soon met a violent death at the hands of some other pimp or criminal had she not been discovered in Pigalle in October of 1935 by Louis Leplée, a former drag queen who now owned one of the most fashionable nightclubs in Paris.  Leplée knew talent when he heard it and offered the dirty, unkempt waif a job; he put her in a simple black dress, selected ten songs for her and billed her as La Môme Piaf (Parisian slang for “Kid Sparrow”) because of her diminutive size (147 cm/4’10”) and sorrowful appearance.  Leplée advertised her debut heavily and many celebrities attended her opening night; among them was Maurice Chevalier, who shouted “She has got what it takes!” during the applause.  In January she cut her first records on the Polydor label, “Les Momes de la Cloche” and “L’Étranger“; the latter was written by Marguerite Monnot, who regularly wrote songs for her thereafter.  But this overnight success was not to last; on the night of April 6th, 1936, Leplée was murdered by gangsters and the tabloids declared his star protégé with the seedy background was a suspect.  And though the police soon decided that she was not involved, Parisian audiences had grown so hostile Édith relocated to Nice and toured Belgium.

After a year she returned to Paris and asked songwriter  Raymond Asso to help her stage a comeback; he changed her stage name to “Édith Piaf”, kept her away from bad influences and asked Monnot to help him write songs drawing on her street background (including her first hit, “Mon Legionnaire”).  Asso became Piaf’s lover and manager and groomed her to become a star, teaching her everything from stage presence to proper table manners.  But when he was drafted in the autumn of 1939, she left him for a successful singer named Paul Meurisse; though this gave her a way into upper-class Parisian life, they were not good for one another and their friend Jean Cocteau based his play Le Belle Indifferent on their relationship (Piaf even starred in the first production of the play).  After the Nazis occupied France in May of 1940 she and Meurisse toured the unoccupied south, but this proved the last straw and upon her return to Paris Piaf moved into a flat above an expensive brothel with her old friend Mômone.

This particular bordello was now reserved for the Gestapo; Piaf befriended a number of their officers and even invited them to parties in her flat.  She also performed for their events and banquets and was therefore accused of collaboration after the war, but she escaped the fate of many other women by claiming to have been a member of the Resistance and pointing to a number of facts that supported the statement:  She dated the Jewish pianist Norbert Glanzberg and helped another Jew, the composer Michael Emer, to escape France; she co-wrote (with Monmot) a subtle protest song named “Où Sont-Ils Mes Petits Copains?” and defied a Nazi request to remove it from her concert repertoire; and it is claimed that during a concert at Stalag 3 she posed for publicity photographs with prisoners that were then used to construct fake papers which allowed them to escape the camp after she smuggled them back in during a second concert.  In her memoirs, Piaf says very little about the war years; being the narcissistic diva that she was, she seems to have considered the Occupation more of a nuisance than anything else.

Sometime during the War her parents both re-established contact with her; she was happy to see her father and supported him until he died in 1944, but her contact with her “poor lamentable mother” was limited to calls from police whenever the woman was arrested for public drunkenness (she died of a morphine overdose in August of 1945).  Meanwhile, Édith had taken up with the promising young singer  Yves Montand in 1944, grooming him as Asso had groomed her; however, she dumped him when his popularity started to rival hers.  She recorded her signature song, “La vie en rose“, in 1946 and went on to international acclaim, touring Europe and the Americas.  At first she was not popular with U.S. audiences (who considered her depressing), but that changed after glowing reviews and she eventually appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show eight times and at Carnegie Hall twice.  While in New York in 1947 she began an affair with Marcel Cerdan, the middleweight boxing champion; he was the great love of her life, and his death in a plane crash in October 1949 started her in a downward spiral of drugs and alcohol which was exacerbated by morphine first prescribed after she was seriously injured in a 1951 auto accident.

Her declining health and mental state did not affect her popularity (both as a singer and an actress), which continued to climb; she married songwriter Jacques Pills in 1952 (with Marlene Dietrich as matron of honor) and divorced him in 1956, then in 1962 she married 27-year-old Théo Sarapo, a Greek hairdresser and would-be singer.  She died of liver cancer on October 11th, 1963, and though the archbishop of Paris denied her a funeral mass because of her “sinful” life, the ceremony was attended by more than 100,000 people.  She is still considered France’s greatest  singer of all time, a national treasure whose gift was considered by many to embody the French soul.

One Year Ago Today

“Christmas Belle” is the story of a Christmas-loving escort named Noel and a most unusual client.

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Veronica Franco

Posted in Biography, Harlotography, History, tagged , , , , , , , , on November 14, 2011| 24 Comments »

I wish it were not a sin to have liked it so.  –  Veronica Franco

Our word “courtesan” derives (via French) from the Italian cortigiana, but the term was originally used (with various modifiers) to mean virtually any puttana; those who met the criteria which we now associate with the word were called cortigiana onesta (honest courtesan).  16th-century Venice was renowned for the number and quality of her courtesans, and the most famous of these was Veronica Franco, who is remembered not only for her profession but also for her poetry and letters.

Veronica was born in 1546 to a family of the citizen class; she had three brothers who were educated by tutors, and her mother, a former cortigiana onesta herself, insisted that Veronica share that education.  This proved to be a wise decision, for though Veronica was married in her mid-teens to a physician named Paolo Panizza, the arrangement proved to be stifling and she soon sought a divorce.  Though Venetian women of that time could initiate such proceedings, obtaining a property settlement or support was virtually impossible if they did so; she asked her husband to return her dowry but he refused, and with a young child to support she had little option other than becoming a courtesan.  Fortunately her mother trained her well and Veronica was an apt pupil; she soon excelled at her profession and was able to support her family in great splendor for a decade.

Portrait by Paolo Veronese, c. 1575

By the time she was twenty, Veronica was among the most popular and respected courtesans in Venice; her intelligence, strong personality and sexual skills won her a number of important clients, including King Henry III of France and Domenico Venier, a wealthy poet and literary advisor whose salon Veronica joined by the time she was 25.  As a member of the Venetian literati she participated in group discussions and contributed to collections of poetry published collectively by the salon; she also helped to edit these anthologies.  In 1575 she published Terze Rime, a collection of 25 capitoli (verse letters) in the titular form; 17 of them are hers and the others are by Marco Venier (Domenico’s brother) and others, writing to and about her.  Veronica’s poetry is erotic and sometimes sexually explicit; she was not ashamed of being a courtesan but rather celebrated it, and defends the rights of courtesans (and women in general) in several of the capitoli.  #16 is a response to three obscene poems written by Maffio Venier (her patron’s cousin) in an attempt to publicly humiliate her.

Unfortunately, Veronica’s success was not to last; soon after her book was published plague broke out in Venice and raged for two years.  She was forced to flee the city, and in her absence her house was looted; she lost most of her possessions (including a library that was among the best private collections in Europe), and was only saved from ruin by the generous patronage of Domenico Venier.  The plague also took her mother and a brother, so she was left with the care of her nephews in addition to her own children (she eventually had six in all, three of whom died in infancy).  Upon her return to Venice in 1577, she unsuccessfully attempted to convince the city to fund a charity for the children of courtesans.

In 1580, Franco published Lettere Familiari a Diversi (Familiar Letters to Various People), a collection of 50 letters, to various clients (including Henry III), friends and others; some of the letters contain biographical data, others give advice (including one to a mother who was considering raising her daughter as a courtesan), and still others expound on her philosophical and moral views.  But as in 1575, this publication was followed closely by disaster; her son’s tutor, Ridolfo Vannitelli (possibly motivated by her spurning his advances), denounced her to the Inquisition on a charge of witchcraft, and though her own eloquent defense, the help of Domenico Venier, her many clients among the nobility and quite possibly the intercession of one of the Inquisitors won her acquittal, her reputation was irreparably damaged and the last of her fortune was depleted.  Venier died two years later, and Veronica was forced to move to a poor area inhabited mostly by lower-class whores.  She died in 1591, aged 45, in relative poverty and near obscurity, having outlived the heyday of her profession.

I first became aware of Veronica Franco’s story after becoming a call girl myself, through the movie Dangerous Beauty (based on Margaret Rosenthal’s book The Honest Courtesan); a friend of mine saw it and insisted we watch it together, and I’m glad she did because it was wonderful to see such a positive portrayal of prostitution.  The movie takes dramatic liberty with some aspects of her life, but it adheres to the spirit of her experiences and the attitude and personality displayed in her poetry; it opens with this English translation of one of her poems, but as it was written after the decline in her fortunes I’d like to close with it:

We danced our youth in a dreamed-of city,
Venice, paradise, proud and pretty.
We lived for love and lust and beauty,
Pleasure then our only duty;
Floating them twixt heaven and Earth
And drank on plenty’s blessed mirth.
We thought ourselves eternal then,
Our glory sealed by God’s own pen.
But heav’n, we found is always frail,
Against man’s fear will always fail.

One Year Ago Today

“Unreal Princesses” examines the phenomenon I call “cyberdrag” (men pretending to be women online), and especially the case of Thomas Bohannan (AKA “Alexa di Carlo”).

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Su Xiaoxiao

Posted in Biography, Harlotography, History, tagged , , , , , on October 5, 2011| 24 Comments »

I ride in a decorated carriage,
My darling rides a blue-white horse.
Where should we tie the knot for our heart?
Under the Xiling pine and cypress.  –  Su Xiaoxiao, “Song of Xiling Lake”

Su Xiaoxiao was a Chinese courtesan who lived in Qiantang City (modern Hangzhou) during the Southern Qi Dynasty (479–502); short as that reign was her life was shorter still, as she was born about 482 and died only 19 years later, about 501.  She was highly regarded both as a poetess and as a courtesan; the poem which forms the epigram (in Chinese each line is exactly five characters) is one of hers.  But like the five women whose stories I told in my column of one year ago today, it is very likely that her name would have been forgotten had she not met an untimely death (though in Su Xiaxiao’s case it was due to a terminal disease rather than murder).

Very little is actually known about her, including her real name; “Su” was her family name (she is said to have had a sister named Su Pannu) and “Xiaoxiao” is actually the character for “small” written twice, thus forming an affectionate diminutive when used as a nickname.  Her stage name in English would thus be most closely rendered as “Teeny-weeny Su”.  She is said to have come from a family of the artisan class and to have attracted sufficient attention for her beauty and skill at verse to have become well-known throughout the region by her mid-teens.  It was not uncommon for a popular courtesan in any country to be taken “off the market” by some nobleman recruiting her as his mistress (as we have seen in a number of the biographies I’ve published), but Su Xiaoxiao had not yet found a satisfactory arrangement when she was taken ill.  This has no doubt helped to give rise to the popular romantic legend that she did not wish to settle down with a man unless she truly loved him.  Given her poetry and the young age at which she died this may indeed have been true, but in any case many stories have grown from the fact.

One of these stories claims that she fell in love with a client who had professed his love for her and tried to get his family’s consent to honorably marry her, but they would not agree and he did not return to tell her.  Another says that she fell in love with a poor scholar, to whom she lent money so he could travel to the capital for the Imperial Examinations (an anachronism since they were not established until a century later); when he did not return as promised, she pined away for love of him and neglected her health, thus developing the illness which killed her.  Some versions of this tale say that his delay was caused by further testing through which he had won a very high position in the imperial service, but by the time he returned for her it was too late.  Though the idea of a much-sought-after courtesan dying for love of a poor man is certainly very romantic, this seems unlikely given that she is known to have accepted her death philosophically and wrote that heaven had blessed her by calling attention to her work through her untimely death.

Su Xiaoxiao was a favorite subject of Tang dynasty poetry and Ming dynasty stories and art (some Ming vases are illustrated with a traditional depiction of a legend in which her ghost serves as a muse to a poet); she also appeared frequently in plays and is the heroine of a Chinese television show called Loving Courtesan Su Xiaoxiao.  She was laid to rest in a tomb beside the Xiling Bridge at West Lake, and the site was visited by poets and artists for almost 1500 years until it was destroyed by the Red Guards during the violent anarchy of the Cultural Revolution.  But once China began to embrace Western tourism the local government recognized that the tomb might prove a popular destination, so it was rebuilt in 2004 and enshrined in a  pavilion with six posts on which poems were handwritten by famous calligraphers.  The tomb itself was even the subject of a poem by the Tang dynasty poet Li He (790-816), who himself died young:

“The Tomb of Su Xiaoxiao” by Li He (translated by Tommy W. K. Tao)

dewdrops on the orchids
in the shadow
like weeping eyes

finding naught to which
to betroth your heart
a haze of wild flowers
unworthy of picking

the grass like a carpet
the pines like a canopy
the wind be your garment
the water be your jade

in a varnished carriage
waiting all night

cold emerald light of the candles
flickering in vain

under the trees of Xiling
the wind blows the falling rain

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Lulu White

Posted in Biography, Harlotography, History, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on September 3, 2011| 46 Comments »

What it comes down to is this: the grocer, the butcher, the baker, the merchant, the landlord, the druggist, the liquor dealer, the policeman, the doctor, the city father and the politician—these are the people who make money out of prostitution, these are the real reapers of the wages of sin.  –  Polly Adler

Business was booming for the whores of late 19th-century New Orleans; there were some 2000 prostitutes and about 40 brothels scattered all over the city, and it is estimated that the gross income of the city’s sex trade at that time amounted to some $15 million per year (about $360 million in 2011 dollars!)  Then, as now, this money flowed through the demimonde and into the conventional economy, enriching merchants, restauranteurs, liquor dealers, furniture stores, shoe salesmen, milliners and landlords, to name just a few.  And considering that many of those businesses were owned by politicians (and the biggest landlord in New Orleans is the Catholic Church), there was a vested interest in keeping those businesses lucrative.  So when the social purity movement reached New Orleans in the 1890s and pressure began to mount for something to be “done about” prostitution, Alderman Sidney Story proposed restricting it to one part of town.  This was enacted into law in 1897, and the newspapers dubbed the resulting district “Storyville” (much to the alderman’s chagrin).  One year ago today I published a short history of prostitution in New Orleans with emphasis on Storyville, and today I’ll tell you about one of its more famous denizens, a madam known as Lulu White.

Lulu White, circa 1900

Her real name was apparently Lulu Hendley, and she was born sometime before 1870 on a farm near Selma, Alabama; she was a quadroon (¼ black) or possibly a light-skinned mulatto, but she claimed to be from the West Indies and to have “not a drop of Negro blood” (though nobody who met her believed this claim).  She arrived in New Orleans in the early 1880s with an older dark-skinned black man who is believed to have been her stepfather (though nothing else is known of him) and immediately began working as a whore, but so ambitious and charming was she that despite average looks and a short, dumpy figure she managed to attract a number of wealthy and influential clients including an oil man, a railroad tycoon and a department-store owner, and by the end of the ‘80s she was a madam with a house of her own.  Further proof of her business skill can be discerned in the fact that, though she was arrested countless times in the ‘80s on charges ranging from disorderly conduct to pandering, by 1892 she had such political influence that her mansion at 166 Customhouse Street was assessed at a mere $300…while a much smaller and plainer house across the street was assessed at $1200.

The Arlington (left, with domed cupola) and Mahogany Hall (right, with tower)

But this house was itself small in comparison with Mahogany Hall, the $40,000 four-story brothel she built at 235 Basin Street (two doors down from The Arlington) when The District was organized in 1897.  Mahogany Hall was an “octoroon parlor”, i.e. a bordello staffed by Creole girls of roughly one-eighth Negro blood; one of these girls, Victoria Hall, was so lovely that Lulu “borrowed” her photo for use in her own ad for the “Blue Book” of 1906 (in which she rather dubiously claimed to be 31, which would’ve made her a madam before she turned 15).  Lulu made a tremendous amount of money, and spent much of it on clothes and jewelry; as Al Rose explains in his 1974 history Storyville, New Orleans:

Vivid is the recollection still alive in certain aging heads, of Lulu descending the “hall’s” swirling staircase, decked out in her gaudy display of diamonds, smiling her celebrated diamond-studded smile, and singing her favorite song, “Where the Moon Shines”.  Attired in a bright red wig and an elaborate formal gown, she wore diamond rings on all her fingers (including thumbs), bracelets up both arms, a diamond necklace, a tiara, an emerald alligator brooch on her chest – the works!

Rose also notes that the 1934 Mae West film Belle of the Nineties was originally entitled Belle of New Orleans and was inspired by Lulu White’s life, but due to the pervasive racism of the time all racial references were suppressed.  Forty years later, the brothel madam in Pretty Baby (1978) was also clearly inspired by Lulu; she wears a red wig and excessive jewelry, and her brothel has a swirling mahogany staircase.

Lulu was a savvy businesswoman who understood the value of diversification and had an appreciation for new opportunities; in 1906 she made a business trip to Hollywood (in her private railway carriage) in order to investigate the potential of the new technological innovation, motion pictures.  She made deals for real estate and production facilities which would’ve made her the owner of the largest studio in town, then returned to New Orleans to get the funds together.  But her next move was one of those critical mistakes which changes history:  she trusted someone who proved untrustworthy, namely her “fancy man”, George Killshaw.  He and Lulu had been together since soon after her arrival in New Orleans, but he was slim, handsome, charming and could easily pass for white, so when Lulu sent him to California to complete the deal for her with $150,000 in cash (about $3.6 million in today’s currency) he decided to drop out of sight and start a new life elsewhere, probably as a white man.

Strangely, Lulu made no effort to find him (probably because she didn’t trust the police), but picked herself up and resumed planning for the future (albeit on a smaller scale).  In 1908 she built a saloon right next door to Mahogany Hall, at the corner of Basin and Bienville Streets;  it opened for business in 1912, but with the arrival of Prohibition in 1919 it ostensibly became a soft drink bar.  By this time, of course, Storyville had been closed (as I explain in last year’s column) to satisfy the prudery of the Secretary of the Navy, and due to the Hollywood disaster the bar was Lulu’s only remaining business.  She secretly sold liquor there, but due to her reputation was repeatedly arrested throughout the ‘20s for violating the Volstead Act.  Eventually she tired of dodging the cops, and in 1929 sold the building to Leon Heymann.  It was one of the few Storyville buildings not bulldozed to construct the Iberville Housing Project in the 1930s, and though it lost its upper story to Hurricane Betsy the year before I was born, the lower story was refurbished and today houses a neighborhood market.

Lulu herself vanished from history after 1931, but is known to have been alive for at least ten years afterward because (as Rose reports) she made a withdrawal from her account at the Whitney National Bank in 1941 and was recognized by the teller; her fate beyond that is unknown, but at the time she would’ve been in her seventies and is not likely to have survived much longer.  There is no death certificate on record in Louisiana, so it is possible she returned to her birthplace to die (though there is no death record in Alabama, either) or else succumbed in some public place and was never identified.  What a sad end for one of the harlot queens of New Orleans; imagine how different Hollywood (and perhaps even America) might’ve been had its largest studio been owned not only by a black woman, but a proud and unrepentant whore!

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Aspasia

Posted in Biography, Harlotography, History, Perception, Philosophy, tagged , , , , , , , , , on July 31, 2011| 19 Comments »

Now, since it is thought that he proceeded thus against the Samians to gratify Aspasia, this may be a fitting place to raise the query what great art or power this woman had, that she managed as she pleased the foremost men of the state, and afforded the philosophers occasion to discuss her in exalted terms and at great length.  –  Plutarch, Pericles (XXIV)

One year ago today, in my biography of the famous courtesan Phryne, I described the state of prostitution in Athens of the Golden Age and even mentioned Aspasia, the mistress of the great Athenian leader Pericles.  It is therefore fitting that today I present a biography of that lady, quite possibly the best-known of all the hetaerae, who is thought to have died just ten years before Phryne was born.  So famous and respected is she, in fact, that as I discussed in Thursday’s column some whore-haters are now trying to convince the world that she was not a courtesan at all.

Aspasia was born about 470 BCE in Miletus, the wealthiest Greek city-state of its time.  She was the daughter of the wealthy Axiochus and was superbly educated, then moved to Athens in her late teens.  The reason for the move is unclear, but it is possible she accompanied her older sister, who had married an Athenian statesman.  In any case her beauty and education allowed her to become a hetaera, and she may also have owned a brothel but this is not certain.  Sometime in her early twenties she became Pericles’ mistress, and after he divorced his wife in 445 BCE she moved in with him, bearing his son Pericles the Younger a few years later.  Aspasia soon became as noted for her intelligence, erudition and aptitude at conversation as for her beauty, and she not only served as an advisor to her lover but inspired others as well; Plutarch wrote that Athenian men would bring their wives to visit in hope that they would learn the art of conversation from her.  They were able to do this because she opened Pericles’ house to visitors, attracting the best and brightest of Athenian society (including the philosopher Socrates).

Like all politicians Pericles had his enemies, and though the ancient Greeks were far more sensible about sex and whores than modern Americans, Aspasia was still a tempting target.  Since the hetaerae were well-respected it was not enough to merely point out that Pericles lived with a courtesan, but brothel-keeping was considered mere crass commercialism, so the stories of her keeping a brothel may have been either invented or embellished in order to imply conflict of interest on her part (in the same way a First Lady’s business deals might be scrutinized or ridiculed today).  Aspasia became especially unpopular when in 440 BCE Athens sent troops against Samos in support of Miletus; the campaign was difficult and the Athenians sustained heavy losses, and many critics claimed that Pericles’ decision to enter the war was based solely on the fact that Miletus was Aspasia’s native city.

Over the next ten years, Pericles’ political opponents spread a number of slanders against him, some of which made their way into comic poetry and plays of the time, and a few of which resulted in lawsuits and spurious criminal charges not just against Pericles but also against his friends.  Aspasia was charged with “corrupting the morals” of Athenian women to entice them into “satisfying Pericles’ perversions”, and though she was acquitted (thanks to an impassioned defense by Pericles) not all of his friends fared so well; the great sculptor Phidias was accused of embezzling gold which he should have used on the statue of Athena in the new Parthenon, and thanks to a false witness he was convicted and died in prison in 430 BCE.  When the Peloponnesian War broke out in 431, some people found a way to blame Aspasia again; the war resulted from Sparta’s attacking Athens in defense of its ally Megara, against which Pericles had declared a trade embargo.  The poet Aristophanes claimed that the embargo had been declared in retaliation for the abduction of two of Aspasia’s employees; he wrote, “…some young drunkards go to Megara and carry off the courtesan Simaetha; the Megarians, hurt to the quick, run off in turn with two harlots of the house of Aspasia; and so for three whores Greece is set ablaze.”

Roman copy of a what is thought to be Aspasia’s funerary stele

In 429, plague broke out in Athens; the exact disease is unknown but it claimed both Pericles’ sister and his two legitimate sons, and later the great man himself.  The loss of so many dear to him cast him into a deep depression in which he spent the last few months of his life; Aspasia could not console him, and his low spirits almost certainly contributed to his death.  When it became clear that Pericles was near death, the Assembly granted citizenship to his son by Aspasia (Athenian citizenship required that both parents be citizens) so he would have an heir, and that son later became a general himself as his father had been.  After Pericles’ death Aspasia was kept by another general and statesman named Lysicles, to whom she bore a son in 428; that same year Lysicles was killed in battle, and there are no contemporary accounts of Aspasia’s life thereafter.  Most historians believe she died around 400 BCE because she was a friend of Socrates’ and was well-known to his student Plato, but died before Socrates’ execution in 399.

Even in the male-dominated world of ancient Athens, Aspasia was admired for her intellect, learning and oratorical skills; she appears as a character in a number of plays and dialogues, including those of Plato.  Socrates is known to have recommended her as a teacher (pointing out her positive influence on Pericles), and to defer to her as being more knowledgeable than he in the area of male-female relations.  Even her enemies respected her; one comedic attack on Pericles portrayed him as politically incompetent without her, and a more vicious one claimed that his choosing to live with a hetaera full-time (rather than to marry an ordinary woman and visit a courtesan as needed) was a sign of sexual degeneracy.

It is striking that, though absolutely nobody in ancient times questioned Aspasia’s superior mind and abilities, some modern scholars (though supposedly more egalitarian than the ancients) have done so on the grounds that a mere harlot couldn’t possibly be all that; others whose neofeminist bias is more pronounced have proclaimed the opposite, that no woman who was so learned and respected could possibly have been a courtesan because all “prostituted women” are humiliated, degraded and victimized by the Patriarchy.  Both of these groups claim her portrayals in the contemporary comedies as their “evidence”, ignoring the fact that descriptions of both her intellectual abilities and her status as a hetaera exist outside of the comic literature. And as Roger Just of the University of Kent points out, the fact that she was so educated and accomplished proves that she was a courtesan, because only women who were outside the normal social sphere were so educated.  Wives were defined as below men, but hetaerae were not.  Fortunately,  the courtesan deniers are but a small minority, and their silly notions will in a few decades be largely forgotten as the twisted belief system which spawned them fades into history.  As the real Aspasia eventually triumphed over those who would destroy her, so will her reputation eventually triumph over those who would deny her status as one of the greatest whores of history.

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Lola Montez

Posted in Biography, Harlotography, History, tagged , , , , , , , on June 23, 2011| 17 Comments »

Exercise, not philosophically and with religious gravity undertaken, but with the wild and romping activities of a spirited girl who runs up and down as if her veins were full of wine.  –  Lola Montez

Eliza Rosanna Gilbert, better known by her stage name Lola Montez, lived her life as she advised women to exercise, running around the world like a wild young girl with “veins full of wine”.  Like so many courtesans she started out in the theater, in her case as a dancer; like Mata Hari she had a prosaic origin, was noted for her precociousness, married too young, created an exotic stage persona which won her the attentions of wealthy men, lived like a “jet-setter” long before there were jets and died far too young (though this last can be said of many famous courtesans).

Eliza was born on February 17th, 1821 in Grange, Ireland, the daughter of Edward and Eliza Gilbert.  When she was two her father (an ensign in the British Navy) was transferred to India, but he died of cholera soon after their arrival and left his 19-year-old wife to care for a toddler alone in a strange country.  The following year she married Lt. Patrick Cragie, who grew to love the child but became concerned with her wildness and precociousness; eventually he and her mother decided her high spirits might be better controlled by an English education.  Accordingly, she was sent to live with Cragie’s father in Scotland, but proved too much for the older man to handle; she soon developed a reputation for pranks (even on strangers) and inappropriate behavior such as running through the streets naked.  By the time she was ten her step-grandfather had enough of her and packed her off to Sunderland to live with her stepfather’s older sister, who had opened a girls’ boarding school.  This arrangement was even shorter-lived; though her art teacher later remembered her as “an elegant and graceful child” of unusual beauty and exotically-dark complexion, he also stated that “The violence and obstinacy of her temper gave too frequent cause of painful anxiety to her good kind aunt.”  Eliza was therefore sent to another boarding school (not run by relatives) in Bath, where she remained for five years until she eloped to India with Lt. Thomas James.

Portrait by Joseph Karl Stieler (1847)

This escapade was the source of a great deal of confusion about the particulars of her early life; since she lacked parental permission to leave school or marry, Eliza simply lied about her birthday and origins, claiming to have been born in Limerick on June 23rd, 1818; this became her official birth date ever after, and indeed was even graven on her tombstone in Greenwood Cemetery, Brooklyn.  Since she was not baptized until the day before her second birthday (February 16th, 1823) in Liverpool (en route to India), her baptismal certificate with the correct date remained undiscovered until it was located by biographer Bruce Seymour while researching the second edition of his book Lola Montez, a Life in 1996.

In 1842, Mr. and Mrs. James separated in Calcutta under a complicated divorce agreement which barred either of them from remarriage while the other was alive; whatever the reason for this strange condition, it was later to cause Eliza considerable difficulty.  The beautiful 21-year-old became a professional dancer under the stage name Lola Montez, by which she was known for the rest of her tumultuous life.  She made her way back to London and debuted there the following year as a “Spanish dancer”, but was soon recognized and the resulting scandal drove her to relocate to the Continent, where she quickly became famous for her beauty and fiery temper rather than for her rather mediocre dancing ability.  It is very likely that she only maintained the dancing as advertisement for her real profession, prostitution to a select clientele of wealthy customers; however, she seems to have truly believed that she was a great dancer and that those who said she wasn’t were merely trying to insult her.  And that was bad, because she tended to attack men who insulted her with a whip, and on a few recorded occasions actually shot at them.

After touring across Europe for about a year (during which time she is said to have received 1000 rubles for a “private audience” with Czar Nicolas I in St. Petersburg) Lola met the composer Franz Liszt in Dresden; the two became lovers for a while, but Liszt (who had a considerable reputation as a ladies’ man) soon tired of Lola’s histrionics and fled one night while she slept.  Soon afterward she settled in Paris, where she was accepted into fashionable literary society and was said to have slept with Alexandre Dumas, père (though it is not known whether this was a professional transaction or a personal one).  She then fell in love with a newspaper editor named Alexandre Dujarier, but he was killed in a duel (which had nothing to do with her) in 1845 and she brokenheartedly left Paris and resumed touring.

In 1846 she was hired to perform in Munich, but when the theater manager saw her performance he fired her immediately.  The infuriated courtesan then went to the palace to complain to King Ludwig I of Bavaria about the breach of contract; due to her reputation the King agreed to give her an audience, and he was so smitten with her beauty that he ordered the manager fired and gave her a long contract to dance in the theater.  He also hired her for more personal duties, and was soon deeply in love with her; he granted her an allowance, built her a small palace and even created her Countess of Landsfeld.  Lola easily dominated the aging monarch, and instituted liberal reforms which appalled the Church, the aristocracy and Prince Metternich of Austria, who offered her an enormous bribe if she would only go away.  When Lola refused the money (literally throwing it back at the messenger), Metternich instigated a student riot against her, prompting her to order the university closed.  This was, of course, exactly what Metternich had hoped would happen; Lola’s haughtiness, bad temper and overt control over the King had made her extremely unpopular, and the riot grew into a full-scale revolution which forced King Ludwig to abdicate in March of 1848.  Lola fled to Switzerland, where she remained for a few months before returning to London later that year.

Lola Montez in 1851

It wasn’t long before Lola met and married George Heald, a young cavalry officer with an inheritance, but Heald’s aunt hated her and investigated the terms of her divorce from James; when she discovered the remarriage clause she filed charges of bigamy against Lola, and the couple fled to France.  The relationship was as short-lived as all of her arrangements, and in 1851 she set off for the United States to make a fresh start.  For the next two years she performed as a dancer and actress on the East Coast, then in May of 1853 travelled to San Francisco, where she married a newspaper publisher named Patrick Hull and opened a saloon and brothel in a mining town named Grass Valley.  Hull soon divorced her and returned to San Francisco, but Lola remained for two years, entertaining a number of wealthy and politically-powerful clients and inspiring young Lotta Crabtree, who went on to become the most popular American actress of her time.

By June of 1855 the California gold rush was over, but the Australian gold rush was in full swing so the ever-adventurous Lola decided to profit from it.  Her erotic “Spider Dance” caused an uproar in Melbourne, but the Diggers loved her until she demonstrated her legendary temper against a few hecklers and the editor of The Ballarat Times (who had given her a bad review).  Lola and Australia had had enough of each other by May, so she returned to San Francisco, wrote a book of beauty secrets (one of which was applying strips of raw beef to the face to prevent wrinkles), then went on tour lecturing on feminism and the proper treatment of women by men and society.  The lectures seem to have been heartfelt, because she eventually settled in New York and spent her entire fortune on rescuing streetwalkers, even living among them in a squalid boarding house.  But on June 30, 1860 she suffered a stroke which partially paralyzed her and seems to have induced a mild religious dementia; she recovered enough mobility that by December she was on several occasions seen limping down the street, praying out loud.  She soon contracted pneumonia and died on January 17th, 1861, just one month short of her 40th birthday.  The ever-colorful Lola never failed to surprise observers and provoke controversy, either in her life or after her death, and the various details of her life and legacy are still contested to this day in every country she visited.

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Nell Gwyn

Posted in Biography, Harlotography, History, tagged , , , , , , , , on May 27, 2011| 20 Comments »

I am a whore.  Find something else to fight about.  –  Nell Gwyn  (to her coachman, who was fighting a man for calling her a whore)

Nell Gwyn (February 2nd, 1650 – November 14th, 1687) was literally a born whore; her mother, also named Nell Gwyn (née Smith) was a fat, alcoholic madam who ran a cheap brothel in Covent Garden.  Nell’s putative father, Captain Thomas Gwyn, ran off soon after she was born and little Nell was employed serving “strong waters” (i.e. Nantes brandy) to the patrons of her mothers’ business.  It is highly likely that her mother sold Nell’s virginity to the highest bidder as was common at that time, and that she thereafter worked as what we now call a “child prostitute”; she is known to have taken her first lover (i.e. exclusive customer), a man named Duncan, at the age of 12 and stayed with him until she was 14.  But though the popular modern view teaches that young Nell should have been emotionally and psychologically destroyed by this rather unorthodox upbringing, the opposite was true; she soon learned to hold her own against the customers and developed the strong personality and ready wit upon which she made her fortune.

Duncan found Nell to be an expensive hobby and eventually decided she must earn at least some of her own upkeep.  Luckily for them both, King Charles II had been restored to the throne in 1660 and lifted Cromwell’s ban on theaters; the brand-new King’s Theater opened in nearby Drury Lane three years later, and 13-year-old Nell went to work as an orange girl.  This innocuous-sounding job deserves a bit of explanation:  in Restoration times theaters allowed outside contractors to sell fruit, candy and other treats inside the theater in exchange for a percentage of the profits, and these contractors employed provocatively-dressed teenage girls to hawk their wares.  When he lifted the theater ban King Charles had also legalized acting as a profession for women, and as in classical times most if not all actresses doubled as prostitutes.  This provided another source of income for orange girls; since they were allowed backstage while members of the audience were not, gentlemen who found particular actresses attractive would tip the orange girls to carry messages to them.  Nor did they limit themselves to facilitating business for the courtesans; ambitious orange girls (Nell among them) also solicited business for themselves.  By the time she was 14 Nell’s beauty, charm and wit had made her popular with the actors, and she joined their number before her 15th birthday.

Nell as Cupid (engraving c. 1672); Samuel Pepys displayed this portrait above his desk at the Admiralty.

Nell learned her craft quickly, and though she never excelled at drama she soared to success in comedy.  She became the mistress of leading man Charles Hart, and the two of them became very popular onstage as a comic couple.  When the King’s court relocated to Oxford during the Great Plague of London (summer 1665 – autumn 1666) the King’s Players (including Nell) followed them, though His Majesty does not appear to have noticed her charms at this time.  That did not occur until March of  1667, when she became a star due to her performance in John Dryden’s The Maiden Queene.  Her character was the mad girl Florimell, who disguises herself as a boy; this was a common plot device in Restoration comedies because it allowed actresses to dress in tight pants which showed off their figures.  By all accounts Nell had an exceptional pair of legs, and King Charles took sufficient notice that he ordered a royal command performance at the palace.  Another of her fans was the diarist Samuel Pepys, who wrote “…there is a comical part done by Nell, which is Florimell, that I never can hope ever to see the like done again, by man or woman…so great performance of a comical part was never, I believe, in the world before as Nell doth this…”  Shortly after this triumph she took a brief sabbatical to spend May, June and July with Charles Sackville, Lord Buckhurst; he paid her £100 for the contract at a time when the average workman made about £1/month.  Soon after she returned to the stage the King began actively flirting with Nell whenever he saw her, and in April of 1668 (two months after her 18th birthday) she became his mistress.  She continued to act, however, and her notoriety drew ever-larger crowds and encouraged playwrights to write roles especially for her.  But as time went on her royal patron claimed more and more of her time, and her last appearance on the stage was in 1671.

Nell was by no means the first of Charles II’s mistresses (there had already been four in the previous eight years), nor was she the last, but she remained his favorite for the rest of his life; part of the reason for this was her ready wit, which set her above most of her beautiful but typical competition.  Her favorite target was her chief rival Louise de Kérouaille, a French noblewoman who was created the Duchess of Portsmouth when she joined the King’s harem in 1673.  Nell lampooned her haughty Versailles manners and called her “Weeping Willow” because of her tendency to cry when picked on.  Unlike Nell (the “darling strumpet of the crowd” as the Earl of Rochester called her), Mademoiselle de Kérouaille was thoroughly disliked by the common people; once when Nell was passing through Oxford, a mob mistook her carriage for that of the Duchess and began shouting insults at her, among them “Catholic whore.”  The unflappable courtesan stopped them by putting her head out the window, smiling at the hecklers and announcing, “Pray good people, be civil; I am the Protestant whore.”

Portrait by Sir Peter Lely, c. 1680

Nor was the King himself spared her barbs; when his son by her, Charles Beauclerk, was six years old, she once summoned him for a paternal visit with “Come here, you little bastard, and say hello to your father.”  The King of course protested, and Nell replied, “Your Majesty has given me no other name by which to call him.”  She of course meant the boy had as yet received no title, and the King responded by creating him the Earl of Burford and granting him a house in Windsor.  Nell herself owned the house at 79 Pall Mall; King Charles had given her the lease for her 21st birthday, but she complained that she should own it rather than lease it and in 1676 her request was granted.  It was sold after her death, and until 1960 it was the only privately-owned house on the south side of Pall Mall.

Charles II died on February 6th, 1685; his dying wish to his younger brother, who became King James II, was “Let not poor Nelly starve.”  Though the habitually dour James had no love for the former orange girl who had labeled him with the epithet “Dismal Jimmy”, he honored Charles’ wish by paying off Nell’s creditors, giving her a pension of £1500 a year and allowing her to retain all of the estates and incomes she had previously been granted.  When she died of a series of strokes (probably due to complications of syphilis) less than three years later, her estate was valued at about £100,000.  Her son had been created Duke of St. Albans shortly before his father’s death, and that title and line still exists today; all in all, not bad for a woman born in a brothel who was once described by Bishop Burnett as “the indiscreetest and wildest creature that ever was in court.”

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Valeria Messalina

Posted in Biography, Harlotography, History, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , on April 23, 2011| 38 Comments »

She would greet each client sweetly, demand cash payment,
and absorb all their battering – without ever getting up.
Too soon the brothel-keeper dismissed his girls:
she stayed right till the end, always last to go,
then trailed away sadly, still, with burning, rigid vulva,
exhausted by men, yet a long way from satisfied,
cheeks grimed with lamp-smoke, filthy, carrying home
to her Imperial couch the stink of the whorehouse.  –  Juvenal, Satire VI

Back in August I told you about the whore who became a Roman empress, but today I’d like to write about the Roman empress who became a whore.  Valeria Messalina was born on January 25th sometime between 17 and 20 CE (she claimed the later date, but there is some evidence for the earlier), the eldest daughter of Marcus Valerius Messalla Barbatus and his first cousin, Domitia Lepida the Younger.  She was the great-granddaughter of Mark Antony, the great-grandniece of Augustus Caesar and a cousin of the Emperors Caligula, Claudius and Nero, but the high degree of  inbreeding in her family appears to have created in Messalina the same sort of sadistic, hypersexual insanity as it did in her imperial cousins.  Little is known of her childhood and adolescence, but after Caligula became Emperor in her late teens (37 CE) she became wealthy and influential and was soon married off to the 48-year-old Claudius as his third wife.

Messalina holding her son, Britannicus

The first few years of their marriage were relatively stable, and Messalina bore two children, Claudia Octavia in 39 and Britannicus in 41 (it is possible that Claudia was actually Caligula’s daughter, but Britannicus was probably legitimate).  But on January 24th of 41 Caligula was assassinated by the Praetorian Guard and Claudius was elevated to the throne, making Messalina empress.  Claudius was very fond of her, so this was not merely a title; she was granted many honors and privileges and the Senate would even have granted her the title of Augusta (making her co-ruler with Claudius) had he permitted it.  But even without such official power she was able to use her influence to have her enemies (and possible challengers to her son’s future succession) exiled or even executed.

As so often happens to unstable people thrust into high positions, Messalina became increasingly cruel, tyrannical and erratic.  She is also known to have been what modern psychology terms a nymphomaniac; though some scholars have proposed that this may be mere propaganda, the sheer number of the ancient sources making the claim (including Tacitus, Suetonius, Pliny and Juvenal) and their agreement on the particulars (not to mention the fact that sexual pathology seems to have run in her family) seems to make this possibility an unlikely one.  Many sources say that Messalina used sex to increase her personal power among politicians and other powerful men (including foreign dignitaries), and that she could be paid to use her influence on the Emperor for whatever outcome the payer desired.

But her whoredom was not merely figurative; Messalina also owned a lupanar under an alias and charged her patrician friends to organize orgies for them.  Nor was her participation limited to the administrative end of the business; she is said to have worked not as a famosa (courtesan) but rather as a proseda, a common brothel prostitute – and not in her own business but someone else’s, disguised by an ash-blond wig and the stage name Lycisca (“Wolf Girl”).  Considering her wealth and position, it should be obvious that Messalina’s whoredom was a sexual fetish for her rather than a business.  And considering the dire consequences had she been found out, I think we can safely consider it evidence of advanced mental illness as well.  But Messalina’s boldness only grew; in 46 or 47 CE she even challenged the prostitute Scylla (who was noted for her endurance) to a competition to determine who could bed the most men in one night; Scylla gave up around dawn, leaving the harlot empress the victor.

Is it possible her husband was unaware of her activities?  In Claudius’ day many people thought him a fool or an idiot because he stuttered, and thus believed that he was simply too dim to see what everyone else could.  But later writers such as Robert Graves have suggested that Claudius was actually a shrewd and reasonable man who had no desire for power and thus allowed others to think him a fool so as to avoid the intrigues in which his family was constantly embroiled; certainly his reign supports that view.  Even after power was thrust upon him, he preferred not to “rock the boat”, and thus allowed his wife’s antics until she eventually forced him to act.

"Messalina" by Henrique Bernardelli, c. 1878

The events which were to seal Messalina’s fate began early in 47 CE; gossip about her behavior had spread throughout Rome, and her popularity was sharply in decline.  She came to believe that her cousin Agrippina had replaced her in Claudius’ affections and that he would soon make Agrippina’s son Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus (the future Emperor Nero) his heir; she therefore ordered the young man’s assassination, but he escaped death because his assassins fled after seeing what they considered to be an ill omen.  Later that year she entered into an affair with the handsome Senator Gaius Silius and eventually forced him to divorce his wife; the increasingly-paranoid Messalina then decided to protect her son’s succession by having her husband assassinated so as to advance Silius to the purple as her consort and acting emperor, pending the majority of Britannicus.  In the latter part of 48 she even staged a mock marriage to Silius while her husband was in Ostia inspecting the construction of a new harbor, and these goings-on were reported to Claudius by his loyal freedman Tiberius Claudius Narcissus.

The enraged Claudius ordered her immediate execution; accordingly, an officer of the Praetorian Guard was dispatched to the Lucullan Gardens, where Messalina was working on a letter which attempted to explain her behavior to her husband.  As was usual for condemned Romans of noble birth Messalina was offered the option of killing herself, but she was unable to do it and so was decapitated by the officer in the presence of her mother.  When the news of her death was brought to Claudius at a feast, he did not react but merely asked for more wine; he later asked why the Empress was not in attendance, but this may have merely been a ploy to distance himself from her execution by feigning ignorance of it.  In the next few days Claudius betrayed no sign of emotion, either positive or negative, which seems to support the idea that he had already decided to rid himself of her long before and was merely looking for a good excuse.

Ironically, Messalina’s actions brought about the very events she wanted so desperately to prevent; just a few months after her death Claudius married Agrippina the Younger and adopted Ahenobarbus (now renamed Nero Claudius Caesar Drusus Germanicus) as his heir.  Four years later Nero married Messalina’s daughter Claudia Octavia, and two years after that he had his brother-in-law Britannicus poisoned.  Finally, he had Claudia Octavia murdered in 62 CE so he would be free to contract a more advantageous marriage.  Messalina’s line was thus extinguished, but her name has come down through the centuries as the archetype of the promiscuous, treacherous noblewoman.

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Ching Shih

Posted in Biography, Harlotography, History, Miscellaneous, tagged , , , , , on March 18, 2011| 27 Comments »

Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition. –  Timothy Leary

To start with, Ching Shih (1775–1844) was only her stage name; it simply means “Widow of Zheng”.  Her real name and her history prior to 1801 are completely unknown except for the fact that she was a prostitute in one of the famous floating brothels of Canton.  She was captured in a raid by the powerful pirate Zheng Yi, commander of six pirate fleets, who appears to have known her professionally before the raid because his men were specifically instructed to bring the 26-year-old beauty to him.  He had fallen deeply in love with her and proposed marriage, and she agreed on the condition that Zheng Yi grant her 50% of his profits and command of one of his fleets.

Artist’s conception of Ching Shih (origin unknown)

Ching I Sao (“Wife of Zheng”), as she was then known, quickly won the respect of her men and her husband drew upon her shrewd advice to increase his power; his family had been noted pirates since at least the mid-17th century and the cunning former whore advised him to use that reputation in combination with intimidation to build an alliance of pirate fleets which until that time had engaged in self-defeating competition.  By 1804 this alliance, known as the Red Flag Fleet, was the most powerful pirate force in China; it was comprised of over 1500 ships and ranged all the way from Korea to Malaysia.  In 1807 Zheng Yi was killed in a typhoon, and his widow (now called Ching Shih) quickly made a pact with Chang Pao, the late commander’s chief lieutenant, which placed her in absolute command of the fleet with him as her executive officer.  The deal appears to have been leveraged by her sex appeal, because they became lovers and later married (though sources vary as to whether this was before or after her retirement).

Ching Shih realized that in order to maintain control she had to establish strict discipline lest the men believe that a female commander could be defied with impunity.  She therefore imposed a code of behavior far more severe than the pirate “articles” common in the Spanish Main:  disobedience, theft, desertion, dereliction of duty, cowardice and rape of female prisoners were all punishable by beheading.  Her power grew at a frightening pace, and within a year the Red Flag Fleet boasted two hundred oceangoing junks of twenty guns each, eight hundred small ships, dozens of riverboats and over 17,000 men; it was one of the largest navies in the world and nothing could stand against it.  She extorted tribute from merchants all over the China Seas and from coastal towns from Macau to Canton, and became a de facto government in her own right; soon she began to impose taxes and levies and enforced her own laws.

This sketch from 1836 imagines what Ching Shih might have looked like in battle.

Clearly, the Chinese government could not ignore this, so in 1808 it sent a fleet against Ching Shih; she easily defeated it, capturing 63 ships and impressing hundreds of sailors into her navy (those who remained loyal to the Emperor were beaten to death with clubs).  Further attacks were equally unsuccessful, as were the attempts at rebellion by subject villages (which were burned to the ground and saw all their men slaughtered).  In desperation, the Chinese government asked for help from the British and Portuguese; their forces, too, were defeated by the harlot admiral.  By 1810 the government was forced to admit defeat and offered a general amnesty to all pirates who would give up their ships and arms.  Ching Shih was no fool, and saw her opportunity to quit while she was ahead; accordingly, she appeared unannounced at the official home of the Governor-general of Canton and negotiated an incredible deal:  she and all her men were given full amnesty and allowed to keep all of their loot, any of her men who wished to join the Imperial Navy would be allowed to do so, and Chang Pao received a lieutenant’s commission.  Ching Shih thus retired from piracy at 35 and opened a combination casino and brothel which she operated until her death at the age of 69, survived by at least one son.

Ching Shih was quite probably the most successful pirate who ever lived; not only did she defeat all attempts to stop her and make staggering sums of money, but she also managed to keep all her profits and transition into a respectable business when she was still quite young.  And considering that the half-share in the pirate fleet which set the stage for her eventual control of the whole was essentially a price for her favors, I think it’s fair to say she was among the most successful prostitutes of all time as well.  She didn’t become an empress as Theodora did, but she essentially made herself a queen, foiled the efforts of the three greatest navies in the world and died a peaceful death as a wealthy, successful, respected businesswoman at a ripe old age.

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