Spider Dance (27 page)

The danseuse was obliged to search for the spider in her skirts
rather higher than was proper in so public a place
.
—SAN FRANCISCO NEWSPAPER

She is the bravest and most daring woman ever to trod the earth.
At the same time, she has real intellect and an uncommon education
.
—BOHEMIAN VIOLINIST MICHAEL HAUSER

San Francisco, a city of fifty thousand souls, was but four years old when I arrived. Anything was possible here for anyone. Buildings of brick and stone had sprouted like mushrooms. San Francisco’s new American Theater held three thousand and they all had heard of the Countess of Landsfeld.

Despite not having a contract and having had to fire my manager (again) on arrival, I opened five days after as Lady Teazle in
The School for Scandal
. I knew the part and the resident company knew the play.

Seats went for the scandalous sum of five dollars apiece, five times the rate in the finest New York theatrical house. The box office collected almost five thousand dollars on my opening night alone. Truly California was a fairyland of instant riches, and the price to play in it was very high indeed.

While the company of the American Theater was learning my signature play,
Lola Montez in Bavaria
, I entertained audiences with
Yelva
, in which I played a mute Russian orphan, and with performances of my Spider Dance.

The California critics found my skirts lower and my art higher than had been anticipated, and my Bavarian play soon opened, an utter triumph. One critic went so far to say . . . now, where is that newspaper squib? . . . to say, “The play represents Lola as a coquettish, wayward, reckless woman, intent on good . . . but not the wily diplomatist, the able leader which she is represented in history. She counsels the King with all the enthusiasm of a Red Republican sophomore. . . . History pays her a higher compliment than her own play.”

Ah, and isn’t that how everyone wanted to see me? Flirting with revolution, dancing my way into dangerous diplomatic waters? Good history doesn’t make good theater. Or good profits.
Lola Montez in Bavaria
made me $16,000 my first week at the American. And I made almost as many friends.

Viva California!

I tried to enlist my dear Miska, a charming violinist sponsored by P. T. Bamum at one time, into forming a company of solo acts to take to the smaller cities and mining camps where a full play couldn’t be mounted. And to him I confided that I would marry the Patrick Hull, whom I’d met on the
Northern
en route here. (Some ungentle observers would comment that I tended to find new lovers or husbands on
every voyage. Perhaps that’s because I was never still enough on land to linger long with one man.)

“Why marry?” Miska asked. “You seem to have found the fountain of youth, stalling in high summer under the two glorious day-stars of your incomparable eyes. I would think no one man would match you.”

“He is a fascinating fellow, dear Miska,” I told him. “A big, roaring lion of an Irishman. He’s handsome and he makes me laugh. In truth, I enjoy the company of men even if they are not material for love. Hull has made a Benjamin Franklin of me! He took me to the offices of the
San Francisco Whig and Commercial Advertiser
and taught me to set type. (I was later to amaze associates in New York by this skill.) I weary of constant travel. This sunset land of the West is more than holes of gold in the earth. I might settle here, have children. Don’t laugh, Miska! The touring theatrical life won’t always be for me.”

I had arrived in San Francisco in early May. By July the marriage was made, a Catholic ceremony which began with me offering two vases of white silk roses to the Virgin. And so Maria Dolores Eliza Rosana Landsfeld Heald (as I had been styling myself after my second husband, George Heald, a handsome but weak young man under his spinster aunt’s thumb) took a third husband and became Mrs. Hull. We celebrated at the reception with cake, wine, and cigars and cigarettes! We moved to the foothills of the Sierras in Grass Valley, which reminded me of the Himalayas as seen from Simla when I was a child in India and the lovely Alps of my beloved Bavaria. I could offer a child no better birthplace.

A pity it only lasted two months, but it soon became bitterly apparent, after he sold his newspaper, that Hull wished only to live on my money, and I was forced to throw him out. Divorce? I don’t believe in it, and reverted to using the surname of my second husband, Heald, when I traveled incognito.

Of course I’d told Father Fontaine, the officiating priest at
our marriage, that I was twenty-seven. (Although I didn’t mention my undissolved youthful alliance with Lieutenant James. The laws of England might want to put me in legal limbo for eternity, but that marriage was long null and void in my head and heart, such ancient history!)

It would have never done to admit to thirty-two and exceed my bridegroom in age! Husbands may come and go, but these facts are put on record, after all. The newspapers do have an annoying habit of going back to look them up and keep track. Always so inquisitive about one’s age, the newspapers. . . .

I look forward with great pleasure to my return to N. Y.,
for it is the only city in America where I prefer living.
. . .
—LETTER FROM LOLA MONTEZ, 1860

If someone had told me that I would one day journey to New York City in search of my friend Irene Adler Norton’s mother . . .

If that same someone had said that in the course of this inquiry I would be obliged to call upon the Episcopal bishop of the city to ask him about the most notorious woman in the world . . .

If that very individual had also asserted that the need to call upon the bishop arose from information found in the “morgue” of a New York City newspaper . . . well, I would have said I knew a liar three times over.

Alas, no one had warned me of these eventualities, so I
had no one to blame for this turn of events but myself, or perhaps my shameless companion who would plot herself into any preposterous situation and carry it through on sheer bravado.

We owed this one respectable call of our stay in New York to another expedition to visit the ogre of the
New York Herald
. He greeted our return to his dingy subterranean domain with a sort of evil glee.

When Irene told him we sought news of a Bishop Potter of the Episcopal Church in 1861, he led us down another confusion of aisles, cackling all the way.

“A bishop you want now? That would be on the churchly aisle, all the denominations together, as they so seldom are in life. In the same pew, so to speak.”

When we finally stopped, his mottled hand waved at a row that looked longer than the nave of a major cathedral. My heart sank, and then I sneezed.

“Bless you, ma’am. It’s the paper dust. And all the weevils and spiders and that sort down here. Shouldn’t wonder if you’d inhaled some dead spider legs. Paper is nasty stuff. The ink smudges and powders. The pages rot and crumble, you know, and attract vermin.”

By now I was ready to retch as well as sneeze.

“Not a place for ladies, newspapers, not even in the offices upstairs. And especially not down here.”

His voice had risen into the strident tone of an itinerant preacher admonishing a flock.

“The sooner we find what we need the sooner we will be gone,” Irene said, and if a soft voice could turn away wrath, hers was warm honey.

“Suppose so. Watch yer hems, they’ll be sweeping up mouse and rat droppings.”

Thus warned, we were led to the middle of the aisle. “Lucky for you Potter has been a hallowed name hereabouts for thirty-five years; still is.”

Our glances met as our hearts leaped up.

“So Bishop Potter is still the prelate here in New York,” Irene said.

“Must be,” our guide grumbled. “They is always writing about him in the paper.”

He’s alive, thank the Lord
. That is the phrase that came unbidden into my mind. If we had to investigate the life, and death, of this troublesome woman, it would be luck indeed that an honored churchman could add a personal recollection to the lurid stories the newspapers had recorded.

Of course Bishop Potter may not have visited her deathbed personally, but from the accounts of her passing, an Episcopal priest, the reverend Francis Lister Hawks, had been beside her reading from the Good Book at the end. His account of her death brought tears to my eyes.

Irene had sniffed and said that deathbed conversions played well enough on the stage, but that she always mistrusted them in real life.

I do believe that, as much as Irene was mortified by a possible mother who was inept onstage, she was even more embarrassed by a penitent one.

“Here it is.” Mr. Wheems pulled an actual file from the shelf. “You ladies know where the table is.”

We didn’t, not in this maze of glaring electric lights beaming down on us, creating shadows larger than ourselves.

Irene told him so, and he led us back to the rickety table we had used on our first visit. The dust we had left undisturbed still lay there.

This time we had clippings of articles to scan, all in a huge envelope marked “Potter, Bishop.”

As soon as Mr. Wheems’s departing shuffles had died to a whisper, Irene began drawing out leaves of yellowed paper from the large envelope. I showed my agreement with our guide about the lamentable condition of old newsprint by sneezing several more times.

Irene snatched the papers from my vicinity like a mother saving a child from a fire. “Here’s my handkerchief. We don’t want the ink to blur.”

She sifted through the collection. “These are filed from the
most recent dates to years back. Let’s see . . . ‘Bishop Potter Addresses Episcopalian Club. This spring. Henry Codman Potter Succeeds to Bishopric of New York City. . . .”

“But that announcement is dated only two years ago!” She frowned and eyed me with astonishment.

“How could he be ‘Bishop Potter’ in the 1861 news report and be made ‘Bishop Potter’ in 1887? Instead of a cart before the horse that puts a bishop before a priest.”

Irene was riffling back through more of the musty clippings. “Ah, here! ‘Henry Codman Potter Consecrated Assistant to His Uncle Horatio Potter, Ailing Bishop of New York.’”

I couldn’t believe the coincidence. “Irene, there are
two
Bishop Potters! Horatio must have been the bishop referred to in 1861. So now he’s dead, and only two years ago. How unfortunate!”

Irene’s toe tapped the rough brick floor, unmindful of any passing vermin she might be sending to their maker.

“Yes,
he’s
dead. But the nephew might be aware of his uncle’s . . . what do they call it in churchy circles, Nell? . . . his uncle’s reign?”

“Your mind turns too much upon kings and worldly monarchs,” I said. “Bishops are elected or appointed, so it would be called a term of office.”

“Apparently his nephew was a shoo-in to replace him. Sounds mighty like a dynasty to me. Anyway, according to the newspaper stories, our man . . . the living Bishop Potter, that is . . . is something of a social reformer, a supporter of working men’s clubs, missions, kindergartens, improved saloons.”