Princesses Behaving Badly

by Linda Rodriguez McRobbie

  But Charlotte was not entirely innocent. Much of the material for the letters had come from her diary, which she lost while on holiday with the Kotzes (the dueler and his wife). In it, she’d recorded scandalous secrets about her own family and members of the court; the diary somehow landed in the hands of the duke’s naughty mistress (possibly via the Kotzes, with whom Charlotte had quarreled), who passed it on to her lover. The police found the diary during the investigation and handed it over to Wilhelm. The kaiser was incensed—relations were already tense between him and his sister, owing to Charlotte’s hatred of his wife (and his wife’s for her). Charlotte’s husband was transferred to a regiment stationed in some dull German backwater and she went with him, suffering a de facto banishment from the society she so loved. The kaiser and his sister never reconciled. (Remarkably, the sex party scandal was almost immediately forgotten. It wasn’t until 2010, when a German historian cracked the Prussian State Archives, that the story came to light.)

  LIKE MOTHER, LIKE DAUGHTER

  For all her cattiness, Charlotte does deserve some sympathy. After all, she had grown up an unloved child, afflicted with a nervous tendency to bite her nails and suck on her clothing, tics that were only exacerbated by her mother’s constant criticism. Victoria (Queen Victoria’s daughter) genuinely seemed to dislike her daughter, calling her “stupid,” “backward,” “naughty,” “very troublesome,” and “ungraceful”; Charlotte’s natural quick wit was taken as rudeness. Years later, when her mother was dying of cancer, Charlotte was the last of the children to learn the news.

  Given such a fraught relationship with her mother, perhaps it’s not surprising that Charlotte turned out to be a pretty crappy mother herself. She hated being pregnant, not to mention the restrictions that it and motherhood imposed on her. After Feodora’s birth, Charlotte decided to have no more children. Feodora grew up as unloved as her mother had been, abandoned to nurses and governesses and with few other children to play with. By the time Feodora was a teenager, her grandmother complained that the girl would be “her Mama over again,” that all she cared about were dresses and what people wore and that she had a tendency to tell lies. Relations did not improve after Feodora married (at age 17, to Prince Henry XXX Reuss, a relatively poor aristocrat 15 years her senior). When Feodora, who desperately wanted children, was unable to conceive, Charlotte was less than sympathetic. To the idea of grandkids, she snapped, “No thanks, I can live without the damned brood!”

  Charlotte found Feodora increasingly “incomprehensible,” saying, “It’s of no use, so I must keep aloof & let her go her own way.” She alienated her daughter and son-in-law to such a degree that public insults were the accepted form of communication between them. Feodora’s father, Bernhard, complained with a startling lack of awareness about his daughter’s “passion for gossip and calumny which she has certainly not inherited from us.” Not even Feodora’s failing health could elicit maternal feelings from Charlotte, who bitched about how “pale, thin, [and] ugly” her daughter was, declaring, “I could hardly believe this curious, loud personage had been my Child!… I cannot love her!” By the turn of the century, Charlotte had even begun telling people that her son-in-law had given her daughter a venereal disease, and she demanded that Feodora submit to a doctor’s examination to prove that he hadn’t. The vitriol was so shocking that gossipmongers in Berlin began to question the mental health of both women. And with good reason.

  Charlotte’s behavior had long been put down to a willful, malicious nature and her insatiable appetite for drinking, smoking, and gossip. In reality, Charlotte may have been suffering from porphyria, the same painful and rare blood condition that was behind the “madness” of her maternal great-great-grandfather, King George III (though recent evidence suggests that George may have been mentally ill, after all). Later in her life, Charlotte was plagued by ill health—rheumatism, aches, kidney pains, colds, bowel issues, swollen joints, and weird blood conditions that doctors thought were severe anemia. She was also depressed, unable to sleep, and plagued by itchiness. And it probably didn’t help that she smoked, known to exacerbate porphyria. Her mother once described her complexion as “yellow” and claimed that “she smells like a cigar shop, which for ladies is not the thing.”

  Feodora suffered from the same condition, which manifested in her around age 11. By the time she was in her thirties, her medical complaints, which were frequent and very real, were dismissed by her family as hypochondria and “mental apathy.” Her husband claimed that she was too lazy to take care of herself: “She grossly exaggerates her illnesses and causes me and others quite unnecessary anxiety.” In addition, Feodora was likely manic depressive or bipolar, swinging daily from ecstatic joy to “depressed unto death.”

  On October 1, 1919, Charlotte died of a heart attack at the age of 59. She and her daughter never reconciled. Feodora spent the next 25 years in and out of sanatoriums, a victim of horrible health, infertility, and her husband’s insensitivity. She committed suicide on August 26, 1945, by sticking her head in a gas oven at the clinic where she was a full-time inmate. Fifty years after she was buried, her body was exhumed, and researchers confirmed that she had indeed suffered from porphyria.

  Where her mother’s death had occasioned a short sentence in the Times’s News in Brief column, Feodora’s went completely unremarked. Both women lived through a tumultuous period of upheaval in what had been for centuries the “natural order”; neither managed it with particular grace, but neither had it easy, either. We could write off Charlotte and her daughter as vain, self-centered women who cared only about themselves. But that’s sort of all they could be—princesses like Charlotte and Feodora were expected to be meek, docile creatures who did what they were told. The problem with that life is that it’s boring and limited, and doesn’t allow for untreated mental illness or swinging sexual experimentation. Being born in a palace may be great, but it isn’t terribly free.

  Clara Ward

  THE PRINCESS WHO RAN OFF WITH A GYPSY … AND A WAITER … AND A STATION MANAGER

  JUNE 17, 1873–DECEMBER 9, 1916

  GOSSIP PAGES ON TWO CONTINENTS

  Paris, 1896. A young, beautiful, vivacious princess and her much older husband are seated at a smoky café, a notorious nightclub patronized by the wealthy and fashionable. Despite the November chill, it’s almost too warm inside, and the princess’s round white shoulders are nearly bare, her ample bosom only just contained by her corseted dress. Bored, she toys idly with her glass of champagne. As the band strikes up a haunting gypsy melody, the keening wail of a violin pierces the air. The violinist, a small man with black hair and dark flashing eyes, sizes up the audience as he moves through it. The princess catches his attention. He walks toward her, playing more intensely. She smiles.

  Ten days later, the gypsy violinist and the princess flee Paris, leaving behind her indifferent husband and two young children and the pressures of high society. It wasn’t the first time this princess made headlines across the globe, and it certainly wouldn’t be the last.

  AN AMERICAN IN PARIS

  The Princesse de Caraman-Chimay, also known as Clara Ward, wasn’t born a princess, but she was as close as most Americans got. Her father, Captain Eber Ward, known as the “King of the Lakes,” was a wealthy shipping tycoon and lumber industry magnate. Michigan’s first millionaire, he’d scandalously married Clara’s mother after his first wife (and mother of his seven children) divorced him on the grounds of serial infidelity.

  Clara was born in Detroit in 1873. Her father died when she was barely 18 months old, leaving most of his $6 million fortune to her mother and their children together. (Pointedly, he left much less to the children from his first marriage.) Clara’s mother moved the little girl and her brother to New York and then, after marrying a Canadian, to Toronto. When Clara was 15 years old, she was sent to a London finishing school.

  Actually, several finishing schools. According to a contemporary newspaper, Clara’s reputation in London soo
n “became anything but what a mother could desire,” and she was obliged to find a new school. One story claimed that she disappeared from her school in Paris and was found 18 days later in the garret of a starving student; another claimed she escaped school by hitching a ride on the roof of her mother’s carriage. Yet another account describes how Clara was sent to an Italian convent school, where she “shocked the good nuns” and had to be removed. Take these stories with a big block of salt—turn-of-the-century newspapers were not exactly devoted to accuracy. But though she had earned herself a reputation before being launched on the polite society of Europe, Clara’s wildness would by no means get in the way of the good old-fashioned husband-hunting her mother had in store.

  Clara’s sizable fortune—at least $50,000 a year from her father’s estate—and voluptuously Victorian figure made her an instant sensation. “Lips like a pomegranate and the heart of a saint,” one enthralled contemporary declaimed, though neither of those things rings true. “As beautiful as she is wealthy,” as another paper reported, sounds about right.

  When Clara met Prince Joseph de Caraman-Chimay, son of a Belgian foreign affairs minister, he was about $100,000 in debt and owned a crumbling chateau in desperate need of repair. He was not, it appears, a handsome man. He was 15 years older than Clara, and his personality barely merited a mention in even the most gossipy newspaper reports about the couple. But he had a title, and that’s what mattered. He proposed, and the two were married in Paris on May 20, 1890. Clara, wearing a $10,000 dress, was only 17 years old; she had just become the Princesse de Caraman-Chimay, one of only a handful of American women to gain a royal title (see “The Dollar Princesses,” this page).

  The newly minted princess and her husband spent their time traveling among his estates, the Belgian court, the Riviera, Paris, and every other fashionable European hotspot. Though she had a daughter, the countess Marie, in 1891, followed by a son in 1894, rumors persisted that Clara was involved with other men and that the prince didn’t care enough to stop her.

  Life as a princess wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Speaking to the press after her divorce (it’s probably not a spoiler to reveal the couple did separate), Clara claimed that she had no choice but to leave the Belgian court after King Leopold II “showered” her with attention, neglected his other guests in favor of her beauty, and made her a social pariah. Sure, she said, she encouraged him. But in so doing, she earned herself the wrath of the court, especially the queen. Clara’s humiliation was complete when she “stood alone on one of the steps of the great staircase leading into the palace conservatories. As I entered the great hall, every woman there turned her back, or gazed at me contemptuously.” She warned other American women not to be dazzled by the promise of a title: “Few American-bred women could feel themselves really happy in the high European, especially Continental, society,” she declared.

  No longer welcome at court, Clara and the prince spent time in Paris, which was then in the grips of a fin-de-siècle passion fueled by scandalous dancing, champagne, and art nouveau. Clara seized upon life with reckless abandon, making a name for herself as the wildest American that side of the Atlantic.

  All this raucous living put her on a collision course with a scandal involving the affections of a Hungarian gypsy fiddler named Rigo Janczy on that November night in 1896. A diminutive man with a massive handlebar mustache and much-pomaded hair, Rigo was not classically handsome. The Chicago Tribune sneered that he was a “monkey-faced brute,” and a Scottish newspaper wrote that “he is said to be pock-pitted, of small stature, and everyone wondered what she saw in him.” He was also already married.

  None of that mattered to Clara. The first night she saw her Rigo, she turned from her husband to smile at him and never looked back. Ten days later, according to Rigo, the pair ran off together “like gypsies” in the dead of night. The press went crazy—papers across Europe, Britain, and America carried news of the princess’s flight.

  POSTCARD PINUP

  Armed with his wife’s notoriety, Prince Joseph won a divorce by January 1897, less than two months after Clara abandoned him and their children. At the hearing—which saw all of fashionable Brussels fighting to get into the courtroom, but no Clara—even her lawyer declared her a “fiery untamed steed” with a “wild, savage, eccentric nature.” The prince retained custody, and Clara was forced to pay him child support; she was never allowed to see her children again.

  Clara had fallen so far so fast that there would never be any going back. Not that she cared. As she declared in a statement made at the divorce hearing, “I am done with it all. I wanted to be free. I am at least out of the rotten atmosphere in which modern society lives. It does not want me and I do not want it—so we are quits.” The loss of her children may have been collateral damage in Clara’s quest for freedom, though in the absence of any letters or comment, we cannot know for sure how she felt. Whatever her true feelings, she certainly threw herself into her new peripatetic lifestyle with gusto.

  The first place the illicit couple went was the mountainside cottage of Rigo’s mother, a far cry from the royal court and Parisian nightclubs the princess had known. Supposedly Clara was so grateful to the Hungarian woman that she bought the mountain and gave Rigo’s mother a pearl necklace, which she hung on a nail by the fireplace.

  Once back in Paris, Clara’s scandalous behavior had gotten her ostracized from respectable society. But the former royal had money, and money fixes everything. When the local worthies succeeded in pressuring hotels and innkeepers into refusing to rent her rooms, she simply got herself a house. She took to riding a bicycle down the boulevards, clad in bloomers and “low socks like a man.” She smoked cigarettes in public and was featured frequently in articles in the foreign press lamenting the city’s moral decline.

  Emboldened by this most bohemian of lifestyles, in April 1897 Clara began earning money posing in skin-tight flesh-colored costumes on the stages of the Moulin Rouge and Folies Bergère. She called her art “poses plastiques”; she was accompanied by Rigo, playing the violin and dancing around her like an organ-grinder’s monkey. Somehow Clara managed to scandalize even the worldly Parisians. Her first show was canceled after police learned that friends of the prince were planning to show up to pelt her with “live rabbits, rotten eggs, and other equally objectionable missiles,” according to one newspaper report. Paris might have been outraged, but locals still ponied up to see Clara Ward sort-of naked, as did art lovers in other European capitals. When the couple played in Berlin, they reportedly brought in $6,800 in one month (about $181,000 today).

  Clara also posed for postcard pictures wearing her poses plastiques body suit, with her wavy brown hair tumbling past her rather sturdy bottom, and topped by a crown seemingly fashioned out of light bulbs and coat hangers. More scandal ensued: in August 1897, her ex-husband demanded that police raid several photographic shops and seize pictures of Clara in, according to the newspapers, “all sorts of costume.” Clara’s naughty photos were reportedly banned in the German Empire because Kaiser Wilhelm II found her “beauty” so disturbing. That’s probably an exaggeration, but it is true that people were arrested for peddling and mailing the taboo images of the ex-princess.

  UNLUCKY IN LOVE

  This was about the time that Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, the famous Belle Époque painter of prostitutes, created a lithograph of Clara and Rigo. The two are sitting in an orchestra pit in a Paris nightclub, Clara’s hair an impossible yellow, Rigo mustachioed and swarthy. Called “Idylle Princière,” it captured them at their most fashionable, amorous, and interesting. Things pretty much went downhill from there.

  The couple lived in sin until 1898, when Rigo was finally granted a divorce, setting him free to marry Clara, which he then did. Their passion was intense; supposedly, during a trip to Japan they had each other’s portraits tattooed on their biceps. Clara showed her devotion by spending ridiculous amounts of money on her new husband. A grinning Rigo told reporters that she bought
him a menagerie of baby elephants, lions, and tigers, just to amuse him, as well as a new violin and a casket full of jewels. They traveled across Europe and spent two years in Egypt, literally building palaces wherever they wished.

  Eventually, all this prodigious spending came to the attention of Clara’s mother. Scandalized by her daughter’s behavior, she was even more worried about the state of the family finances. So she moved to have Clara cut off, asking that the wayward ex-princess’s uncle be appointed conservator of her estate. In 1898 the court agreed, and Clara was given a yearly income of £12,000 (nearly $2 million in today’s money), out of which £3,000 went to her ex-husband to pay for the children’s living expenses. But Clara’s spending continued unabated. In 1901 she was officially declared a spendthrift after her uncle was forced to dip into her capital to pay off her debts. He revealed that over the course of seven years Clara had spent $750,000 (about $20 million today), the bulk of it “frittered away in company with the sparkling-eyed Rigo,” according to the Detroit Free Press.

  Meanwhile, life with Rigo wasn’t all zoo animals and palaces—the two fought often, loudly and publicly. In January 1897, right about the time her husband was divorcing her in Brussels, Clara and the gypsy violinist had a violent quarrel at a Milan hotel, stunning guests with their shouting and screaming and door-slamming. Clara left Rigo in the lurch, paying only her share of the bill and putting him, as the New York Times noted, “in an awkward position.” Little else is recorded about their life together, but it couldn’t have been easy. Even “loose” society rejected them: in 1902, the couple was viciously booed at the Folies Bergère when Rigo was performing with his orchestra. The strain may have been too much for their marriage; they were divorced by 1904, and Rigo moved to America. He claimed that Clara left him because she’d taken up with a grubby railway worker.

  At least part of Rigo’s statement appears to be true, because in the same year of her divorce, Clara married her third husband. Guiseppe “Peppino” Ricciardi was a waiter on a train, or a baggage clerk, or a canvasser for an Italian tourist agency, or a manager of a railway station of the Mount Vesuvius Funicular—his professional situation remains unclear. What is certain is that he was very good-looking, known as the “handsomest man in Naples.”