Beautiful and Be Damned

By Brad Darrach

THE UNCROWNED QUEEN

by ISHBEL ROSS 349 pages. Harper & Row. $8.95.

"The splendour of her breasts," wrote an early biographer, "made madmen everywhere." He might also have mentioned her energy, ambition, courage, cunning, charm, wit and wardrobe. It took all those things, and plenty of gall besides, to turn Eliza Gilbert into Lola Montez, famous dancer, mistress of Franz Liszt and Alexandre Dumas pere, intimate of kings and prime ministers, de facto ruler of Bavaria during Ludwig I's declining years, and belle of the California gold rush.

Who was Lola? Rumor had it (probably from Lola's own lips) that she was the daughter of Lord Byron ... or maybe of a matador. In fact, as this perfectly sober biography with a plot like a chambermaid's dream shows, Lola was born in Limerick, Ireland, in 1818, the daughter of an 18-year-old lieutenant and a 13-year-old chorine. When she was seven, Eliza's father died of cholera in India. Shipped home to Scotland, the child appalled her stepfather's Presbyterian parents by running naked through the streets. Hustled off to school in Paris, she perfected a homicidal temper and a gift for languages. At 19, she eloped to Ireland with a lieutenant named Thomas James, who soon ran off with a captain's wife. Eliza changed her name to Lola Montez, and under the protection of two great and good friends, Lord Malmesbury and Lord Brougham, made her stage debut in London as a Spanish dancer. The show closed, but a star was born.

At 25, Lola was what the Victorians called "a superb piece." She had skin like a Dresden shepherdess, hair like a black velvet shawl, eyes that flashed and flickered like sapphires in firelight. When a man got her Irish up, she cut him across the face with a riding whip. She once fired a pistol at a disappointing lover. What Lola wanted, Lola got.

In St. Petersburg, Lola got a "private audience" with the Czar, who gave her 1,000 rubles for services rendered. In Dresden, she got Liszt, the great lover of the age, and so wore him out that one night he locked her in a hotel room and fled, leaving a substantial sum to pay for the furniture he knew she would break. In Paris, she got culture and a taste for liberal politics in the company of Balzac, Lamartine, George Sand, Victor Hugo, and especially Dumas pere. She found the great love of her life, however, with a talented radical editor named Alexandre Dujarier.

He was soon killed in a duel, but he had somehow refined Lola's primitive hunger for sex and power. In Munich, a year after Dujarier's death, she opened the climactic episode of her career by striding unannounced into the study of King Ludwig I of Bavaria, an aging aesthete who had transformed his dowdy Munich into the Florence of the north. When the King asked the lady if her figure was a work of nature or of art, the story goes, Lola snatched up a pair of scissors and ripped open her bodice. "I am bewitched," the King later told his council, "I know not how."

Lola ruled Ludwig's kingdom as well as his imagination, and to the dismay of Prince Metternich, the Austrian archconservative who was master of Europe between the two Napoleons, her rule was quite liberal--she harassed the Jesuits and introduced the Code Napoleon. In 1847 Metternich offered Lola $250,000 if she would quietly go away; Lola threw the money in his emissary's face. Then Metternich organized a student riot, and Lola fell into his trap. Haughtily, she got Ludwig to close the university. The students rioted again, and now the riot was swollen by thousands of tradespeople who stood to lose the students' business. Barricades went up all over town; revolution was pending. "I will never abandon Lola!" the King shouted. "She is the most noble of creatures. My crown for Lola!" Persuaded at last that the mob would kill her if he did not banish her, Ludwig yielded. Lola made the next train out of town, a casualty of her own political incompetence.

Gold Rush. Lola never altogether recovered from the double loss of Dujarier and Bavaria. But at 35, after severe bouts of sickness and marriage, she rallied enough to join the California gold rush. She opened a frontier salon in a mining camp called Grass Valley and stocked it with Ludwig's jewels, Louis Seize cabinets, ormolu mirrors, Kanaka houseboys, a swan bed, a pet bear and every Senator, Governor or millionaire she could find. In the back of her mind, as letters discovered after her death made clear, was a plot to capture California from the U.S. and set herself up as Queen of Lolaland.

Weirder fantasies soon set in. Lola took refuge in astrology and nature mysticism. She revived briefly to write a book of beauty secrets (to prevent wrinkles, she suggested binding thin slivers of raw beef tightly around the face) and made some lecture tours ("Let historical justice be done to the intellect of woman," she implored. "I am content to leave the history of her heart and moral life, without comment, to defend itself by contrast with that of the other sex"). But at 41, she had a schizophrenic collapse. She spent the last two years of her life shuffling along the sidewalks of New York, imploring God to forgive her "wicked" life. She died at 43 after a stroke. "In the 18th century," wrote Augustin Thierry, "she would have played a great Pompadour role, with taste in small things and courage in big ones . . . She was born a hundred years too late." Or a hundred years too soon.

.Brad Darrach

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