by Iva Polansky
She lived miserably in a caravan, where she gathered ailing circus animals, and she returned to the Moulin Rouge for financial support. She was allowed to sell peanuts and cigarettes on the sidewalk. Now and then, she’d get drunk and shout: “I’m La Goulue! Can’t you see it? I was the greatest star here!”
The newspapers announced La Goulue's death in 1929.
Born near Paris, but seemingly coming from another planet, was Jane Avril, the other celebrated Moulin Rouge star. Strange and mysterious, she did not need the raw sensuality of La Goulue to seduce her audience. She'd come and go as she pleased –no salaried employment for her—and simply danced with every nerve in her body. Except for that, she had nothing in common with the other dancers. They did not understand her and they did not like her. For them, she was Mad Jane. But Mad Jane did not care. She found her friends and lovers in intellectual circles. She could marry if she wanted to for there were willing takers but she loved her freedom.
Her story of an enfant-martyre explains a lot. Born Jeanne Beaudon, in 1868, to a Second Empire courtesan, and fathered by an Italian aristocrat to whom she was an embarrassment, she was first brought up by her maternal grandparents. Her life took a turn for the worse when her sadistic mother decided that Jane should live with her in Paris. She was nine when she entered hell. Today, Jane's mother would be identified as a dangerous psychopath but the science in Jane’s childhood did not yet reach that stage. Nor did the social services function as they do today. The children, then, were the property of their parents. Several people knew that Jane was beaten at least twice a day for invented offenses, but none reported the abuse to the police. It was just not done. The constant stress had to show somewhere and Jane developed a chorea minor, then referred to as Saint Vitus Dance. It is a nervous disorder characterized by rapid, involuntary jerking movements. At fourteen, she ran away from home. Finally, she found herself in a madhouse and happy as a lark. One can fully appreciate the degree of her suffering when a child finds the madhouse a step above her home.
In her biography, Jane relates that during a musical entertainment at the hospital, she suddenly got up and began to dance. In front of her audience’s eyes, she changed from a timid, shivering nonentity into a graceful nymph. Her condition improved and, soon, she was released to her mother’s care. She ran away—for good— at sixteen to live with a student. She gave all of herself to this first love, only to find herself betrayed. This was too heavy a load for her fragile constitution. Immediately after the discovery, she ran toward the Seine to jump from a bridge. A prostitute talked her out of the idea. Jane spent that night in a brothel. The next day the inmates went to a public ball, taking their new protégé with them.
The public ball was Jane’s second awakening. From then on, her life became divided into two: a day job to keep her from hunger and a night life to keep away her demons. Her talent led to prestigious theatrical engagements when an exceptional dance number was needed and, for a time, she was the ambassador of French can-can in London and in Madrid. Her poise, grace, and intelligence made her a welcome guest at dinner parties. A friend of novelists, dramatists, artists, philosophers, and scientists, she also captured the heart of Toulouse-Lautrec who saw in her a sister soul. He too was a victim of physical suffering. He, too, had an unusual childhood. They remained friends until the painter’s premature death.
In her forties, Jane finally settled down to sixteen years of quiet married life. She died in 1943 at the age of seventy-five.
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Other books by Iva Polansky:
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Is it hard to be famous in the 1870's Paris? Ask the sharp-shooting contest winner Miss Nelly McKay, formerly of Butte, Montana. She is already walking the thin line between fame and infamy when she is noticed by Chancellor Bismarck and the German Secret Service. Yet all she ever wanted was to marry a gentleman!
Fame and Infamy is an entertaining blend of comedy, mystery, romance and hard facts. Sarah Bernhardt and Victor Hugo are among the celebrities who share the scene with gritty characters emerging from the bohemian Latin Quarter. Paris, mopping up after the twin calamities of war and revolution, provides a background for this hearty clash of French and American cultures.
416 pages (print, ebook)
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Eighty-two-year-old Leo Tolstoy, the patriarch of Russian literature, a sage of international renown revered by the people and feared by the government, has only one serious adversary: his loving wife Sonya.
In the fall of 1910, readers around the world, in Berlin, London, Paris, New York, and Tokyo scramble for the latest edition of the local newspapers to read about the Tolstoys’ marriage break up. Tsar Nicolas II curtails his holiday in Germany and hastily returns to Russia, where police and a cavalry detachment surround a remote railway station besieged by a crowd of thousands. Is this a beginning of a revolution? Well, almost. And it all started with a domestic dispute.
Based on several biographies, personal memoirs, the Tolstoy diaries, and eye-witness accounts, The War of the Tolstoys tells the story of the crumbling marriage of two strong-willed individuals—and of family division, jealousy, madness, and greed—ending in Leo’s ill-fated dash for freedom.
112 pages (print, ebook)
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Emilie du Châtelet and Voltaire, two brightest minds of the French Enlightenment, meet the poet Saint-Lambert in a dangerous liaison that truly happened. Our Divine Emilie tells the story of conspiracy, court intrigue, passionate love and betrayal. (A screenplay)
Biography / Comedy / Drama
105 pages (print only)