by Greg King
And those who did were often seeking entertainment of the sort that irreparably damaged Helene’s reputation. Any number of lovers, according to rumor, enjoyed her favors, among them at least one Habsburg archduke.39 There were whispers of a liaison with either Rudolf’s wayward cousin Archduke Otto or the young Archduke Eugen, an affair that supposedly ended in January 1886 with the birth of a daughter, Ilona, who was quickly spirited out of the Vetsera palace and raised by a discreet couple in exchange for financial compensation.40
An unexpected tragedy brought Albin back to Vienna at the end of 1881: As a reward for exemplary service, five cadets from Vienna’s Rudolf Friess Military Academy—among them sixteen-year-old Ladislaus Vetsera—received complimentary tickets for the December 8 performance of Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann at the Ringtheater. Gas from the stage lights exploded, and a devastating fire swept through the crowded auditorium. Unable to jam through the exits, people leaped from windows or were trampled in the crush. Ladislaus Vetsera was among the 386 unfortunates burned alive in the conflagration; his body could be identified only after Helene recognized the cuff links her eldest son had worn.41
Mary was ten when her brother died, though she seems to have recovered quickly through the buoyancy of youth. To escape any unpleasant memories, the Vetseras took a long lease on Schloss Schwarzau, a seventeenth-century baroque villa in the mountains outside Vienna. There Mary regularly spent her summers, and there, ironically, Austria’s last emperor, Karl, would wed his bride, Zita, in 1911.42 Returning to Vienna in the autumn of 1882, Mary embarked on her secondary education at the Sacre Coeur Institute for Young Ladies, a convent school.43 In addition to academics, the nuns offered instruction in art and dancing and classes in needlework and etiquette—all that was deemed necessary to arm a young noble lady for her future as a wife and mother.44
Mary emerged from her formative years as a young lady of medium height, elegant and self-assured. “Extraordinarily beautiful,” was how Princess Catherine Radziwill described her, with “the most magnificent pair of eyes it has ever been my fortune to see.”45 Those eyes were dark—almost as dark as the luxuriant hair Mary kept coiled atop her head to emphasize her neck and shoulders. The solemn, stiff formal photographic portraits of the Victorian era rarely captured undeniable beauty, but surviving images suggest that contemporaries tended to exaggerate Mary’s physical attributes. “The Baroness,” declared one newspaper, “was not what one would call a classical beauty.”46 Her nose was a bit too small, too retroussé, to be deemed really attractive; her lips were just a bit too full, too red, and her teeth a bit too sharp.47 Her eyes, it is true, were her best feature, but they were set in an oval face atop a thick neck. “Short and rather stumpy, with one shoulder higher than the other,” declared the British ambassador’s wife.48 And Mary had developed rapidly and just a bit too much: Her overgenerous bosom, perhaps captivating to men, lent a slightly unbalanced impression to her figure.49
Helene Vetsera, recalled Princess Nora Fugger, “loved Mary very dearly” and favored her over her other children.50 This caused a good deal of resentment: Mary, said a friend, was “always bickering” with her more sober sister, Hanna, who found her coquettish behavior exasperating.51 It was the era of the notoriously termed “Pushy Mama,” of ambitious women like the American Gilded Age hostess Alva Vanderbilt, who ruthlessly negotiated advantageous marriages for their often unwilling daughters to unite fortunes and ascend the social ladder. Helene’s preening attentions using Mary were scarcely maternal, though: Her “one ambition,” said Princess Fugger, “was to marry off her youngest daughter well in Viennese society. To this end she used every means.”52 This wasn’t lost on Mary, who from childhood had been relentlessly drilled in the idea that she must marry well and raise her family’s social status. “Mama has no love for me!” Mary once complained to a friend. “Ever since I was a little girl, she has treated me like something she means to dispose of to best advantage.”53
Quick-witted and sharply sly, with a mischievous sense of humor and a light, melodic voice, Mary undoubtedly possessed a certain allure, a magnetic quality that made her the center of attention—much to her delight.54 But years of favored indulgence had gone to her head: A friend deemed Mary “a spoilt child,” with an “impulsive Oriental temper” and an “unstable, nervous and irritable” quality that often led her to indulge in tantrums.55 “Silly” and “vain,” said Walburga Paget, while a courtier remembered Mary as “exceptionally excitable and ambitious.”56 She could play the piano and compose verses in French, but Mary had “literally no intellectual interests.”57 The lack of depth was scarcely Mary’s fault: Education and expectation had discouraged such unfashionable pursuits. Aside from expensive clothing, Mary’s only passion was secretly devouring the “immoral and highly colored French novels” that her maid, Agnes Jahoda, smuggled to her—“the only reading that interests me,” as Mary once confessed to Gabriel Dubray.58
This was the singular young woman who arrived in London shortly before Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, and whose presence so unnerved Stephanie that she preferred causing scenes and creating offense to watching the baroness chase her husband. Nothing apparently came of the visit, though undoubtedly Rudolf and Mary crossed paths during receptions at the Austro-Hungarian Embassy. Together with her parents and siblings, Mary spent seven hours crowding a windowsill to watch the impressive royal processions to and from Westminster Abbey.59 Then it was on to Paris, where the family stayed at the Hotel du Rhin on the Place Vendôme. “I am suffocating from the heat in your capital!” Mary wrote to Gabriel Dubray in Vienna. She visited the Louvre, shopped along the Champs-Élysées, and drove through the Bois de Boulogne with other fashionables, though she complained that she only saw “the same people, with the same big hats.”60
Mary was with her mother and siblings at Schloss Schwarzau that autumn when an urgent telegram arrived from Cairo: On October 28 Albin Vetsera had suffered a stroke. Although Helene and her children left immediately for Egypt, the journey took two weeks. They arrived in Cairo on November 15 only to learn that Albin had died the previous day. Rather than bring the body back to Vienna, Helene had her husband buried in a Catholic cemetery in Cairo.61
Settling Vetsera’s estate kept Helene and her children in Cairo for three months, months that witnessed Mary’s stunning transformation from innocent schoolgirl to sexually provocative young lady. She wasted little time mourning her father: A British diplomat recalled often watching the smiling Mary playing tennis on the court at Shepheard’s Hotel.62 When not thus occupied, she hurled herself with abandon into a series of flaunted love affairs that left gossips scandalized. There was now an “arresting, sensual grace” to her movements as she discovered her power over men.63 The convent-educated Mary soon prided herself on her seductive gaze, the deliberate sway of her hips, and the “breath of hot sensuality” she radiated.64
Mary, said a friend, “was a coquette by instinct … immoral in her tendencies” and “amorous by nature,” qualities that blossomed beneath the hot Cairo sun.65 She dressed provocatively, flirted openly, and spoke “quite freely many things that a much older person would have felt embarrassed to speak about,” recalled the visiting Princess Catherine Radziwill. Mary’s habit of boasting about her romantic conquests not only “jarred on the sense of propriety” but also left the distinct impression “that love, far from being a mystery, was known to her in all its details.” While the men fawned, the women condemned: Rather than be shamed, Mary “simply laughed and snapped her fingers at the judgments passed upon her and her conduct.”66 In “romantic and indiscreet letters” to a friend in Austria, Mary bragged of her conquests: By the time she returned to Vienna in early 1888, as another friend delicately referred to her sexual experiences, Mary was “no longer the innocent girl she had once been.”67
It was now time to conquer the Habsburg capital; reality, though, was about to teach Mary a harsh and unwelcome lesson. Coveted invitations to court balls or the most exclus
ive aristocratic parties never came. Wrapped in elegant new ensembles from Paris, a determined Mary joined other young fashionables promenading or parading in carriages each morning and evening along the Ringstrasse and the fashionable Kärntnerstrasse; adorned in extravagant gowns from Maison Spitzer, she attended the opera and theater, though aristocratic tradition kept the Vetseras from taking a box in the exclusive parterre circle.68 Society columns inevitably recorded her presence at parties and noted her smart clothing. “Baroness Vetsera no longer favors the fox,” the Wiener Salonblatt informed its readers, reporting that she sported a sable wrap at one event.69
But no amount of press could win Mary or her family entrance to functions at the imperial court. In this atmosphere of thwarted ambition, she made a name and reputation for herself—and not the sort of reputation that would help her social advancement. Mary flouted the rules: At a time when even the wealthiest banker in Vienna would never dream of taking tea at exclusive Demel’s or dining at the Hotel Imperial for fear of offending aristocratic sensibilities, the young baroness had no such hesitations.70 She threw herself into the role of demimondaine, a young woman who “satisfied the surface requirements of respectability,” wrote the historian Frederic Morton, “while remaining tactically mobile in her attachments. A man could leave her, just as he could leave the sweet girl, but this girl he always left at a higher price than when she had been found.”71
Mary flirted outrageously, spoke in alluring whispers, and smiled beguilingly, earning a reputation for “amorous frivolity.”72 Viennese gossips entertained themselves with stories of her romantic conquests: Young or elderly, married or single—Mary apparently made no distinctions in her pursuits.73 Stories hinted about this or that gentleman—a Hungarian, a Pole, an Austrian—liaisons, as Lady Paget noted, that condemned Mary as “a very rapid girl” and that “could only have had one object.”74 Aristocratic Vienna deemed her “a horror, avoided by all,” undoubtedly the “fastest” of the city’s “fast” women, and condemned as “quite without religion or principle.”75 Mary loved to ice-skate, but prim mothers warned their daughters to avoid her at all costs. If they were skating and the young baroness suddenly appeared, they should flee the ice if they hoped to save their own reputations.76
Mary was no innocent, but neither was she a cold, calculating adventuress. A sixteen-year-old schoolgirl, ruled by emotion, driven by excitement, and flattered by the attentions she received, she fell victim not only to her own desires but also to her mother’s ambitions. Helene Vetsera, far from evincing concern over her daughter, seems to have deliberately flung Mary at a succession of potential conquests. One day she lured the handsome and eligible Prince Fugger to her palace with assurances that her young daughter was highly sympathetic. In a Victorian age in which chaperones were an indispensable guarantee of moral propriety, Helene played by her own rules. As soon as the prince was seated in her drawing room, Helene introduced Mary and quickly left them alone, shutting the doors behind her. And the moment the doors closed Mary bolted from her place on the sofa and jumped into the prince’s lap. It didn’t take long before the prince’s family objected to such visits, complaining that he was compromising their reputation.77
Aside from fashion and romance—the melodramatic, torrid affairs of her favorite French novels and the real-life dangerous games she played with Vienna’s male population—Mary’s only other interest was horse racing, a taste cultivated by her Baltazzi uncles. Mary haunted the racecourse at Freudenau, at the end of the Prater’s long, chestnut-lined Hauptallee. Each spring smart carriages and elegantly attired riders promenaded past wild meadows filled with violets and primroses to the distant music of military bands serenading open-air cafés crowded by society.78 Freudenau was the place to see and be seen, as sartorial reputations were won or lost and fortunes wagered. The “Turf Angel,” people called Mary, a young lady hovering in the stands, sipping Champagne as she admired the handsome horses. And on April 12, 1888, wearing a black cape embroidered with gold panels, she found something else to admire: Crown Prince Rudolf, watching a race from the imperial box.79
A renewed acquaintance over Champagne: She flashing her dark eyes and flirting, he taking in the young lady with her overdeveloped bosom—a passing moment for the jaded prince but one rich with fantasies for the teenage baroness, who, like other girls her age, had collected souvenir postcards of Rudolf.80 Some fiery passion overwhelmed Mary: She rushed home, noted the encounter in her engagement book, and breathlessly told her maid, Agnes, “Today I have seen the Crown Prince. He was so beautiful.”81 She suddenly began speaking about Rudolf “with great enthusiasm,” remembered Gabriel Dubray. There was a lightness to her step, a “noticeable change in her attitude and mood.”82 Here was a new, exciting challenge, fraught with the sort of romantic drama that Mary found most appealing. The chase was on.
CHAPTER FIVE
A fever burned in Mary Vetsera’s brain as spring turned to summer. Infatuated and intrigued after her encounter with Rudolf, she let her girlish fantasies blossom. Every afternoon she visited the Prater, circling its broad, lushly canopied avenues hoping to spot Rudolf’s carriage. The slightest glance or exchanged smile filled her with hope, but as yet there was no real relationship.
In her pursuit of the crown prince, Mary soon found a willing ally in Rudolf’s cousin Countess Marie Larisch. The illegitimate daughter of Empress Elisabeth’s brother Duke Ludwig in Bavaria and his lover, the actress Henriette Mendel, Marie was born in 1858, a year before her parents finally contracted a morganatic, or unequal, marriage, and King Maximilian II of Bavaria created her mother Baroness Wallersee. Elisabeth felt sorry for her pretty young niece condemned to social ostracism and gradually drew Marie into her enchanted web. Soon the golden haired young lady with “lovely, reckless eyes” became the empress’s constant companion, traveling with her, riding with her, and sharing her embittered confidences.1
Carefully nurtured to be her aunt’s willing slave, Marie acted the part of obedient and mindless companion, all the while existing “in a state of impotent and angry revolt” and “smoldering hatred of the life that she was forced to lead.”2 Countess Marie Festetics resented the Baltazzis; she also resented Elisabeth’s niece. “There is something about her that I find uncomfortable,” she confided to her diary. “I have a feeling that she is not true, not sincere.”3 Perhaps Festetics had reason to worry: Sixteen-year-old Marie endlessly flirted with her cousin Rudolf: Although the illegitimate daughter of a morganatic union, she seems to have taken the empress’s favor as evidence that she would be an acceptable bride for the crown prince. Although she later claimed to dislike Rudolf, Marie apparently showed herself more than amenable to his attentions. With his relaxed approach to appropriate behavior, Rudolf is said to have reciprocated his cousin’s affections—a dangerous situation that Empress Elisabeth finally ended in 1877 by arranging Marie’s quick marriage to Count Georg von Larisch, a minor aristocratic army officer.4
The new Countess Larisch found her husband “disfigured by spots” and “hopelessly dull,” but she had no say in the matter and did as the empress demanded.5 At first she kept herself amused gambling away her husband’s minimal fortune; when this ran out and her debts swelled, Marie turned to Rudolf. She knew her cousin’s secrets—indeed, she knew where all the family skeletons were buried—and she wasn’t shy in deploying gossip to accomplish her goals. Those “lovely, reckless eyes,” Rudolf knew, concealed an unlovely, reckless, and spiteful spirit: Larisch was eager to repeat every rumor and cause trouble if it kept her entertained, advanced her position, or brought her money.
Given this vindictive record, it is not surprising that Rudolf was soon handing over money to his unpredictable cousin to cover her debts and keep her quiet. Although Larisch later deemed it “ridiculous” to suggest such a thing, evidence discovered after Rudolf’s death proved otherwise.6 The crown prince’s payments bought temporary peace of mind, but he managed to make the episode even more sordid by asking Marie Larisch for f
avors in return. Introducing new lovers to Rudolf, along with arranging for his liaisons, were said to be among the “certain services” she now provided in exchange for her cousin’s financial assistance.7
Marie Larisch was no stranger to Mary Vetsera and her family: Ironically, Empress Elisabeth had first introduced her niece to Helene Vetsera at Gödöllö a decade earlier, and she often saw the baroness on visits to Hungary. By 1883 the morally flexible Marie had embarked on an affair with the baroness’s married brother Heinrich, whose hussar regiment was stationed near the Larisch estate at Pardubice.8 Soon enough Larisch found herself pregnant with Baltazzi’s child, though jealousy erupted when she learned that he was simultaneously carrying on an affair with the actress Jenny Gross. One night in the winter of 1883, according to Marie Festetics, both of Heinrich Baltazzi’s lovers unexpectedly came face-to-face at the opera in Vienna. No shrinking violet, the pregnant Larisch hurled insults at the actress, and startled onlookers had to separate the two women as they literally came to blows on the staircase.9
In November 1884 Larisch gave birth to Baltazzi’s daughter, Marie Henriette; his son, Heinrich Georg, followed in February 1886. The compliant Georg von Larisch never questioned their paternity, though many in the capital knew of his wife’s infidelity.10 Friends with Helene, lover of Heinrich Baltazzi, and mother to Mary’s two illegitimate cousins—Marie Larisch was thus deeply tied to the Vetseras, who were not shy in attempting to use her privileged entrée to the imperial court to advance their social positions and higher goals.