Historical Heroines
Page 10
Lucy has proven to be a rather famous globetrotter, in demand across the world. Everyone literally wants a piece of her but her pieces are a very delicate so many museums refuse to exhibit her out of serious concern it would all be a bit much for the old gal.
Controversy also surrounds her death. (Where is CSI Ethiopia when you need it?) In 2008 whilst on a tour of the US, she was secretly examined at the University of Texas whilst being exhibited at the Houston Museum of Natural Science. Using some swanky new technology, a group called Team Lucy was able to examine her bones in depth, revealing several tiny fractures consistent with a fall from a great height. Was she pushed by a jealous hominid because she had prettier and longer arms? Apparently she was about 3.5ft tall and approximately 60lb. However, no matter which designer you might dress her in she would still have looked far more like one of our hairier ape cousins than a Victoria Secrets girl.
Newer discoveries made since Lucy even question whether she indeed was one of our ancient ancestors. She is still studied today and represents an important part of an evolutionary mystery that remains to be fully unravelled.
Footnote: Hominids refer to the evolutionary line that possibly leads to humans. It is known that this evolutionary process was a rather messy mix of various hominids and not a simple straight line.
Luisa Casati (1881–1957)
Luisa Casati, an Italian heiress, socialite and muse, wowed and scandalised society in the first half of the twentieth century. But would she be considered so avant-garde today?
She wanted to be a living piece of art. The twenty-first century is knee-deep in artists vying to be controversial, many of whom are probably influenced by Luisa. Next to unmade beds in Turner competitions, cows sliced in half and a massive pair of butt cheeks cupped by a pair of hands, our generation would barely raise an eyebrow.
However, her era was still recovering from the shock of seeing women’s bare legs, so she had a captive audience. What was more outrageous was her decadent and hugely wasteful lifestyle, a contrived insanity that included: taking pet cheetahs for walkies, chivvied along by their diamond leads whilst she strolled naked in her furs (quite literally all fur coat and no knickers); booking a room at the Paris Ritz for herself and her pet boa constrictor (in case she needed a hug); adorning her naked staff in gold leaf and wearing live snakes as necklaces. At least she never ran the risk of bumping into someone wearing the same outfit.
Luisa was born in 1881 to well-heeled and extremely wealthy parents. By the 1930s, she would have frittered away every last penny of their immense fortune and accumulated eye-watering debt in her quest to be immortalised as an original piece of art. Poverty didn’t stop her obsessive desire to stand out from the crowd, as she raided bins outside theatres to find accessories, some of them made out of newspaper. Perhaps she really was the bohemian incarnate, living for art and art alone? Certainly she could use her distaste for bourgeois conventions as an excuse for cuckolding her husband to play lover and muse for the controversial and womanising poet Gabrielle d’Annunzio.
Tall, thin and eager to shock, she made an inspiring coat hanger for noted designers including Leon Bakist and Mariano Fortuny, all of them delighted to let their imaginations run riot over her body. She was particularly famous for short fiery red hair (dyed), very pale white skin, heavy black kohl and green eyes made to look large and luscious by squirting highly toxic belladonna in her eyes. She was quite the Edwardian Goth. In her bid to be unique and visually entertaining, she changed her look as many times as her and her artists’ imaginations would allow and paraded herself as a live piece of installation art through the opulent party season that was the 1920s.
Her parties were legendary, the stuff of Gatsby dreams, or nightmares, depending on your perspective. They were attended by the great and the not so good, such as the radical dancer Isadora Duncan, Picasso and several wax figures who joined guests for dinner. At these extravaganzas Luisa would emerge as a living sculpture adorned in fabulous clothes, such as a creation made from her own albino peacocks’ feathers accessorised with chicken blood.
Desperate for immortality, she also blew her fortune being a patron, and often lover, for emerging artists as long as they found new and more decadent ways to exhibit her. She was art’s greatest Narcissus. One of her many homes housed an art gallery filled with over a hundred images of her.
People may condemn her as a frivolous socialite, yet her hedonistic, idiosyncratic personality drew the art world to her. She inspired artists, poets, writers, sculptors, designers and Hollywood film stars, including Giovanni Boldini and Cecil Beaton, not to mention the Cartier panther collection. She lit the creative lights of geniuses across the artistic spectrum, including surrealism, Dadaism and even artists from the Fauve movement.
She may have spent her final years in poverty, but those who loved her made sure she was buried in style with false eyelashes and her favourite stuffed Pekinese dog. For all her faults, she was totally indifferent to public opinion and defiantly her own woman.
Madame du Barry (19 August 1743–8 December 1793)
Diamonds aren’t always a girl’s best friend. And in the case of low-born Marie-Jeanne Becu, Comtesse du Barry and the final Maȋtresseen-Titre (Chief Mistress) to King Louis XV of France, they would prove fatal.
The illegitimate daughter of a seamstress and a friar, a sometime milliner’s assistant and hairdresser, the young and beautiful convent-educated Jeanne caught the eye of high-class pimp Jean-Baptiste du Barry, who first made her his mistress, then sold her off to the highest bidders in Parisian society as an expensive courtesan. She proved immensely popular and one can only imagine the names in her little black book of clients.
From there, it was only a matter of time before she caught the attention of the ageing King of France, desolate since the death of his previous Maȋtresse-en-Titre, Madame de Pompadour. However the only way for her to gain entry to the upper echelons of court society was to have a title; in 1768, Louis XV swiftly married her off to Jean-Baptiste’s brother Guillaume, who was then paid handsomely to make himself scarce. To the disgust and dismay of the royal court, the king then installed the newly ennobled ‘Madame du Barry’ in private apartments. After bribing an impoverished court ‘sponsor’, he had her officially presented to the court at Versailles. She would be Maȋtresse-en-Titre from 1769–74.
Madame wasn’t interested in politics, choosing instead to be a generous patron of the arts whilst also spending vast amounts on exquisite clothes and jewellery for herself. By all accounts she was a generous, good-hearted woman who never forgot her friends, petitioning the king herself on their behalf when they found themselves in dire straits. The king adored her and indulged her hugely extravagant lifestyle and helped alleviate her large debts – a lifestyle that would not help her cause as the Revolution loomed.
Marie Antoinette, the Dauphine and wife of the king’s grandson, together with the king’s own daughters, turned up their noses at Madame du Barry, viewing her as a morally repugnant street-level upstart. Marie Antoinette rarely acknowledged her at court and only after extreme pressure from her mother, the Archduchess of Austria, to show diplomatic tact, stiffly and reluctantly remarked to her, ‘There are many people at Versailles today.’ As the French court used the rules of don’t speak to royalty until you are spoken to, this finally legitimised du Barry, although she was far from accepted by it.
By this time the Comtesse had been given a ‘manners makeover’ and was an elegant member of the royal court. When she wasn’t there, she would retire to the lands given to her by the king, estates near Louveciennes. After the death of the king in May 1774, Madame du Barry was banished to a convent, before retiring to enjoy years of luxury at the chateau and estates she shared with the Duke of Brissac, from where she made several trips to London.
In January 1791 she returned home to discover she had been robbed and a huge amount of jewellery stolen. Publishing a long list of the missing jewellery with an offer of a huge reward was the
worst thing she could have done. It called attention to herself, the spendthrift, extravagant mistress of the King of France, at a time when the Revolution was looking increasingly likely.
Historians differ in opinion on what followed. She did travel back and forth to London four times. Some researchers believe that whilst ostensibly this was on the pretext of working to rescue her jewellery, she was however likely a counter-revolutionary using these journeys to smuggle counter-Revolutionary émigrés and her own fortune out of France. Other academics insist on her innocence and political naivety. Either way, she proved too big a scalp for the Revolutionaries to pass on; with the explosion of the French Revolution in 1792, she was duly captured and imprisoned on one of her return visits home.
In a desperate bid to save her life, she provided her captors with a full list of all her jewellery and where to find it; the attempt failed. The Revolutionaries gladly took the list and sent the 50-year-old du Barry to meet the brutal blade of Madame La Guillotine on 8 December 1793 in the Place de la Revolution.
Not for her the calm, dignified resigned silence of others who shared her fate. She went to her death kicking, screaming, crying and begging for mercy. But to no avail. Her final words to the executioner were: ‘Encore un moment, monsieur le bourreau, un petit moment.’ (‘One moment more, executioner, one little moment.’)
In a bizarre twist to her tale, du Barry is the name given to French foods served with cauliflower, perhaps in a homage to her wigs or curvy figure, including the garnish ‘à la Dubarry’, Eggs du Barry, Cocktail du Barry and Crème Madame du Barry (cauliflower soup).
Madam Sacho (18th Century)
So where are the Iroquois (or the Haudenosaunee to use their preferred name)? What did they have to say? What did the women have to say?
Unfortunately the scant stories that exist are mostly written from the colonists’s perspective. It is difficult to hear the Haudenosaunee women, including Madam Sacho, who illuminated a particularly dark episode in the colonisation of Native America and Canada.
During the American Revolution under the leadership of the much-revered (slave-owning) George Washington there had been a slew of violent, brutal skirmishes between the colonists and the Iroquois. In addition many Native Americans had chosen to help the British and were proving to be a tenacious threat to the luscious green pastures of the brand new American dream. The colonists’ response, known as ‘Sullivan’s Campaign’, was ruthless, cruel and wantonly destructive. The campaign may have been spearheaded by Major General John Sullivan, but it was given the go-ahead by Washington.
Of course the situation was not black and white or indeed red, white and blue. It was a bitter campaign fought between desperate people and fear doesn’t lend itself to flowers and trust circles. It followed a series of bitter raids during which the Native Americans had pitilessly ravaged settlements killing men, women and children.
Fear was very much at the heart of this devastating strategy. Washington’s men were ordered to raze every Iroquois settlement to the ground, to kill the men, burn the crops and carry off women and children in the hope that they would run away or be cowed into submission. Although most fled, it was an unrelenting destruction of crop pastures that the colonists were hoping to farm themselves.
It was in an abandoned settlement that an old, wizened woman appeared before a group of soldiers. She was alone in a village that was the Native American version of the Mary Celeste, utterly deserted, kettles hanging above fire pits and life set to pause. Some men wanted to kill her but respect for her age and gender prevailed. With the help of an Oneida interpreter, she told the troops that her village had held a council in which the men said they must flee, although some women wanted to stay and guard the crops but in the end they left. She told the soldiers that the women had gone towards Seneca Lake. None of this answered why she was there alone but the men left her with food and shelter despite being low on rations themselves – perhaps burning those crops wasn’t the smartest idea.
Why was she there? Perhaps she planned to misdirect the soldiers to a false location whilst her people sought safety in a different direction. Certainly, she told them that many of the women had gone towards Seneca Lake and almost 400 men went searching to no avail. Thanks to a limited patriarchal imbued imagination, the men would have failed to credit some ‘poor old dear’ with the influence and nous to stay and misdirect the army, if that was her reason. The colonists failed to realise that Iroquios women were an important voice in society, instrumental in decision-making and agriculture.
When they returned to the village they found Madam Sacho still there but they also discovered the corpse of a young Native American girl who had been shot. A depressing tragedy in every way and a young girl whose name will never be known, her story never told, her death never given justice. We don’t even know Madam Sacho’s real name, it was simply one of the kinder names she was given by the soldiers. We searched in vain for the Haudenosaunee’s take on this story but couldn’t find it, although that’s not to say it doesn’t exist but it’s certainly not readily available.
Madam Stephanie Queen St Clair (1880s?–1969)
Prohibition Harlem knew her as Madam St Clair, whilst Manhattan referred to her as ‘Queenie’. The legendary Lady Gangster of Harlem dressed accordingly, and was known for being elegant and sophisticated but with the mouth of a fishwife.
Madam said she was born in France. But let’s take everything Madam said with a very large pinch of salt. Evidence suggests she was actually from Guadeloupe. Likely born in the 1880s, she probably arrived in New York’s Harlem via Marseille by steamer in 1911 or 1912, when she may have been in her early 20s. No one knew her actual age and Madam sure as hell wasn’t going to tell anyone.
She started her criminal career as a leader of local extortion gang the 40 Thieves, effectively the first black syndicate in US history. Her right-hand man was arguably the first black gangster, Ellsworth ‘Bumpy’ Johnson (so-called because of a large bump on the back of his head). She also allied with legendary mobster Lucky Luciano to keep other hoods out of her territory.
Clearly educated, she spoke French, Spanish and English and could probably express extreme profanities in all three. She was that rare thing: a female gangster in a strictly white, male gangster world, living up on Sugar Hill, the place to live in Harlem. She started off her numbers business with $10,000; rumours abound on how a penniless woman from Guadeloupe got her hands on that sort of money. To put it in context, President Hoover was on around $30,000 a year.
By the 1920s she was known as the ‘Numbers Queen of Harlem’, ‘numbers’ referring to the illegal lottery that residents of Harlem played, usually for a penny but the game was worth millions. She was soon a black, female gangster millionaire.
In 1928 Queenie’s rival Casper Holstein was ambushed and held to ransom for $50,000, upon receipt of which he was released. Rumour has it that notorious Bronx gangster Dutch Schultz was behind it. A Jewish bootlegger, known as the ‘Beer Baron of the Bronx’ as the Great Depression deepened and the end of Prohibition neared, he needed to diversify his business interests and wanted in on the Harlem numbers game.
But the black gangsters in Harlem, including Madam, didn’t want any white gangsters encroaching on their territory. Things got violent with around forty people murdered, including many Harlem numbers operators. Schultz sent assassins to take Madam out; she evaded them, hid under the bed and survived the attempt, but held one hell of a grudge. In 1935, when Schultz lay dying from a multiple gunshot wounds (allegedly ‘taken out’ by Lucky Luciano), she sent a telegram to his hospital bed simply staying: ‘As ye sow, so shall ye reap.’
Both adored and feared by the Harlem community, she fought fiercely as an activist for civil rights, providing jobs and fighting against racism, exposing police brutality and corruption by placing advertisements in newspapers blatantly talking about the bribes she’d given them. Her actions led to the arrest of several police officers.
She shot
her own husband, alleged cult leader Sufi Abdul Hamid, for purportedly cheating on her, later claiming that the gun went off by accident. Hamid was a real piece of work; he claimed to be a descendant of Egyptian pharaohs, was an anti-Semite, known as Black Hitler and was convicted of stabbing a communist organiser in 1936.
For shooting him, Madam was sentenced to ten years in New York State Prison for Women, for first-degree assault and possession of a concealed weapon – it’s unclear how many she actually served. Sufi divorced her, later dying in a plane crash which he piloted himself.
Queenie turned over the business to Bumpy in the 1940s and focused her efforts on civil rights before disappearing from view to die in her early 70s in 1969.
Madeleine de Verchères (1678–1747)
At first glance Madeleine de Verchères, at the tender age of 14, is one seriously hardcore heroine. However, her story is not all it seems and for once that’s not just the result of some misogynist historians, it’s also thanks to her own exaggerated retelling of the incident that turned her into a French Canadian icon.
She may be better described as a smart and savvy operator. What is interesting is why she embellished her tale and why French Canada needed her so badly as a symbol of #independence, #sisterhood, #canadianhero.
There are two accounts of the Iroquois raid of 1692 in letters Madeleine wrote; the first in 1699 as part of an appeal for a pension; and the latter written in 1722 to the king several years after the event. The second letter was a far more intrepid tale of derring-do than the former. Did she even write these letters or were they penned by a couple of over-excited contemporary authors (La Potherie and Charlevoix) who persuaded Madeleine that a more heroic version would secure her and her family a much-needed pension? She may have exaggerated the truth but other reports of the raid do not mention Madeleine at all.