Madame Blavatsky: The Woman Behind the Myth (19 page)

Despite the cheapness and friendliness of her new quarters, H.P.B.’s financial problems kept her in a permanent state of anxiety. She had so little money that even coffee became a luxury. She boiled the grounds several times to make her supply last and worried about how she was going to survive. Within three weeks of her arrival, she took the initiative in a rather audacious manner by boldly notifying the New York
Sun
of her presence in the city. When a woman reporter, Anna Ballard, was sent to get an interview, H.P.B. was delighted to talk about herself along with other matters that she hoped would interest
Sun
readers. She told Miss Ballard that one hundred fifty aristocratic Russian women, including Czar Alexander’s daughters, had been studying medicine in Zurich when the Emperor suddenly forbade such masculine endeavors and limited them to the study of midwifery; some of the women had been forced to return to Russia while others had gone to France and Germany and a small group to the United States.

This information was, of course, invented on the spot, but the
Sun
did not pause to distinguish between fact and fiction as would the
Times
or the
Tribune,
and on July 28, they ran the story as front-page news. Judging by the final sentence it is obvious that H.P.B. played her game to the hilt: “These accomplished women, polygots, travellers, scientists, nearly moneyless are able to do much and want something to do.”
¹

If Helena hoped that the
Sun
would give her a free want ad, she must have been grossly disappointed. Not once did her name appear in the article; no employer contacted the paper to make inquiries as to the whereabouts of the gifted Russian women, starving and looking for work. After this setback, H.P.B. seemed uncertain as to her next step. Day after day she sat in the first-floor office and rolled cigarettes, garnering her tobacco supply from the head of some fur-bearing animal that she wore around her neck as a pouch; she chain-smoked and passed her time talking to anyone who happened by.

By this time, she was beginning to understand what it took for an unknown to succeed in New York City. It was obvious that no matter how important an individual might have been elsewhere, New Yorkers automatically considered her a nobody. One had to work at building a reputation, and then she would be taken for just what she was worth and no more. To H.P.B., this seemed a mixed blessing in that it enabled her to start fresh, but by the same token it meant there would be no easy road to recognition, much less to procuring one’s daily bread. Her abortive publicity stunt in the
Sun
had not, actually, been a bad idea; it merely had not worked as planned, and she could see that in the future she would have to be a good deal more subtle.

By August, she was still in the office, rolling her cigarettes and brooding. There was little use prowling about the city because she had no money to enjoy herself and, besides, she found it somewhat intimidating. New York, in 1873, had only two visible classes, the wealthy and the poor; the middle class, who could not afford the city, lived in the suburbs and commuted to work. Most noticeable was New York’s air of prosperity, the illusion that everybody had money to throw away. One had only to walk down Broadway, the city’s great thoroughfare, to observe an assorted spectacle of wealth: elegantly attired gentlemen with canes, top hats and wide cravats set with diamond stickpins; sporty fellows with derbies cocked over one eye and hair roached up in bear grease or macassar oil; corseted ladies going to extremes with powder and rouge and every variety of false hair— chignons, pompadours, braids, rolls, and spit curls. Shops displayed a generous assortment of satins, jewels, toys, paintings and silverware, and one cosmetic shop advertised thirteen different varieties of skin powder and eight kinds of creams. The Fifth Avenue Hotel charged thirty dollars a day for a suite of two rooms and a parlor (supposedly a bargain), while the one-million-dollar Stevens House apartment building on the corner of Broadway and Twenty-seventh Street offered lavish eighteen-room suites with a steam elevator, frescoed walls and separate quarters for servants. Inflation had driven up prices to the point where even essentials had become luxuries: butter was fifty cents a pound, crushed sugar sixteen, fowls twenty-five, and choice cuts of beef thirty-five.

At the same time, there were ominous signs that the boom could not continue indefinitely. By the year’s end, depression had already begun to rock the country; on September 18, the failure of the great banking house of Jay Cooke and Company would precipitate further disasters of the Panic of 1873, as banks collapsed, five thousand businesses failed, the iron industry cut wages, and mines and textile mills closed down. By the following year, unemployment would rocket to three million. It was not the best time for an immigrant to make her way in the United States of America.

Elizabeth Holt had spent the summer with her mother at Saratoga. In August she was sent home to New York to get ready for the opening of school, but since a proper Victorian girl could not live alone, her mother’s friend Miss Parker agreed to chaperone her at 222 Madison Street. There Elizabeth met Madame Blavatsky, which was inevitable as her room was directly opposite the office where H.P.B. spent most of her time. Madame seemed to Elizabeth “an unusual figure.” It was not only her cigarettes and the crinkled blond hair—she overflowed with a nonstop fund of fabulous stories about her life in Paris, where she claimed to have decorated Empress Eugenie’s private apartments. Elizabeth imagined her as “dressed in blouse and trousers, mounted on a ladder and doing the actual work, and I think this is what she told us; but I cannot be sure whether she said that she did the actual painting, frescoing, etc., or whether she merely designed it.” Either seemed equally marvelous.

Elizabeth knew that H.P.B. was “greatly troubled about money,” which seemed peculiar because Madame was a Russian countess. Some skeptics in the house tartly suggested that Madame was, despite her stories, nothing but an ordinary adventuress. But Miss Parker, who had accompanied H.P.B. to the Russian Consulate, assured them that the consul knew of her family and had promised to contact them for money. In the meantime, however, Mr. Rinaldo had introduced Helena to two young friends of his who owned a collar-and-shirt factory and were willing to give her freelance work designing advertising cards. “Madame also tried ornamental work in leather, and produced some very fine and intricate examples, but they did not sell, and she abandoned the leather work,” recalled Elizabeth Holt.

Later, when H.P.B. became well known, Elizabeth could never quite imagine her as an ethical teacher because she remembered her excitable temper and how she expressed herself “with a vigour which was very disturbing” when things went wrong. That was a genteel way of putting it, because H.P.B., angry, had a disconcerting habit of swearing like a sailor. Still, there was much about her to admire, especially her fearlessness and her instinctive response to anyone in trouble. “Undesirable people were beginning to move into the street,” recalled Elizabeth Holt, 

and the neighborhood was changing rapidly. One evening one of our young girls, coming home late from work, was followed and greatly frightened; she slung herself breathlessly into a chair in the office. Madame interested herself at once, expressed her indignation in most vigorous terms, and finally drew from some fold of her dress a knife (I think she used it to cut her tobacco, but it was sufficiently sharp to be a formidable weapon of defence) and she said she had
that
for any man who molested her.

While the prim Elizabeth recognized and appreciated the guttsiness that characterized the least of H.P.B.’s actions, she also acknowledged another side of Madame Blavatsky, one that Miss Parker did not, evidently, believe appropriate for a young girl to know about. H.P.B. was in the habit of relating weird tales of the supernatural, some of them so frightening that Miss Parker stayed all night with Elizabeth instead of climbing two flights of dark stairs to her own room. Apart from spooky stories, Helena amiably dispensed information about people’s pasts to anyone who asked. Miss Parker, for one, was greatly startled to hear about incidents in her own life that were, she thought, known only to herself. When she asked to be put in touch with her dead mother, Helena refused—her mother, progressed beyond reach, involved herself in higher matters now. Since Madame continually claimed to be under the authority of unseen powers, Elizabeth and the others at 222 Madison assumed that she must be speaking of her spirit guides and naturally concluded that she was a Spiritualist. For her part, Elizabeth could not get excited about Madame’s spirits, those “tricksy little beings” whom she called
diaki.
²

Entertaining her co-residents with life readings was all very well but did nothing to solve Helena’s problems. As no rubles had yet appeared from Russia, her financial situation continued to deteriorate until she was reduced to relying on the generosity of others in order to live. A few blocks away in Henry Street there was a French Canadian widow, Madame Magnon, with whom Helena had grown friendly. When Madame Magnon offered to share her home until Helena’s money difficulties were straightened out, she left 222 Madison. Some of the women, notably Miss Parker, kept in touch and after the two madames decided to hold Sunday evening seances, Miss Parker was an eager participant. While Elizabeth Holt was not invited—her mother would not have approved—Miss Parker told her all the news. It seemed that one morning, when Helena failed to appear for breakfast, Madame Magnon finally went to her room and found her unable to rise. Her nightgown had been sewn securely to the mattress, stitched in such a way that Madame could not possibly have done it herself, and Magnon had to cut the threads. This, Miss Parker assured Elizabeth, was the work of the
diaki.

In early November, Helena received a letter from her half-sister with the unhappy news that their father had died on July 27 after a three-day illness; he had been buried at Stavropol in the Caucasus. Excusing her delay in writing, Liza said that she had not known Helena’s whereabouts—she enclosed a draft for Helena’s portion of the estate. The amount must have been modest, at least less than H.P.B. believed she was due, because afterward she would accuse her sister Vera of withholding half her inheritance.
³

Shortly after this, Helena rented a place of her own at the northeast corner of Fourteenth Street and Fourth Avenue. It was a musty top-floor room containing only an iron cot, a table, and a three-drawer cabinet; downstairs, a saloon occupied the ground floor. Helena, a rabid teetotaler, could not have been delighted.

To make matters worse, she had a fire in her room, perhaps as a result of careless smoking, and after the firemen had extinguished the blaze, she discovered that her watch and chain were missing. When she complained to her landlord, who happened to be the proprietor of the saloon, he scoffed that she had never owned a watch. Helena’s almost paranoid reaction to the fire supplies a clue to her anguished state of mind at that period of her life; she told Elizabeth Holt that the fire had been deliberately set in order to rob her, and, referring to what Elizabeth assumed were her spirit guides, she kept talking about “they” and “them.” When she had asked “them” to give her proof of the robbery, there had immediately materialized a charred piece of paper with two white spots in the shape of a watch and chain, meaning to indicate, one supposes, that the objects had been resting on the paper before the fire.
⁴

If H.P.B. actually offered this “documentation” to her landlord, it failed to sway him. In response to Elizabeth’s expressions of sympathy, Helena cheerfully assured her that money was no problem—she had only to ask “them” for it and would find what she needed in the drawers of her cabinet. But it was a meaningless boast. For all her outward nonchalance, “they” had evidently failed her and it was clear that she must find another place to live. Although by this time the Madison Street commune had failed financially and closed, she was able to locate a similar working woman’s home at 45 Elizabeth Street. Unlike Mr. Rinaldo’s house, this was a massive, six-story brick building accommodating five hundred boarders. The ground floor was given over to a parlor, reading room, laundry and restaurant, while the upper stories had been made into dormitories. Helena had to pay $1.25 a week for lodging and laundry privileges, and she could have a decent meal in the restaurant for twenty-five cents.
⁵

In early 1874, Helena met Hannah Wolff, a reporter for the New York
Star
who visited the home while interviewing one of H.P.B.’s roommates. “Scantily clad,” Mme. Blavatsky lay on the carpetless floor during the conversation and “rolled and smoked cigarettes with marvellous rapidity.” Afterward Helena interrogated Hannah at such length about the position of women in the American press that Miss Wolff felt she was the one being interviewed. When Wolff finally got a word in and asked why she was living in a working woman’s home, H.P.B. cited necessity. So a month later, meeting her again at a women’s rights convention, Wolff was surprised to find Helena with money to spare. Having received, she told Wolff, a large sum of money from Russia, she had been able to move to an expensive hotel on Fourth Avenue near Twenty-third Street. “She invited half a dozen ladies to lunch with her,” Wolff recalled, “and subsequently told me that her bill footed up to five dollars each.”

Neither H.P.B.’s presence at a feminist convention, nor her lavish entertaining of delegates, should be construed to mean that she had any particular interest in the cause of women’s rights. On the contrary, the fact that Susan B. Anthony had illegally voted in the 1872 election left her indifferent. H.P.B. herself had no desire to vote, even though she felt strongly that women deserved the right if they wanted it. As for the notorious Victoria Woodhull who had run for President in that same election (and who had actually announced that she believed in “free love”), this was the last person Helena would champion, Mrs. Woodhull’s sexual liberation being much too close to home for comfort. Rather it was loneliness that sent her to the feminist conclave, just as her need for companionship made her pursue Hannah Wolff.