Most startling of all, however, was young Mary’s insouciance after dinner, when the gentlemen had withdrawn to the smoking room. Countess Larisch congratulated the girl on her conquest. Whereupon Mary said, not quite nodding, “Oh yes. He’s nice. He wants to marry. But I suppose one could do better.”
Decades later the Countess still had not gotten over that remark. “It was amazing,” she would say. “Of course Mary was adorable. And she was already a lady of fashion. But the nerve!”
She shouldn’t have been so startled. It was just “nerve” which characterized a certain female expertise in the Vienna of the late nineteenth century. “Nerve” was a hallmark of adepts like Mary Vetsera.
Women in this redoubtable category were anything but Sweet Girls whose appeal lay essentially in their vulnerability, in the fact that they were born to be betrayed. Nor were they demimondaines content to know their (deliciously indispensable) place. No, a girl of the Mary Vetsera sort was quite different. She satisfied the surface requirements of respectability 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 place higher than where she had been found. This newly prominent woman was the Lady of Fashion.
In earlier centuries high fashion had been yet another aristocratic privilege. It separated blueblood from commoner. But then, more and more, ambitious burghers began to emulate what hitherto they had only admired. Gradually fashion became commerce, professionally created, cannily merchandised, widely broadcast, tensely practiced. It was as widely reported on, as greedily read about, as any interesting war.
The wealth of the upper middle class and the columns of the daily journals made “taste” a challenge for the upward-minded tens of thousands. Now the newest in bodices and bustles became important; as decisive a clue to self-advancement for the female half of a newspaper’s readership as stocks and bonds were to the male. Through fashion a woman mobilized her personal attributes for conquest. Through fashion she hinted at the social altitude of the suitors to whom she might be receptive.
How lofty were the stakes in this arena! Played in Vienna’s otherwise still highly stratified society, the fashion game had become intoxicatingly open ended. The right lovers could be rungs on a ladder for the right woman. Therefore the contest was fierce no matter how melting the waltz, how softly glowing the chandeliers. Gliding across the parquet floor, the Lady of Fashion was the social outrider of the higher bourgeoisie, ever wary of her own kind, ever covetous of the fields ahead. Never mind her piquant smile. She was a dead-serious modern strategist. Every silky gala was another secret battle.
Among such warriors the very young Baroness Mary Vetsera began to make history in the fall of that year. Mary—her official name was Marie, but she used the chic English form—Mary had all the martial skills; could make more of a petite figure and a retroussé nose than other girls could of lusher assets. She could float, sort of helplessly, in a flamboyance that was unforced and thus doubly magnetic. She knew it wouldn’t do to arrive at costume balls as a Bourbon princess (accountants’ wives were known to do that). Instead she’d come as a saucy chambermaid (the favorite disguise of duchesses). She could deploy the frill, the lacy hem, the fan and the parasol with a sureness and an effect already perfect in her teens. She knew at what Hussar major’s arm to appear at the races in the Freudenau and how to smile while spooning sherbet at the Sacher Garden in the Prater. She knew how to stand out, incidentally but unforgettably, at the cercles of Princess Pauline Metternich, the only gatherings in Vienna which sometimes mixed good titles with big money. One could hardly guess that this lovely thing represented the second category.
Ambition had been bred into Mary Vetsera’s genes. It had begun with her maternal grandfather, Themistocles Baltazzi, a commoner grown rich on the collection of bridge tolls and other government franchises. Later he had, like Schönerer Senior, involved himself with the Rothschild railroads, though on the money rather than the engineering end. And like the Knight of Rosenau, this toll-bridge baron ached for true nobility. His means toward that end was not anti-Semitism, nor the Wittgensteins’ Kultur, but the wedding ring and a tireless siege of the beau monde. He had married his three daughters to diplomats, that is, to needy younger sons of the lower Austrian aristocracy. As for his own sons, they had turned to England’s much more open society where dukes were known to accept good Havanas gladly from bankers. In London the Baltazzi boys invested in horses long enough and well enough until they had a Derby winner, and thereby purchased the nodding acquaintance of the Prince of Wales.
With this coup they returned, determined to storm the innermost bastions of social Vienna. And to at least one eye that saw them from a rung below and watched them dine at the Sacher Garden after a day at the Freudenau races, these Baltazzis seemed enviously upper-class. “The race track played an important part in my life,” Arthur Schnitzler would write in his autobiography. “The unattainable ideal: Henry Baltazzi…became the prototype of the Count in ‘La Ronde.’…In the Prater [I saw] Baltazzi at a nearby table, looking summery in a gray hat.”
Seen from the top, however, the Baltazzis made a much less seignorial spectacle. They might mime casualness at a luxury restaurant, but they were hell-bent on being introduced at Court. A potential shortcut was the favor of Katharina Schratt. Therefore Hector Baltazzi sneaked his way into a horsy set frequented by the actress. In his eagerness he offered Frau Schratt one of his thoroughbreds for her morning rides. The importunity was so bald that Franz Joseph had to warn his lady. “First of all I am not sure these horses are safe for you to ride,” he had written her on June 7, 1888, “…and then…the gentleman’s reputation is not entirely correct.”
The gentleman’s niece, Mary Vetsera, committed no such mistakes. During her ascent to society’s mortal summit she never made one wrong step. And she never paused on the way up.
It had to be up, up all the way. Having the Duke of Braganza was all very well, as conducting was all very well for Gustav Mahler. But Mary Vetsera wanted better. She willed the ultimate as the genius wills the masterpiece, as Mahler willed the symphony. “He is mine,” she told her maid. “I know I have no right to say it. He may not even know I exist. But he is mine. I feel it in my heart.”
He was the ne plus ultra of catches for any girl in Europe. He was Rudolf, heir to the Empire.
He presented a long-standing target for the Vetsera women. He was greatness. Mary’s mother, that weathered social climber, had done a bit of Rudolf-chasing herself. A decade earlier her pursuit of the Crown Prince, years younger than she, had been stopped only by the irritated intervention of the Emperor himself. Now in 1888 the Baroness Helene Vetsera turned forty, and her daughter Mary seventeen. It was time for Mary to inherit the hunt.
And Mary took it up with an intensity that frightened even her mother. In the summer the Rudolf mania in her had become such that the girl had to be packed off to England. The idea was to distract her with some earls. At first the plan seemed to succeed. Mary returned to Vienna in time for the great season and did talk less about the Prince. Sessions with her dressmakers kept her busy. She plunged straight, unerringly, into the tournaments of fashion.
At the first race meeting in Freudenau her ensemble—a black cape with gold insets—carried the day. The Salonblatt gave more space to her than to the Princess Montenuovo. Since Vienna read the Salonblatt as a weekly score sheet of chic, this was quite a coup. A little later the Wiener Tagblatt ran a feature on the furs being worn this fall. Inevitably Mary Vetsera’s name stood out on the front page. “Look who’s become unfaithful to her favorite dead animal,” the article said with the jeer behind which society reporters liked to hide their admiration.
Baroness Vetsera no longer favors the fox. But after all, the sable, too, was born in the Garden of Eden. This precious little animal clung to her neck all through the afternoon at the races. Under Baroness Mary’s renowned round chin lay the beastie’s tiny head, its legs
looped behind her nape. The creature must have been happy there because it did not stir once throughout the races; its black-pearl eyes vied with the gleams of its proprietress’s proverbial pearl teeth.
At the age of seventeen, when other girls still giggled at the lycée, Mary Vetsera was an established cynosure. And soon more than that. In the fall of 1888 it wasn’t just the press that focused on the “Turf Angel,” as her friends called the young Baroness at the Freudenau courses.
That fall Edward, Prince of Wales, made a prolonged Austrian visit. In Vienna he inevitably attended the races. Somewhat covertly too. Early in October the first big track day was a crisp and sunny Sunday. Reports of Queen Victoria’s son cheering on horses on the Lord’s Sabbath would not sit well with the English. But it was such lovely weather for the sport of kings and the entries were so attractive, particularly Count Esterházy’s steed Etcetera, and the Prince of Wales had a good friend in his Austrian counterpart. On Wales’s behalf, Rudolf called Moritz Szeps’s office at the Wiener Tagblatt to ask a favor. Could it be arranged that Viennese newspapers refrain from mentioning the presence of a certain British personage at Freudenau?
It could indeed. In fact, it was the discretion of the press which indirectly catalyzed the indiscretion of the century. On Sunday, October 7, Rudolf and Wales appeared at Freudenau. They watched Etcetera win the steeplechase. Afterward the two imperial heirs strolled to the tea pavilion where Baroness Mary Vetsera sat sipping at a front table. Wales almost recognized her from previous encounters in London. Here was some glittering little minx mixed up somehow with a Derby winner. That sort of sight always stimulated the Prince’s memory and activated his manners. Yes, this little morsel was the niece of the horsy Baltazzi brothers. He greeted her and introduced her to the young man at his side. The Baroness curtsied deeply. The Crown Prince bowed and walked on.
Nothing further came to pass between the two during the next weeks. Rudolf’s agenda was now dominated by the imminence of Vienna’s most splendid season in many years. After all, the Prince of Wales’s stay had only begun. The King of Greece was expected. The appearance of Wilhelm, Germany’s new Kaiser, would be spectacular and difficult if the Prussian ran true to form, but also potentially important to Rudolf. The Kaiser’s authoritarian strut could be used against him to make Austria recoil toward the left, domestically as well as internationally. When the Kaiser left, the new Court Theater—after too many postponements during too many years of construction—would open. Just a little later the globe’s most prima, prima donna would alight: Sarah Bernhardt would come to Vienna for the principal engagement of her European tour. After that, in December, the Empire would rejoice in having lived under Franz Joseph for exactly forty years and with that celebration revenge itself on the rain that had dampened the All Highest birthday. And the pre-Lenten carnival with its myriad balls would round out the jubilee season.
For Rudolf this schedule meant mostly dressed-up theatrics along with a few genuine opportunities to shore up the realm. His contribution would consist of frequent changes of uniform. But couldn’t he break beyond gold braid and shako into reality? Couldn’t Vienna? Along with others, similarly worried, he hoped that by the season’s end the city would start moving from its mythic seclusion into the mainstream of progressive greatness.
Wasn’t it time at last?
Chapter 9
The weather tautened all anticipations. Summer thinned into a fall of tightly stretched lucidity. The sun throbbed out of the blue, but each day the warmth drained faster from the golden light. On such a day a woman walked singing to the window of a villa in Döbling, at the lovely edge of the Vienna Woods. Singing, she jumped from the third floor. She kept singing the Imperial anthem right up to the thud. A rosebush broke her fall, and the ambulance brought her to the psychiatric retreat of Professor Leidesdorf close by.
She was not the only one. Another woman in the news at this time (whose name was also withheld by the papers) entered a church in the elegant Hietzing district. Dressed in the latest style, quite in the vein of the fashion report starring Baroness Vetsera, she waited for Mass to begin. Then, to the solemnity of the organ, she began to remove her clothes. While she stripped, she preached. The sable fur dropped onto her pew, then her jacket, her lacy blouse, her petticoat. The nave echoed with her shrieks about the coming Christ and the catastrophe that would precede Him. She, too, ended the day at the Leidesdorf retreat.
So did a Herr M., a director of the Danube Steamship Company. Suddenly, while playing billiards, he accused his opponent of being an anarchist plotting to gun down the King of Greece. He tried to stab “the assassin” with his cue stick. Police officers took him into custody until attendants from the Leidesdorf retreat took over.
They also had to come for Emil W., as the Wiener Tagblatt identified him. This twenty-six-year-old son of one of Vienna’s richest manufacturers had always been a habitué of Freudenau. In the fall of ’88 a series of betting paroxysms seized him. The only means by which he could cope with the uncertainty of the future was to wager on its outcome in all situations, trivial or important, be it the date of the Emperor’s death or the location of the next dropping left by the horses of the Ringstrasse trams. He must bet his way through the day. Anybody refusing to gamble with him would risk his rage. The Leidesdorf retreat had to rig up a “casino” for him, complete with roulette table, jetons, and an attendant playing the croupier.
Professor Leidesdorf, as may be gathered, ran a socially elevated establishment. The professor’s reputation, extending far beyond the Empire’s borders, acclaimed him messiah to all the disordered regions of the mind. The fall of ’88 was just another season in which illustrious patients flocked to the Leidesdorf Clinic in Vienna to be relieved of their devils.
Proudly the press reported that the Prince of Wales himself had recommended the Professor to Mrs. Bloomfield-Moore, a multimillionairess from Philadelphia whose daughter had sunk into the blackest depression. That thousands of gulden a week had been paid for treatment and board of the heiress. That a healing machine had been specially built for this case, emanating ether together with an esoteric sequence of noises and blue rays. That an American, a Dr. Keely, had constructed the machine at the staggering cost of 435,000 gulden, but that Professor Leidesdorf had found it wanting and stuck to his customary methods of electrotherapy, water immersion and drugs. That a glamorous international custody fight had ensued between the young woman’s husband, a high Swedish diplomat, and her dowager mother in Philadelphia—a contest in which Professor Leidesdorf’s testimony would figure prominently.
All of Vienna devoured the story. Dr. Sigmund Freud must have read it with some rue. Three years earlier he had been on the staff of the Leidesdorf Clinic as a twenty-eight-year-old nerve doctor. He’d worn white gloves and a silk hat while administering hydrotherapy to schizophrenics from good families. He’d also drawn quite a pleasant salary—until he’d quit. He’d wanted to be free to go to Paris and study under Charcot, the famous neurologist. Now in 1888 he was free to envy and to worry: a free-lance practitioner unable to attract much of a practice. During the autumn of Vienna’s great season, Freud’s mind was on money.
“In the summer things were very bad,” he wrote his friend Fliess. “This left me…with cares enough to sap the inclination [to creative work]…The whole atmosphere of Vienna is little adapted to steeling one’s will…or fostering…confidence in success.”
The problem was that in Vienna the accomplishment of actual success did not count for as much as the accomplished gesture. A physician, for instance, was expected to make house calls in a two-horse fiacre. Freud could not afford a fiacre—not even a one-horse Einspänner. One hour a week he lectured at the University to a scant audience of eight or nine (sometimes eked out by friends for the looks of the thing). The honorarium was a few pennies above nil. Yet the gesture let Freud call himself Universitätsdozent on his shingle.
Three mornings a week he spent at the Vienna Pediatric Institute, a long
-moribund facility which its director Dr. Max Kassowitz was trying to rebuild. Its entire premises—a few rooms—consisted of Kassowitz’s former apartment in the Tuchlauben alley. Unaffiliated with the University, it was ineligible to draw on any University resources and Freud was not even permitted to use clinical material gathered there for his University lectures.
At the Pediatric Institute, Freud functioned as “Head of the Department of Neurology.” His staff consisted of a single student assistant. His “department” occupied corners here and there in whatever space happened to be free. Its equipment was virtually nonexistent, and since most patients were penniless, his salary amounted to zero. Still, in title-happy Vienna, Freud could now pronounce himself Department Head of a clinic as well as University Lecturer.
His own apartment-office was itself a gesture printed on his visiting card; the place was impressively beyond his means. Maria Theresienstrasse 8 constituted a prime address on the Ring. The very house had come into being as a gesture from none other than the Emperor. On this spot the famous Ring Theater had stood before it burned down on December 8, 1881, killing hundreds of Viennese, including an uncle of Mary Vetsera’s. Anton Bruckner and Freud himself had had tickets for the performance that night. Both might have been among the three hundred and eighty-six charred bodies if they hadn’t been separately—they never knew each other—diverted to other engagements at the last moment.
Over the ashes of the disaster the monarch had ordered the construction of a stately new building. It contained a memorial chapel as well as some choice commercial and residential units. This had attracted Freud when he had looked for a “married” apartment. Vacancies were frequent at Maria Theresienstrasse 8 because of popular superstition surrounding this Sühnhaus (atonement house). The Freuds hesitated, too, but for a different reason. The rent amounted to no less than sixteen hundred gulden a month. In the end they decided to pay it. The sound of the location—in other words, the gesture—was the thing.
A Nervous Splendor Page 8