Favorite Hussy

THE WOMAN IN BLACK (309 pp.)--Helen Holdredge--Putnam ($4.50).

Women with the talent for raising the tantrum to an art form and the conniption fit to a way of life seem to work terrible powers of posthumous hypnosis upon their biographers.

Such a one was Lola Montez, the notable 19th century hussy, whose beauty and calculated hysteria drove strong men mad --particularly King Ludwig I of Bavaria. * During her life, women were oddly immune to her power. The victims were the gentlemen of Berlin, Paris, London and New York whose heaving breasts and creaking shirt fronts provided the obbligato for her "abandoned" dancing. But now that Lola is safely buried these 94 years in Brooklyn, the ladies, especially the lady writers, have been taken over.

Enter Franz. Her latest biographer, Helen Holdredge (Mammy Pleasant), labored hard to dig up all that is rich and rare about her favorite hussy. What was Lola's strange appeal? Her beauty? Her habit of wielding a horsewhip in order to discipline cynical newspaper editors who hinted at her Forever Amberguous relations with men?

Whatever the cause, says her biographer, she was "a woman of mystery." According to the rumor of the times, she may have been a daughter of Lord Byron (actually, she was not; he was somewhere else at the time) or a changeling--the adopted daughter of gypsies (her favorite fantasy, which psychologists will recognize). Was Francisco Montes, the famous bullfighter, her father? (He denied it.) Was she born in Turkey? India? Her real name was Marie Dolores Eliza Rosanna Gilbert, and she came from Limerick. At all events, she liked to wear black, was on the stage, had tiny feet and enormous eyes. Her whole life was as absurd as a Verdi opera plot adapted for the wide screen by MGM.

By the book's page 7, Composer-Pianist Franz Liszt is involved: "The burning eyes of the passionate Hungarian studied her for a long moment, and it seemed that the decision to possess her was made in that instant. 'As an artist you have no equal,' she said tritely, as he held her hand in a fervent and prolonged grasp . . . Only a few hours later, her body stripped of the clothes that hid its superb beauty, Lola sought to achieve the heights of passion which Liszt so obviously enjoyed . . ."

And so on and on, with what British critics like to call the thundering hooves of the tosh-horse.

Exit Ludwig. A duel in the Bois de Boulogne (afterwards, Lola looked smashing in her bereaved-mistress' weeds) set her firmly in the center of what would now be called cafe society. But her real career began when she was engaged to dance in Munich and bewitched old King Ludwig (her bodice tore at just the right moment and place). Lola moved into the posh palace he built for her in Munich and prepared to run the country. Then, as now, advanced ideas were a prime source of self-advertisement, and Lola had absorbed a set of "bold and novel" notions through the pores of her celebrated milky skin by association with Alexandre Dumas. Her plans to give "freedom" to Bavaria were blocked by what she called "the cloven foot of Jesuitism." After two years, the Jesuits helped Bavaria get rid of her and the King, and she never forgave them.

Thereafter, she played herself in her own foolish part on the stage in a presentation called Lola Montez in Bavaria. When a performance went wrong in Philadelphia, she knew whom to blame. The conductor, she stormed, had smuggled Jesuits into the orchestra to sabotage her dance. So it went all round the world--lawsuits, horsewhippings, fake suicides, fainting spells, screamings, lovers, comas, seances, and always gentlemen who would take the horses out of her carriage to drag her in triumph to her lodgings. Yet she had the pathos of sincerity that lacked only the understanding of itself. In a sense, her stage appearance was a franker, more straightforward sensationalism than that practiced--among gossip columns, fan magazines and semi-public scandals--by Lola's Hollywood successors.

She wound up playing to miners in Nevada, and even worse, in the Australian goldfields. It was there, at last, that someone had the common sense to get on to the horsewhip dodge (which was the Victorian form of the modern gossip queen's "denial" of a "romance"). Lola was flailing away as usual at the local editor, a coarse colonial called Seekamp, when he hit her right back. It discouraged her.

According to an investigator for the Sacramento Union named Ching Foo, she ended up starving in a New York tenement. All she had left, before her death, was Ludwig's $20,000 diamond necklace, and she was bilked of that. The book, unfortunately, is written by Author Holdredge in an infatuated period prose. It is all very sad and wonderful in its own ludicrous way.

* Not to be confused with mad Ludwig II, his grandson.

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