FLORENCE KING: The Spy Who Loved Men
Shipman, Pat
OUDON’THAVETOREADVERYFARinto this book to know that you won’t be able to stop reading until you finish it. Only then will you get around to the dishes piling up in the sink, the basket of...
...And the pitch de résistance, “She dances with her muscles...
...Said her chief inquisitor Pierre Bouchardon: “Feline, supple, and artificial, used to gambling everything and anything without scruple, without pity, always ready to devour fortunes, leaving her ruined lovers to blow their brains out, she was a born spy...
...They had two children in rapid succession, a boy and a girl, but it did not help...
...She had always taken money from men because she needed it and they had it...
...He wanted to “remove her from the infectious influence of the filthy nature of her mother,” he wrote, predicting that the girl would become “fatally ill if she stays another six months in the clutches of this woman...
...An officer is another being,” she rhapsodized, “a sort of artist, living outdoors with sparkles on his arms in a seductive uniform...
...But not as far as the French were concerned...
...Throughout her life, she eagerly held forth on the hormonal effect of men at arms...
...It didn’t matter whether she was being lionized by her adoring fans or grilled by French Intelligence about her alleged espionage activities...
...Nor does he...
...Tyrrell’s well-argued disapproval of the Clintons, much of it published in this magazine (of which he is the founding and continuous editor), is well known...
...But many things about the Clintons are hard to believe...
...The officers here in the Indies, both old generals and second lieutenants, have already come to me amorously,” she wrote her father...
...Her immediate response was to demand money for clothes and travel...
...Her mother had recently died but she didn’t mind that—she barely acknowledged the existence of women— but the loss of male adoration drove her into panic and threatened her identity...
...Among the officers she met in The Hague was Maj...
...Her first years alone in Paris are sketchy, even more so than her espionage period...
...And given how the U.S...
...Rudolf suspected poison and began to obsess about their daughter...
...In 1910 she danced in Monte Carlo and in 1911 appeared at La Scala in Gluck’s opera Armide, but when she offered herself to the Ballets Russes, Diaghilev told her she was “too matronly...
...The next thing we know, it is 1904 and the 28year-old Margaretha is dancing in private homes for society hostesses...
...She wanted to do the Dance of the Seven Veils in Strauss’s opera Salome but Maud Allen already had it locked up (Mary Garden was the first singer to do her own dance...
...She wears a simplified costume of a Javanese court dancer, and toward the end, simplifies it even more” was an artistic way of sayDECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 8 1 Narcissism and discretion are a poor fit...
...She found a Dutch businessman on the train and persuaded him to pay her fare to Amsterdam...
...The Hague was full of colonial soldiers on leave from the Dutch East Indies and Margaretha lost no time proving that a military chest seems to suit the ladies best, as the song goes...
...Some spy… Keeping track of the twists and turns of her inquisition and trial is like trying to make sense of Richard Burton’s speech “explaining” who’s spying on whom in Where Eagles Dare—a double agent is posing as a single agent when in fact the real single agent is an imposter who discovered that the fake double agent was the traitor everyone assumed to be dead...
...Relentless and Entertaining THIS IS A LIVELY UPDATE of this author’s extensive previous comments on the ethical and legal shortcomings of President and Senator Clinton...
...An olive-skinned brunette with eyes so dark they seemed black, she stood out among all the wholesome blondes, but that was the way she liked it...
...Maybe you couldn’t eat off her floor but you could certainly eat off her, and it’s a safe bet that much of the officer corps did...
...They got engaged after six days and married in 1895 when she was 19 and he was 38...
...RUDOLF’S LETTERS HOME contained such sentiments as “If I could deliver myself of this bitch I would be happy...
...Margaretha’s descriptions of their married life in her letters to her father and friends give “spousal abuse” new meaning...
...By God,” said the commander of the firing squad, “this lady knows how to die...
...This book is a prosecution argument, but it takes its title from the author’s contention, one of the principal premises of his book, that President Clinton is now a miserable, frenetic, often depressed, and, as is stated several times, “disgraced” man, even though his wife is a strong candidate to take them both back to the White House...
...Barnum would have loved it...
...DEMOCRACY DOESN’T DO a thing for women like Margaretha and her troubles began the moment World War I broke out...
...What really drove Rudolf around the bend was the attention his wife got from other men...
...Yes, I have had many lovers, but it is the beautiful soldiers, brave, always ready for battle and, while waiting, always sweet and gallant...
...ing that she took it all off...
...Using statues of Eastern deities as stage props, she entered like an undulating tiger, dropping veil after veil in symbolic tribute to creation-fecundity-destruction-incarnation and any other hokum she could dream up, until she fell in a swoon at Siva’s feet...
...Margaretha discovered that he was a two-fisted drinker, a compulsive gambler, a skinflint, a foulmouthed lout given to mess-hall food fights, and that he had had syphilis, probably contracted from native Javanese prostitutes...
...The woman whose stage name would become an eponym for seductive female spies began life as a nice middle-class Dutch girl who didn’t look at all Dutch...
...His hatred of her increased when their son died suddenly under suspicious circumstances...
...It was one of the few times she took money from a man without giving him her usual quid pro quo in return...
...She was in an ideal place to realize her dream because Dutch colonials went native in ways that the English did not...
...She constantly changed her stories about her origins and ancestry...
...plea bargain system works, I don’t attach much importance to the outgoing president’s payment of $25,000 and acceptance of the bearable sacrifice of not practicing law in Arkansas for five years to be rid of the independent counsel’s investigation of him...
...I have never loved any but officers...
...How much of this was true must be weighed against her penchant for gilding the lily, i.e., “Sometimes he jumps out at me with red, bloodshot eyes and spits on me.… I wanted to be bitten by a snake tonight so I would not have to go back to him...
...All we know is that she posed for artists, worked as a circus rider, and went with men to maisons de rendez-vous, or houses of assignation, one step up from brothel prostitution...
...This section of the book is strewn with phrases such as “the significance is unclear… another inexplicable gap… yet another unanswerable question...
...I had artistic aspirations,” she would later say, “and inclinations that made it impossible for a woman like me to be a good housewife...
...Billed as “sacred dances” to shield her and her sponsors from charges of indecency, they were supposedly an ancient holy rite, a form of worship, prayers really...
...The union began to deteriorate almost immediately and was doomed by the time they set sail for Indonesia and Rudolf’s next posting...
...Technically she was a citizen of neutral Holland, but she had tampered with her passport to make herself younger, and had lived in France so long and crossed the border so often that the Germans regarded her as an undesirable...
...When a Serbian radical assassinated the Austrian archduke in Sarajevo in 1914, he also killed the glamorous, aristocratic Edwardian Age of adventuresses and titled lovers and replaced it with a war to make the world safe for democracy...
...She just wanted to be reimbursed because they took her stuff...
...The matter 8 2 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 B O O K S I N R E V I E W NOW AVAI LAB L E To Order, Call: 1-800-685-0632 x105 The Long War Ahead And The Short War Upon Us By John C.Wohlstetter was over and done with as soon as she got the money, at least as far as she was concerned...
...She wanted, she said, “to live like a butterfly in the sun...
...He called her “a scum of the lowest kind” and confessed that he wanted to kill her...
...when she talked about herself she could not shut up or leave anything out...
...All of the men who sat in judgment on her kept coming back to her sexuality, even the understated Brits, whose consul called her “bold...
...This is a relentless, but entertaining, excoriation of the former first couple...
...and donned Indonesian pajamas for long afternoon naps...
...Far more interesting is how Mata Hari affected the men who were determined to prove her guilty...
...Instead of dressing for dinner in the steamy jungle, they left their offices at 2 P.M...
...Desperate, she signed on at the Folies-Bergère, where dance routines did not have to be sacred, and even played some provincial music halls and vaudeville houses...
...For once she told the simple truth, for she ignored the Dutchwoman’s legendary cleanliness except as it applied to her own fastidious person...
...THOMAS NELSON, 320 PAGES, $26.99) Reviewed by Conrad Black Conrad Black is the author of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom (PublicAffairs) and the new book Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full (Public Affairs...
...Unfortunately she was in Germany, which promptly froze the bank accounts of French depositors and seized their personal property in payment for debts, and as usual she had lots of debts...
...It was a come-down but it didn’t really matter because the world that had created her, the world for which she and women like her had been created, was about to vanish forever...
...born in Java, born in India, born in a Nepalese temple, came from a long line of Hindu priestesses, and ad infinitum...
...Rejection from a man always had the power to terrify her and by now she was feeling especially insecure...
...Sometimes I cannot bear to have this creature around me, but what can I do to get rid of her...
...The reviews were boffo...
...When Ladoux temporized, she nagged him for the promised sum in an uncoded letter addressed to his office and sent through the regular mails...
...she always felt she deserved it...
...It certainly does.Herewith the first two sentences: “The most important thing to know about Margaretha Zelle is that she loved men...
...She had earned an enormous amount of money both as a dancer and as a courtesan (one of her generous lovers was Jules Cambon, France’s ambassador to Spain), but she was an incorrigible spendthrift who was always short of funds...
...For me, the officer forms a race apart...
...Without men dancing attendance on her she was a nobody, so she set out to become a somebody again...
...He has had a bumpy sleigh ride at times, but my impression is that his life is less perturbed and much less controversial than when he was at the height of his career...
...The elite of Paris did love it and flocked to see her...
...reviewed in this issue on page 87...
...B O O K S I N R E V I E W DECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 8 3 The Clinton Crack-Up: The Boy President’s Life After the White House By R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...The Spy Who Loved Men Y Femme Fatale: Love, Lies, and the Unknown Life of Mata Hari By Pat Shipman (WILLIAM MORROW, 450 PAGES, $25.95) Reviewed by Florence King B O O K S I N R E V I E W Such over-the-top statements were her stock in trade and she never bothered to tailor them to different audiences...
...She took the name Mata Hari (meaning “eye of the day” or “sunrise”), which also happened to be the name of the Masonic Lodge in Sumatra...
...Confiscating her trunks, furs, and jewelry, and freezing the funds owed her by her German agent, they put her on a westbound train with no money, no luggage, and no clothes but what she was wearing...
...She loved being interviewed and would say anything, e.g., “From the time I was a child I loved men: a strongly built male brought me to a state of ecstasy...
...Nobody challenged her or tried to pin her down: “She believed her own lies, which was the key to her sincerity,” deadpans author Pat Shipman...
...She took it—not the assignment, just the money...
...That he really is in such a deteriorated condition is not so clear...
...Subconsciously they all agreed with the dictum of Tacitus: “When a woman has lost her chastity she will shrink from no crime...
...In actual fact they were hoochie-coochie writhings loosely based on the occasional Javanese dancing she had seen in her days as an army wife...
...Let’s hope she heard him...
...Refusing to be tied to a stake, she stood on her own in a desolate field in the bleak autumn dawn, and when they tried to tie a blindfold around her eyes she waved them gently away and said in a gracious tone, “That won’t be necessary...
...The vagina dentate imagery is ever present...
...The most crucial thing to know about her is that she did not love truth...
...OUDON’THAVETOREADVERYFARinto this book to know that you won’t be able to stop reading until you finish it...
...Given the author and the subjects, it would not be credible if Mr...
...Narcissism and discretion are a poor fit...
...when she talked about herself she could not shut up or leave anything out...
...In Amsterdam she saw the German consul to demand the return of her property, and he countered with an offer of 20,000 francs (some $60,000 in today’s money) to spy for Germany...
...Rudolf MacLeod, member of an originally Scottish family that had settled in Holland...
...Only then will you get around to the dishes piling up in the sink, the basket of dirty laundry still sitting beside the machine, and all the other chores you had planned to do, because it’s a book that meets that stringent requirement of people who normally don’t like to read: “It starts out good...
...Either he was poisoned or else Margaretha had caught syphilis from Rudolf and passed the congenital form of the disease to the baby...
...While she was in Paris buying new stuff and trysting with the Marquis de Beaufort at the Grand Hotel, she was summoned by Georges Ladoux, head of French Intelligence, who asked her to spy for France to prove that she was not spying for Germany...
...She was past 35, putting on weight, and going broke...
...Rudolf beat her with a cat o’ nine tails, chased her through the house with his sword, threatened her with a loaded revolver, and gave her a household allowance equal to about 15 cents a day so she could not waste his money on new dresses...
...Questioned about this uncharacteristic behavior later on, she gave one of her unnecessarily thorough answers: “Because I had only one chemise, and I really didn’t feel clean enough...
...It is hard to believe that anyone who has been elected to and completed in good health two consecutive, contested U.S...
...Standing out and being special were her oxygen, seeds of an ultimately fatal narcissism that was planted in her by her doting father, who spoiled her rotten until he lost his money and decamped, leaving his 15-year-old daughter in the care of relatives...
...President Clinton appears to be wealthy, healthy, and cheerful...
...It was as simple as that...
...B O O K S I N R E V I E W 80 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 Florence King’s collections include The Florence King Reader, STET, Damnit!: The Misanthrope’s Corner, 1991 to 2002, and, most recently, Deja Reviews: Florence King All Over Again...
...Rudolf obtained a legal separation and she gave him their daughter...
...Feline, majestically tragic, her body trembling in a thousand rhythms,” said another...
...As she later swore, she had no intention of spying for Germany and never did...
...She danced in the home of Baron de Rothschild with Colette in the audience, and at the Trocadero, where the opera composer Jules Massenet fell in love with her...
...The newspapers, who blamed her for the slaughter of Verdun, called her “a sinister Salome, who played with the heads of our soldiers in front of the German Herod...
...It is impossible for a woman to like Margaretha because we know only too well what women like her think of the female sex and how they treat us, but we can admire her in her last moments...
...Tyrrell professed to be offering a completely objective assessment of the arguments for and against his view that the Clintons are immoral, and the ex-president a degenerate and a felon...
...presidential terms, a feat achieved by only seven of the 40 prior presidents, would be such an odious character as is described here...
Vol. 40 • January 2008 • No. 10
