by Pat Shipman
Femme Fatale
LOVE, LIES, AND THE
UNKNOWN LIFE OF
MATA HARI
Pat Shipman
To Alan
Contents
Acknowledgments
Prologue
1. The Little Orchid
2. Different Lives
3. Object Matrimony
4. Indies Life
5. The Fatal Move
6. Death of a Child
7. Death of a Marriage
8. The Birth of Mata Hari
9. The Toast of Europe
10. Living Like a Butterfly in the Sun
11. In Time of War
12. The Tangled Web
13. Maelstrom
14. Stepping into the Trap
15. Secrets and Betrayal
16. Caught in a Trap
17. Grinding Her to Dust
18. Suffering
19. Telegrams and Secrets
20. The Lowest Circle of Hell
21. The Kangaroo Court
22. Waiting
23. Dying Well
References
Notes
Searchable Terms
About the Author
Other Books by Pat Shipman
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Acknowledgments
Mata Hari first came to my immediate attention because of a newspaper article in 2000. At that time, the Institute of Anatomy museum in Paris announced that the head of Mata Hari—in the museum’s collections since her death in 1917—was missing. A curator speculated that the head might have been stolen by an admirer in the 1950s, the last time the collection had been moved. This seemed to me an extraordinary suggestion bordering on the fantastic. The thought of an aging admirer stealing a woman’s head thirty years after her death was both ludicrous and macabre. I soon came to realize that, for Mata Hari, many unbelievable things were possible.
As I investigated the books about and documentary evidence of her life, I felt that previous biographers had neglected her married years in the Dutch East Indies. Because I had researched the colonial period in Indonesia extensively for another book, The Man Who Found the Missing Link, I was convinced that the roots of the later, better-known part of her life lay in her years in the Indies. This approach has led me to a new understanding and some important discoveries.
I have used terms popular in the later 1800s and early 1900s for the racial and social classes of people in the Dutch East Indies. Some of these are now offensive or derisory. I wish to make clear that I do not use them because I wish to impugn the people to which they refer but simply as a matter of historical accuracy.
I have relied heavily on available correspondence to or from Mata Hari. Letters are often irregularly punctuated, with dashes and underlinings used instead of more conventional punctuation. In quoting these, I have inserted more modern punctuation and used italics instead of underlinings for emphasis, but otherwise the words stand as written. Because I am writing for English-speaking readers, I give the names of all publications in English in the text. The full references in the original language can be found in the notes.
Translation has been a major issue in researching and writing this book. Translations from the French are my own, with the able assistance of Marc Godinot and Catherine Helgeson. Translations from the Dutch have been done either by my remarkable colleague and research assistant, Dr. Paul Storm, or by myself with assistance from Chiara Bols and Ida In’t Veldt. I am very grateful for such friends. In this book as in previous work we have done together, Paul Storm has demonstrated his invaluable ability to discover long-lost or-overlooked information. I cannot thank him enough for his inspired efforts.
Nonetheless, I am solely responsible for any errors in translation.
I wish to express my gratitude to the curators, scholars, and institutions that have kindly provided access, assistance, or information, and I apologize if I have overlooked any. Thanks to librarian Mrs. M. Gaspar-Raven of the Museum Bronbeek; Gerk Koopmans and Evert Kramer of the Fries Museum in Leeuwarden; Michiel van Halem of the Gemeente Archief, Leiden; and the Haanstraschool in Leiden. I am grateful for the invaluable assistance of Philippe Fernandez in obtaining permissions from France. My appreciation also goes to the Algemeen Rijksarchief, the Centraal Bureau voor Genealogie, the Nationaal Archief, and the Stichting Indische Familie Archief, all in The Hague; Gina Houwer at the Tropeninstituut in Amsterdam; Liesbeth Ouwehand of the KITLV, which housed a photograph of Mata Hari that is, to my knowledge, previously unpublished; the Legermuseum and its excellent library in Delft; the Public Record Office at Kew; Emmanuel Penicaut of the Service Historique de l’Armée de la Terre at Vincennes; Tristan Boos; Glenn Bruce; Tineke Hellwig; Christine Ruggere of the Institute of the History of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine; Ann Laura Stoller; and Julie Wheelwright.
As always, my closest friends and family have offered me a great deal of support and encouragement, without which I can never write. You know who you are. Thank you.
Prologue
The most important thing to know about Margaretha Zelle is that she loved men. The most crucial thing to know about her is that she did not love truth. When it was convenient, she told the truth. When it was not, or when she found the truth tedious, she invented what might be kindly called “alternative truths”—and unkindly, “lies.” For her, what was factually true never seemed as essential as what should have been true. By the time she had transformed herself into Mata Hari, she was highly skilled at fashioning the world to her liking.
She was a creation from beginning to end, a character in a play that she continuously rescripted. She changed her name as often as some women change hairstyles.
Only once in her life did she acknowledge this fact about herself, and it was when she was in prison, in imminent danger of being convicted of espionage and sentenced to death. The severe conditions of her imprisonment, the catastrophic collapse of the world she had created, and the brutal destruction of her identity had driven her very near to madness. With painful insight sharpened by her teetering on the edge of the abyss, she wrote to the man who was her captor, accuser, and interrogator, trying to explain:
There is something which I wish you to take into consideration, it is that Mata Hari and Madame Zelle MacLeod are two completely different women.
Today, because of the war, I am obliged to live under and to sign the name of Zelle, but this woman is unknown to the public.
I consider myself to be Mata Hari. For 12 years, I have lived under this name. I am known in all the countries and I have connections everywhere.
That which is permitted to Mata Hari—dancer—is certainly not permitted to Madame Zelle MacLeod.
That which happens to Mata Hari, they are the events which do not happen to Madame Zelle. The people who address one do not address the other.
This was probably the moment of her greatest self-understanding.
In this telling of her life I have steered as close to the truth as I am able—but in her case, the truth is an ever-shifting and elusive wind.
1
The Little Orchid
HE TAUGHT HER to think of herself as special. She was his little princess and he loved to show her off. He bought her wonderful dresses in vivid, flamboyant colors—once a dress of scarlet velvet that she wore to school. She twirled to show her father how the skirt flared out, and he beamed and told her she was beautiful. She did the same for her friends at Miss Buys’s exclusive school, and they looked at her with wide eyes. They pretended to be shocked, to think it was a scandalous dress for a girl her age, but she knew they were only jealous. They were better suited to the subdued colors they habitually wore. They could have afforded a
dress like hers easily, but they never could have worn such a garment with her flair. Their pallid skin and colorless hair and lack of personality condemned them. Only someone like her, with thick, darkly waving hair, compelling eyes, and café au lait skin—only someone whose very essence cried “Look at me!”—could get away with it.
One of her school friends in a moment of genius called her an orchid in a field of dandelions, and she was, even then. And she knew it. She knew it because she was different from everyone else. She knew it most of all because of the way her father treated her, as if she were infinitely precious. His love gave her a wonderful feeling.
She was born on August 7, 1876. Her younger brother, Johannes, was born two years after her, on November 26, 1878. Then in 1881, on September 9, came twin boys, Arie and Cornelius. The birth of her brothers never displaced Margaretha from her place in their father’s affection; she was always the favored child in his eyes. She probably believed he loved her more than he loved her mother.
Adam Zelle was the prosperous and handsome father of Margaretha Geertruida Zelle, the future Mata Hari, and her three brothers. She was his favorite child. (The Mata Hari Foundation/ Fries Museum)
On her sixth birthday, her father surprised her with a goat cart, a bokkenwagon. It was the most marvelous gift she had ever received. The vehicle was an exquisite miniature phaeton as fine as the ones the rich drove with their superb horses. Hers was pulled by a matched pair of stout goats with fine horns. All her friends clamored to go for a drive in it, and she loved indulging them. The neighbors clucked their tongues at the extravagance of such a gift, and for a little girl too! It would only make her vain and give her ideas about her own importance. They should have known that she already had those ideas, that she had learned them at her father’s knee.
The extraordinary goat-drawn phaeton was remembered by Margaretha’s former classmates and many others in the town decades later. “It was an amazing bit of foolhardiness, which put Margaretha absolutely in a class by herself!” So said one of her former friends in 1963, when she was well over eighty years old and Margaretha was long dead. Others spoke of the gift of the bokkenwagon as the most unforgettable event of their childhood years.
In 1882, on Margaretha’s sixth birthday, her father gave her a goat carriage—a magical and extravagant gift. (The Mata Hari Foundation/Fries Museum)
But that was typical of Adam Zelle: he loved to be noticed. His daughter was in some ways his most becoming accessory. He was vain about his full beard and his good looks. He always dressed well, in a top hat and flowered waistcoat that flattered him, to advertise the quality of the goods produced by his hat factory and for sale in his haberdashery. Some people called him “the Baron,” as a jibe at his pretension and posing, but he rather liked the nickname, assuming it was a recognition of his natural superiority.
In 1873 he had his greatest social triumphs, the first of which was marrying Antje van der Meulen from nearby Franeker. Although Antje was thirty-one years old, only two years his junior, and not a young woman in her first flush of marital eligibility, she was from a family with higher social standing than his. He felt the marriage was a major step up for a rising young merchant in a provincial capital in northern Holland. Later that year, Zelle was selected to be in the mounted Guard of Honor when King Willem III visited their town, Leeuwarden, in the province of Friesland. Zelle prided himself on his horsemanship and was honored to be selected to represent his town. He had his own portrait painted, showing him on horseback and in full uniform. Many years later Zelle presented it to the new Fries Museum as an important work it ought to display. It is a mediocre piece of art but an excellent example of Zelle’s personality.
Ten years after these triumphs, in 1883, Zelle’s haberdashery business was doing so well that he moved his growing family into a beautiful old brick house at 28 Groote Kerkstraat. It was a fine residence and doubtless he felt himself established as one of the most important burghers of Leeuwarden. He hired more servants and sent his pretty daughter to learn elegant manners, music (both singing and piano), exquisite handwriting, and French at Miss Buys’s school; his sons were growing into strong and good-looking boys, and he planned a good education for them, too. Although Amsterdamers might claim that Leeuwarden was rural and unsophisticated, Zelle felt the town in which he had been born and raised was an excellent place. It boasted nearly 27,000 inhabitants.
After another six years of acting the baron, Zelle found that Leeuwarden no longer seemed so splendid. His investments and business ventures went so far wrong that on February 18, 1889, he was forced to declare bankruptcy. The failure must have been a bitter comedown to a proud man. The news was probably a great shock to his family, for men of his background did not discuss financial matters with their wives and children. Leeuwarden was no longer a place where Zelle could live and hold up his head.
He left for The Hague on July 15 to look for work. His family was left behind, crowded into a cheap upstairs apartment on the Willemskade, a much less fashionable address than Groote Kerkstraat, with little money to live on. It was the family who had to face the pitying looks and whispered words about their sudden turn of fortune.
For Margaretha, her father’s departure for The Hague less than a month before her thirteenth birthday must have felt like a desertion. Didn’t Papa love her anymore? How could her birthday come with no goat carriages, no fancy dresses, no gifts from him at all? She was by then honing her excellent linguistic skills on English and German as well as French, but there was no loving Papa to applaud her academic triumphs or to admire her pretty dresses. He had left her, and the effect must have been shattering.
In 1889, Adam Zelle went bankrupt and divorced his wife, who died two years later of shame and poverty. The adolescent Margaretha was sent to live with relatives who found her difficult, with few prospects for a good marriage or a useful career. (The Mata Hari Foundation/Fries Museum)
After ten months, on May 31, 1890, Zelle returned to Leeuwarden and his family. Margaretha may have expected the golden days she remembered from her younger years to resume, but Zelle was unable to support his family and equally unable to reconcile with his wife. The neighbors overheard violent quarrels. By the end of the summer, the couple filed for a legal separation, which was granted on September 4. In conservative Friesland in the nineteenth century, a legal separation was a scandalous act, fuel for gossip and smug or knowing nodding of heads. A decent man and his wife would simply have come to an unspoken agreement and lived apart. But a legal separation? Even in disgrace, they might have said, that man Zelle had to call attention to himself.
Zelle moved to Amsterdam, nearly ninety miles away, where he was soon living openly with another woman. His wife stayed in Leeuwarden trying to hold her family together. On May 10, 1891, Antje Zelle died. The announcement in the newspaper read:
This day it pleased the supreme architect of the universe, to take away from this earth, after a grievous suffering from February 21, 1889, my dearly beloved wife, loving mother of four helpless children, Mrs. Anna van der Meulen Zelle, at the age of 49 years. Adam Zelle Corneliszoon [son of Cornelius].
The date mentioned—February 21, 1889—was three days after the public declaration of Adam Zelle’s bankruptcy. There is no evidence of what happened on this date; perhaps it took three days for the word to spread throughout Leeuwarden that “the Baron” was bankrupt. Perhaps Antje had only enough courage to hold her head up for three days against the titters and snubs that plagued her. The intertwined causes of Antje’s “grievous suffering” were almost certainly humiliation and poverty.
On the afternoon of Antje’s funeral, piano music was heard issuing from the Zelle household by those passing in the street. People in Leeuwarden were surprised, even shocked. Music was considered an entertainment and hence indecorous in a house of mourning. “I was playing; it was the pain I felt,” Margaretha told a friend solemnly, enjoying the opportunity to dramatize her sorrow just a bit.
Neighbors looke
d after the Zelle children for some weeks while more permanent arrangements were made. In November, Johannes, the older boy, was sent to Antje’s family in nearby Franeker. The twins were sent to their father in Amsterdam, but Margaretha—M’Greet as she was usually called by then—was not. Instead she was sent to live with her uncle and godfather, Mr. Visser, and his wife, in the small Friesian town of Sneek.
The depth of M’Greet’s feelings of outrage and betrayal can only be imagined. She had always been her father’s favorite; she was now almost a woman, nearly fifteen years old, and she had suffered what were to her terrible deprivations because of the family’s sudden poverty and social downfall. Why didn’t Papa come and take her to Amsterdam? Why did he take the twins and not her?
The answer can never be known, but it would not be surprising if Zelle’s new woman refused to have M’Greet in the house. The girl was vain and self-centered and used to having her father indulge her. Money was still tight; the couple did not live in a good section of Amsterdam. It was less onerous to take on twin ten-year-old boys than a spoiled teen-aged girl who loved extravagant clothes and being the center of attention.
From M’Greet’s point of view, her mother had died and her beloved father—the handsome papa who had made life magical and fun, the man she bent every energy to please—had rejected her twice. She felt she was practically an orphan. In all likelihood, she was sulky, petulant, and angry, not an easy guest in her godfather’s home. Sneek was a small town in which respectability and conformity were of paramount importance to everyone except, perhaps, M’Greet. There was little to distract her from her misery.
What seems clear is that the Vissers tried hard to reform the headstrong girl. Within weeks, they told her she was unlikely ever to attract a husband. She was dark and flat-chested; she had grown to five feet nine inches tall, an awkward height in an era when the minimum height for men in the military was five feet; she had no dowry; and her family name had been disgraced. No one would ever want to marry her. The Vissers felt she had best begin thinking of how she was going to earn her living. Fancy languages, a fine hand, and piano playing were not very marketable skills. One obvious alternative, domestic service, was unthinkable to a proud girl like M’Greet. Since her grandmother van der Meulen had allotted five thousand florins for the education of the Zelle children after Antje’s death, perhaps she should attend some sort of training school.