HARI’S LIFE STORY

Margaretha Geertruida Zelle was born in a small Dutch town in 1876. Her father managed to achieve some financial success with his hat shop during Margaretha’s youth, but when his wife died and his hat-making business faltered, Margaretha was sent to college to become a kindergarten teacher. An affair with her headmaster cut short her training, and with nothing to lose, she answered an ad in the newspaper from a colonial officer seeking a wife. She moved to the Dutch East Indies to be with him, but colonial life was horrible and her marriage worse, so she fled both to start a new life in Paris. (Starting new lives was never a problem for her.)

Margaretha thought that with her big dark eyes and long dark hair she would be a shoo-in for modeling work, but that didn’t turn out to be the case. Nevertheless, instead of returning to Holland, she reinvented herself as Mata Hari, an exotic dancer of mysterious, vaguely Eastern origins. She debuted on the stage of Paris’s Musée Guimet wearing an Indian sarong, jewelry from the museum’s East Asian collection, and metal plates covering her chest. Her performance consisted of stripping and twirling seductively before the statue of the Hindu god of destruction. Audiences loved it, and soon she was the toast of Paris. She toured Europe, collecting gifts from smitten admirers in every city on the Continent.

At the peak of her fame, when she was pivoting from high-profile love affair to high-profile love affair, she became involved in international espionage, but the details remain muddy. Whatever her actions, the French government arrested her in 1917, locked her up for six months and then put her in front of a firing squad. Both the French and German governments would exculpate her years after her death.

THE STORY OF HER SEX LIFE

Margaretha Geertruida Zelle’s marriage to Rudolf MacLeod was even worse than what you’d expect from a teenager and a career colonialist who met through the newspaper. By all accounts, it was a total nightmare: MacLeod was a gambler, an alcoholic, had syphilis, and he was jealous and abusive. He was, in other words, just about the worst husband imaginable. Their deeply troubled marriage—along with their dangerously adventurous sex lives—had tragic implications for their children, one of whom died at the age of two. Some have speculated that the child’s death was due to mercury poisoning, since at the time mercury was administered as treatment for syphilis (which, unfortunately, can be passed on to children).

After she adopted her new exotic persona, Mata Hari had lovers in abundance, and many of these happened to be military officers. During World War I, allegiances were tentative and enemies were everywhere, and the border-hopping dancer was, as a result, playing with fire. Her sex life was her professional life and vice versa, and when the end came, it was due more to love than it was to money. In order to obtain a pass across hostile borders to see her then lover—a Russian general named Vadime—she agreed to help provide information to the head of French intelligence. What she couldn’t have known, however, was that the head of French intelligence suspected her of spying in France and wanted a big-name capture to show that France was making inroads against domestic espionage.

WHY SHE MATTERS

Beautiful, mysterious, and seductive in the extreme, Mata Hari helped create the archetype of the femme fatale. In retrospect, it appears unlikely that she had any real impact on war campaigns or initiatives, but her exotic appearance and voracious sexual appetite were enough to instill fear and loathing in many Europeans. Wherever she went, she made an impression.

BEST FEATURE: Her ability to reinvent herself.

Mata Hari, who came from nothing and transformed herself into the most desirable woman in the world, was the mother of reinvention. She was a self-made woman who used her looks and her wiles to make her own way in the world. And when her act started to slow down, she simply came up with something else. For a while there was simply no stopping her, because she was impossible to pin down. Her name, her appearance, her lover—nothing was static.

HEAT FACTOR: Hot enough to play with fire, but not hot enough to do it for very long.

The image of Mata Hari—gauzy scarves trailing down her bare back, a bold metallic chest piece, and an unapologetic expression on her face as she stares directly into the camera—still has the power to seduce. But the notion of trading on exotic stereotypes of other cultures has lost its luster over time. Mata Hari was ahead of her time in terms of how she lived her life, but in other ways, she really was a product (and a victim) of her time.

Though Mata Hari made quite a bit of noise during her life, the first time she was represented on-screen, it was actually in a silent film, in 1921. Subsequent attempts to commit her legendary tale to the screen often resulted in wildly speculative scripts, but their artful visuals and star power committed the myth to public memory. Celebrities like Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, and Doris Day all flexed their actorly muscles to weave a tale of fact and fiction for American audiences. That being said, 1967’s Casino Royale probably has the distinction of being more liberal with the truth: In that film, the character of Mata Hari appeared as the mother of James Bond’s child. The baby girl, of course, bears the dancer’s namesake. The legacy, like the mystery, continues …

QUOTABLES

“She was an over-rated young woman. Not a beauty—but she had charm. Yes. She had charm, and that’s what counts. But beauty? No.”

Andre Mornet, prosecutor of Mata Hari

“The problem was not what Mata Hari said but who she was. She was a woman travelling alone, obviously wealthy and an excellent linguist—too educated, too foreign. Worse yet, she admitted to having a lover. Women like that were immoral and not to be trusted.”

biographer Pat Shipman

“I was not content at home… . I wanted to live like a colorful butterfly in the sun.”

Mata Hari