The Death of a Courtesan

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30763, 29 May 1965, Page 12

The Death of a Courtesan

(By

EDDIE OAKES

in the "Sun-Herald," Sydney. Reprinted ba arrangement.)

rpHE gipsy girl who was the toast of Paris, darling of kings and queen of the casinos died last month a wrinkled recluse.,.

The kings and the emperors who once courted her, the great men of the world who paid for her smiles and her favours with costly jewels and gold-filled purses, all died long ago. It came as a surprise to many Parisians to learn that the very old lady who died alone on April 10 in a cramped secondfloor room of a cheap boarding house in Nice was, in fact, the fabulous “La Belle Otero.”

Ninety-seven years, of age, she had outlived her golden age, the “belle epoque” of the turn of the century from 1890 to 1910, when the beauty of her face and body, and her dancing, made her the most famous courtesan in the world.

For 20 years she had lived in the one-room apartment, avoiding all except her few close friends, and going out mainly at night.

She hated the world to see the ravages age had wrought in the once-beautiful face. Before the large mirror in her room Caroline Otero spent hours trying to erase the deepening lines on her withered face with a variety of beauty creams.

To old men dreaming in nostalgia the tributes to the woman who once was the toast of Paris, of New York, St. Petersburg, Berlin and a dozen other great cities became an evocation of a leisured age long passed into history.

The legend of La Belle Otero encompassed it all. This was the woman who enjoyed a celebrity far beyond anything known to today’s screen and pop stars, a dazzling courtesan who drove famous men to ruin and even to suicide. Royal Camping One evening at the Cafe de Paris, before the First World War, she danced before three kings and two emperors. . Then she joined Edward VII of England, Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, Tsar Nicholas of Russia, Leopold of the Belgians and Alphonso XIII of Spain at their table. As Prince of Wales, Edward had been her admirer. He was said to have travelled incognito to Ostend to see the dancer with the marvellous figure and fiery Spanish temperament. And England’s future king .would draw a clock face on a piece of paper and mark the hands to show the time he i wanted her to meet him. i Kaiser Wilhelm invited her 'to Berlin. He called her his “little savage,” and kept in . his private apartment the portrait of La Belle Otero that ihe had specially commis- ■ sioned. 1 Gabriele D’Annunzio, the ' Italian poet, strewed rose petals in her path. Russian grand dukes and princes used emeralds and diamonds. When Caroline Otero returned from a triumphal Russian tour, during which she was said to have leaped from a first-floor window to escape the attention of the Grand Duke Nicholas, uncle of the Tsar, she was laden with jewellery. Three Necklaces Soon afterwards, she appeared one night on stage at the Folies Bergere wearing three magnificient necklaces. One had belonged to the Empress Josephine, another to the Empress of Austria, and the third to Leonide Leon, the beautiful mistress of Gambetta, France’s most famous politician in the late 19th century.

Stories about her abound. One concerns her rivalry with another famous beauty of the day, Emilienne d’Alencon. It was the fashion for the wellknown courtesans to appear on special occasions—a gala at the Paris Opera House for example—weighed down, as it were, by all the jewels they possessed. It was a sort of competition. On one such night La Belle Otero waited until all her bejewelled sisters, particularly “the Alencon,” had taken their seats to make her entry in a simple unadorned black dress—followed at a distance by her Swiss maid carrying an immense heap of jewels on a tray. Disagreeable Event The Comte Rupieski, who had spent a fortune on her and then lost everything in trying to win more on the gaming tables, killed himself on the stairway of the elegant Paris house in the Avenue Kleber that he had bought for Caroline. “How disagreeable,” was the lovely gipsy’s comment. “Now every time I walk up the stairs I will be upset. The count has not been very considerate to me.” So La Belle Otero moved house, taking with her, in a special lacquered casket, the last letter of another lover, Jacques Payen. A celebrated explorer, he had committed suicide one spring morning because Caroline refused to accompany him on an expedition. At least he had more delicacy than the count. For he killed himself in a Chinese pavilion in the Bois de Bouglogne. Who was this woman whose admirers threw at her feet not only their fortunes and their reputations but their very lives? Caroline Otero was born Caroline Puentovalga in a gipsy camp at the Spanish port of Cadiz, in December of 1868. Her mother was a dancer, Carmencita. Her father was a Greek naval officer who, as Caroline told the story later, had spent only three days in port. Precocious At 13 At 13, she was already a precocious beauty, a fine dancer, and a fiery singer. That was when she fell in love for the first time. Paco, an 18-year-old, gipsy lad, persuaded her to go away with him to Seville, where the police found her dancing in a tavern.

Taken home and put in a school, Caroline soon escaped to rejoin Paco, this time in Lisbon. But there she had her first disillusionment. Finding Paco with other girls, she tried to kill herself by crushing a box full of sulphur matches into water and drinking the mixture.

She recovered with the determination never again to attempt suicide over a man. Henceforward they would have to kill themselves over her. Soon afterwards she was in love again, this time with a handsome Italian baritone Guilelmo, who was singing “Rigoletto” in the Barcelona opera. He had a crown en-

graved on his visiting cars, and claimed to be a count But Caroline remained “Madame la Comtesse” for a few months only. Guilelmo was an inveterate gambler, and when they went to Monte Carlo he lost all he possessed on the casion tables.

He even staked the key to the hotel room in which his 15-year-old bride awaited him.

All Or Nothing

Confronted by a stranger, “black and bearded,” who claimed to have won the right to share her bed, La Belle Otero fled in tears.

She took her last two gold coins to the casino and staked them on an all-or-nothing gamble.

Both went on the red, one on 30, the other on 40. That night red came up 23 times. The two coins were transformed magically into 50,000 francs, worth then around £15,000.

That evening gave Caroline the money to start an independent life. It also aroused a life-long passion for gambling that eventually would reduce her almost to penury. Rich admirers literally hurled their purses at her feet as she danced on the stage. La Belle Otero disdained even to pick them up. When the dancer briefly left the glettering world of grand dukes and princes for a month’s season in New York she was paid 700,000 gold francs to appear at the city’s largest music hall, the Eden. The infatuated Arthur Vanderbilt gave her his personal yacht to take her back to Europe. It dropped anchor at Monte Carlo, and Caroline at once rushed to the casino’s gaming tables. Fortune Melted She lost more than a half million in gold francs (£150,000) in all. It was more than she could pay, and La Belle Otero decided to sell the Vanderbilt yacht. But her wealthy admirer heard about it and came across the Atlantic himself. “I will buy it back for the total of all your debts," he told her. For more than 20 years this was the life of La Belle Otero—festivals, princes, champagne. But when the lights of Europe went out, one by one, in 1914 it was the end of the “belle epoque,” and the end of this world of beautiful courtesans with seductive bodies.

There were no more grand dukes for one thing. In 1922 Caroline Otero, still a rich woman, decided to retire. She was 54.

But the gaming tables of Monte Carlo were close to her home at Nice, and soon the fortune had melted away. Twenty years ago she had to sell her home, then many of the paintings by famous artists of La Belle Otero in her heyday. She claimed to have lost on the green tables of the world’s casinos more than 30,000,000 gold francs—worth more than £9 million—in a lifetime’s gambling. Old Monte Carlo croupiers declared some years ago that they had seen her lose several

hundred thousand gold francs in a single night's play. But that all lay in the future as the Spanish gipsy girl with the mantilla set out for, Paris, then the centre of the fashionable world of international high society. It was a city famed for its beautiful courtesans.

Yet within a few weeks of her debut in the “Tango of the Meredjilda” Caroline was a celebrity. Soon she had become the most dazzling courtesan in all Paris. Chefs invented dishes to bear her name, a “Marche Otero" was composed in her honour. One critic wrote that she “carried all the Orient in the movement of her hip.” and another declared that she had “the most beautiful smile in the world.”

But her last years were lived in reasonable comfort, thanks to the money paid her for a film about her own life, and called simply “La Belle Otero.”

On. the morning of her death she had received a sheaf of roses. For half a century they had been regularly delivered, the homage of an admirer whose name she never revealed. Only a few friends from the neighbourhood followed the pathetic little cortege to the cemetery. Only a sheaf of white roses by the grave linked this burial of a very old lady from the Rue’ D’ Angleterre in Nice with the radiant La Belle Otero whose provocative hips delighted the glittering audience as she danced the flamenco at the Folies Bergere so long ago.