‘Shameless devil’, ‘fraud’, ‘sorceress’ and ‘concubine’ were just some of the epithets applied to Lola Montez, the most notorious woman of her day.
Lola was born Eliza Rosana Gilbert in Limerick around 1820. Her father, Edward Gilbert, was an English ensign stationed in Cork City where he met, seduced and quickly impregnated a fourteen-year-old milliner’s assistant, Eliza Oliver, the youngest of the four illegitimate children of a County Cork squire. After Eliza’s baby was born, the pair married quietly and the young father continued with his army career in Sligo and Roscommon.
When Lola was three years old the family was posted to India. Near Patna, on the last leg of their long journey, Edward Gilbert died of cholera. A widow before she was twenty, and with a small daughter to support, Mrs Gilbert’s objective was simple: she had to remarry as soon as was decently possible. This she did in 1824, the summer after her husband’s death, giving Lola as a stepfather the kind and caring lieutenant Craigie from Scotland.
Lola was left pretty much to her own devices over the next two years as her shallow and stupid mother concentrated on dazzling the expat community in northern India. When Lola was six, Mama decided she was a burden and should go to school in a country she’d only ever heard of, in the care of a step-grandfather she’d never seen. Mrs Craigie packed Lola onto a ship bound for freezing eastern Scotland; they didn’t meet again for eleven years.
Little Lola lodged with various associates of her stepfather, who paid for a good education. By the time she was sixteen and at school in Bath, Lola could speak French, play the piano and dance, but she was already exhibiting her two defining characteristics: the unfortunate combination of extreme prettiness and excessive wilfulness. Curvaceous, black-haired and blue-eyed, she was unsettlingly gorgeous to those around her, but she was also considered vain, dishonest, extravagant, wayward and mischievous.
When Lola was seventeen the lackadaisical Mrs Craigie was finally persuaded to come to Bath and take control. The plan was to prepare Lola for life as a respectable married woman in India. But Lola had other ideas. After her mother’s arrival, she took one look at the young ‘gallant friend’ who was accompanying her, a lieutenant Thomas James from County Wexford, and promptly eloped with him.
This was the first in a long list of scandals in Lola’s short life. She was a minor and lieutenant James was practically the first man she had ever met. But the scandal of their elopement was hushed up and the pair were married quietly in Dublin. Afterwards they visited the James’s family home in Ballycrystal, which, with its hunting and ‘innumerable cups of tea’, Lola hated with a passion. The following year they set sail for India.
Lola had rushed into ‘a runaway match’, as she called it, in her quest for freedom and adventure, but she quickly realised she had saddled herself with a master, and a mean-spirited one at that. The Jameses cut a handsome figure at his posting in northern India, but underneath it all Lola was bored, James was bitter and they both regretted the marriage. When James started to hit Lola, she left him and sought refuge with her mother. Mrs Craigie was horrified by the prospect of having to be responsible for Lola again, and instead made her choose between returning home to her abusive husband or returning alone to England. Lola chose England and set sail in autumn 1840.
Early Victorian England could cope with old maids, wives or widows, but nothing in between. There was no place for a woman who had left her husband. Lola had enough money to just about survive upon her arrival in England. If she wanted to supplement her income respectably, she could be either a governess or a lady’s companion, and that was it. Faced with this situation, Lola chose an entirely different life: she took up with an attractive and aristocratic lieutenant, George Lennox, and by the time the ship docked in England, they were lovers. Lola was on the road to ruin.
Pleas from her stepfamily to save her reputation by going to live quietly in Scotland fell on deaf ears. Lola was in love with Lennox and lived happily as his mistress in London, naïvely believing that he would one day marry her. But by her actions, Lola had become the sort of woman Victorian gentlemen didn’t marry, and eventually Lennox took himself back to the bosom of his well-bred family.
Shortly afterwards, lieutenant James divorced her – not in the polite, gentlemanly way of most middle-class divorces but as meanly and as vindictively as he could. He cited Lola’s adultery with Lennox, destroying any chance she might have had of redeeming herself in society and depriving her of the possibility of remarriage.
After her divorce, the twenty-two-year-old Lola quickly went to the bad, entertaining a string of lovers at her London lodgings and allowing herself to be squired around town by a series of well-heeled bachelors. Always an exhibitionist, she decided that life on the stage was for her, so she took basic Spanish dancing lessons and then travelled to Spain. By the time she returned, she had reinvented herself: no longer Eliza James, disgraced wife and deserted lover, she was now Donna Lola Montez, exotic artiste of the dance and tragic Spanish war widow.
In 1843 Lola made her début at Her Majesty’s Theatre, Haymarket. Throughout her career her dancing received a very mixed reception – some found her exciting, dazzling, exotic, even gifted, while others found her vulgar, unorthodox and totally without rhythm. Most, however, admitted she had nice legs.
While Lola was not entirely talent-free, she had started too late in life to become really good. She was certainly somewhat limited: she had just three dances in her repertoire, but these included the risqué Spider Dance in which she searched her skirts for tarantulas in a suggestive manner. She devised this dance herself, basing it on a half-remembered Spanish country dance. She wore relatively short skirts for the performance and took the whole thing terribly seriously, even as the members of the audience was splitting their sides laughing. As she perfected the routine it became more suggestive – she lifted up her skirts in her search for the elusive spiders.
After the London stage had grown tired of Lola and her three dances, she travelled to Europe. She spent the next eight years travelling, looking for work and letting her volcanic temper get the better of her wherever she went. She visited a principality in southeast Germany and was asked to leave by the prince after only a few days. She then visited Dresden and Berlin, and was asked to leave the latter after slashing a policeman with her horsewhip. Then it was on to Warsaw where she managed to make an enemy of the director of the city’s biggest theatre; then to St Petersburg where she performed only once before leaving under the cloud of her by now noisome reputation.
Then, en route to the Paris Opéra – a Mecca for all performers – Lola met and managed to attach herself, limpet-like, to the celebrated composer Franz Liszt. Lola followed Liszt to Dresden where, according to him, they spent a passionate week together in a hotel room. But once again Lola disgraced herself. She got involved in a violent late-night fracas, and slapped the face of an Italian operatic tenor. Liszt had her locked in their hotel room, paid the hotel manager damages in advance for the destruction he knew she would cause – and made good his escape.
In 1844 Lola finally hit Paris. She got the inevitable mixed reviews at the Paris Opéra, but her love life improved. She was taken under the wing of a powerful and influential lover, Henri Dujarier, a journalist and the editor of the influential La Presse. Dujarier financially supported his ‘dear little girl’, raised her profile in the press and got her more engagements; for her part, Lola really seemed to love him. Then the first genuine tragedy of Lola’s life struck. Dujarier was killed in 1845 in a dawn duel over a card game, and Lola was once again alone.
At twenty-four years old, Lola was at the height of her beauty but penniless. She managed to keep up appearances by ‘borrowing’ money from friends and lovers. Continually in need of funds due to the patchiness of her dancing engagements and her extravagant lifestyle, Lola tended to attach herself to men who were able to pay her way. However, she was not a gold-digger – she did not trade sexual favours for cash and she would generously pay her own and everyone else’s costs when she had money, though this was rarely the case.
Lola travelled incessantly: fashionable Baden-Baden (from where she was expelled after throwing her leg over the shoulder of a man in public), back to Paris (which she quickly escaped to avoid her creditors), then on to Brussels, Heidelberg, Homburg, Stuttgart and Munich. In Munich, Lola met the man who was to be her most famous and exalted lover: sixty-year-old King Ludwig of Bavaria.
The next two years saw the meteoric rise and catastrophic fall of Lola Montez. Within weeks, Ludwig was bewitched by the raven-haired exotic dancer. He gave her a house, jewellery and money. He made her the countess of Landsfeld. She could do no wrong in his eyes and she exercised huge influence over the besotted old king. Lola had never been political, but she hated authority and was, essentially, a free-thinker. She turned Ludwig against the conservative elements of the government – especially the powerful Jesuits in the court. She formed what amounted to a private army of politically active students, whose motto was ‘Lola and Liberty’. This ‘army’ was known as the Allemania and was a sort of student bodyguard for Lola. The members kept themselves aloof from the student body and were rather disreputable.
Lola became so dangerously unpopular with ordinary people that mobs used to descend on her in the street. Finally, in 1848 – the year of revolution in Europe – the once-beloved King Ludwig was forced to abdicate in favour of his son, the Crown Prince Maximilian, who became King Maximilian II of Bavaria. One hour after the abdication the government banished Lola from Bavaria forever.
Following Lola’s banishment and Ludwig’s abdication, their relationship limped on by letter, but out-of-sight proved to be out-of-mind and soon there was another husband in the offing for Lola. In the summer of 1850, thirty-year-old Lola married a handsome twenty-one-year-old English army officer, George Heald, in London – bigamously, of course, since the terms of her divorce did not allow for remarriage. The couple honeymooned in Spain, Lola’s supposed ‘homeland’. Due to her murky marital status, Lola risked jail if she returned to England so the couple lived the high life in Paris. And it was in Paris, after less than a year of marriage, that George Heald, sick of continual squabbling, money worries, scandal and house moves, abandoned his wife and went home.
Alone once again, it was time for Lola to assess her situation. She was now thirty-one – rather old for a not-very-good dancer. Nevertheless, she still had to live. She wrote her autobiography, danced frenziedly all over France and Belgium to earn and save some money and then packed her bags once again and headed for the USA.
In December 1851 a new chapter opened in the chequered career of Lola Montez as she landed in New York City. Lola had begun to realise she could capitalise on the only thing that was indisputably hers: the story of her life. Within weeks of her arrival she was was on Broadway starring in a stage play named Lola Montez in Bavaria, in which history was cavalierly rewritten to make Lola the heroic innocent at the centre of the Bavarian revolution. For once she got good reviews. Her acting turned out to be vastly superior to her dancing, and in New York, Philadelphia and other cities she made a lot of money.
More plays followed and Lola performed in the south and all along the eastern seaboard. But the increased prosperity and success did not seem to have improved her infamous temper. In New Orleans she was arrested for assaulting her maid and had to fake a suicide attempt to get the charges dropped. In St Louis there was a further fracas and a court appearance when Lola kicked and punched a prompter.
In 1853 Lola sailed for San Francisco, California. She was a huge success in the west, starring in humorous plays and resurrecting the infamous Spider Dance. That same year, in a Catholic ceremony, she married a thirty-two-year-old journalist, PP Hull. She apparently believed a report she had heard that husband number two, Heald, had drunk himself to death, and by now she seems to have genuinely believed that her marriage to husband number one, lieutenant James, was somehow invalid. Bigamous or not, the marriage was less than three months old when Hull left, never to return. (He died shortly afterwards of a stroke.)
In 1855, on foot of her successes in America, Lola departed on an Australian tour. Again, in the more liberal atmosphere of a young country she met with less censure and more full houses, but her personal life was still troubled. She fell in love with her married acting partner, twenty-seven-year-old Frank Folland. Their tempestuous affair continued for the duration of the whole tour, from Sydney to Melbourne and on to Adelaide, but tragedy struck Lola once again on the return voyage in 1856. After a night’s drinking session, Frank disappeared from the deck of the ship. It was never established whether he fell over by accident, committed suicide, or was pushed by person or persons unknown.
Lola was devastated and held herself responsible for Folland’s death. Now thirty-six, losing her looks and in increasingly poor health, this latest loss seemed to change her. She began to think about life after death and took to reading religious tracts. Back in the States her personal life went quiet. She no longer had pressing money problems so she sold all her jewellery at auction and sent the proceeds to Folland’s stepmother to be held in trust for his two children. She even moved to New York City to be nearer all of Folland’s dependants – his mother, sister, two children and ex-wife.
Lola’s last acting tour, in 1857 – Albany, Providence, Pittsburgh, St Louis, Cincinnati, Chicago – was a success. Amazingly, Lola was now becoming known more for her good works than her bad behaviour. Her interest in matters of the soul had led her into spiritualism. She attended meetings, visited sick actors and spent a lot of time in study.
Lola knew she was coming to the end of her stage career and cast about for another means of support. She realised that her stage experience, her articulacy and her fame, combined with her love of being in the public eye, meant that she could carve out a career as a lecturer. Engaging the help of an associate of hers, Charles Chauncey Burr, she organised and embarked upon a lecture tour of Canada. She wrote and edited all her own lectures, the subject matter ranging from ‘How to Stay Beautiful’, ‘The Role of the Catholic Church’, ‘America and its People’, ‘Slavery in America’, ‘Heroines of History’ and ‘Comic Aspects of Love’. She delivered the pieces like the old pro she now was and the tour was a success.
But Lola still had one last disastrous romantic liaison in her. Some years before coming to America she had met an Austrian aristocrat by the name of prince Ludwig Johann Sulkowski. The two renewed their acquaintance in New York and Lola was left with the quite definite impression that she was to be a princess. In late 1857, she duly sold all her goods and sailed to Paris to meet her prince and marry him. But once in Paris, there was no prince. He did not show up. Lola soon learned that, as he had a wife and several children back in Austria, he was never going to.
She had put all her financial eggs in one basket and was now poor once again, but Lola seems to have been fairly philosophical about this last matrimonial setback, and apart from diligently saving face in the press by claiming that she herself had broken her engagement, she forgot about the prince and went on with her lecturing. She re-made her fortune yet again by publishing her lectures and a surprisingly commonsensical beauty manual, one of the earliest of its kind.
In November 1858, Lola returned to Ireland for the first time in more than twenty years. She lectured in Galway, Dublin, Cork and Limerick and then sailed to Scotland and England. In 1859 she completed her final lecture tour in the States: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Chicago, Toronto and back to New York City.
Wealthy enough to take a break, she became involved in supporting the Magdalen Society in New York, a charitable institution for fallen women. But if the racy Lola Montez was getting ready for a middle age filled with philanthropic deeds, her ambitions were to remain unfulfilled. In June 1860 she had a massive stroke and nearly died. Against all the odds, and no doubt utilising her famous wilfulness, she clawed back to mobility and was walking again, slowly, by the Christmas of that year. But in the New Year, in her weakened state, she came down with pneumonia. She died on 17 January 1861, at the age of forty-one. She is buried in Brooklyn, New York.