by Pat Shipman
Her first few performances were private, starting in the home of Madame Kiréevsky, a society hostess who favored new artists. Francis Keyzer, a correspondent from London for the society magazine The King, got himself invited to the exclusive performance at Madame Kiréevsky’s and wrote a lengthy article on February 4, 1905. He was entranced by what he saw:
Vague rumors had reached me of a woman from the Far East, a native of Java, wife of an officer, who had come to Europe, laden with perfumes and jewels, to introduce some of the richness of the Oriental color and life into the satiated society of European cities; of veils encircling and discarded, of the development of passion as the fruits of the soil, of a burst of fresh, free life, of Nature in all its strength untrammeled by civilization….
The door opened. A tall dark figure glided in. Her arms were folded upon her breast beneath a mass of flowers. For a few seconds she stood motionless, her eyes fixed upon a statue of Siva at the end of the room.
Her olive skin blended with the curious jewels in the dead gold setting. A casque of worked gold upon her dark hair—an authentic Eastern head-dress; a breastplate of similar workmanship beneath the arms. Above a transparent white robe, a quaint clasp held a scarf around the hips, the ends falling to the feet in front. She was enshrouded in various veils of delicate hues, symbolizing beauty, youth, love, chastity, voluptuousness and passion.
The first notes of a plaintive weird melody were sounded and with slow, undulating, tiger-like movements she advanced towards the God. It was an appeal to the spirit of evil, an invocation to help her avenge a wrong. Her eyes shone with the fire of revenge when she began, but after a while a softer light crept into them as she strove to win the favor of the Deity. Then the movements became more and more intense, more feverish, more eager. She first threw flowers and then divested herself, one by one, of the veils, implying that, as a sacrifice, she gave beauty, youth, love, etc.; and finally worked to a state of frenzy, unclasped her belt and fell in a swoon at Siva’s feet.
Siva is the Hindu god of destruction and of transformation, symbolizing the new creation that follows annihilation. The choice of Siva as the focus of Gresha’s first dance was singularly apt.
Whether Gresha explained the symbolism of her dance to Keyzer or not, his words vividly evoke the enormous impact her performance had upon spectators. Perhaps unwittingly, the dance held stunning parallels to her own life: the appeal for help in avenging a great wrong, followed by the sacrifice of first her beauty, then her youth, and virtue after virtue in mounting desperation; then, symbolically, the giving of her entire sexual being to the god of destruction in order to triumph.
Touches like the motionless pause after she entered, the slow unveiling of her body, and the increasing frenzy of her passionate movements were calculated to capture her audience. Neither traditional ballet nor Isadora Duncan’s “classical” dances were her models. Her steps, poses, and movements made little reference to those forms of dance; what she did was entirely new. She offered spectacle, emotion, and the mystery of the Orient, which was just beginning to be fashionable. Keyzer concluded, “Lady MacLeod is Venus.”
Her costumes, recorded in contemporary photographs, owed much to the costumes of traditional court dancers in Java. Something of the Javanese style can be seen in some of her postures, the undulating movements of the arms and the sweeping use of loosely draped cloths or veils. There are hints of the Javanese style of dance, said to be derived from marionettes, in the angulation of her wrists and elbows, but she was certainly not accurately reproducing dances she had learned in Java. Her dances were her own.
She created a sensation. After her performance at Madame Kiréevsky’s, she was invited to dance at the Musée Guimet, a museum of Oriental art assembled by the prosperous Émile Guimet, an industrialist from Lyon who had traveled and collected extensively in the East. His Paris museum had opened in 1889. Having a much-sought-after new dancer perform the fascinating sacred dances of the Orient in his museum was just the event to draw a crowd of Paris’s elite, aristocratic, and wealthy art lovers. Her debut was scheduled for March 13, with a second performance the following night. It is said that Guimet made a valuable suggestion: rather than dancing as Lady Gresha MacLeod, she should adopt a stage name that was suitably enigmatic and evocative.
Two young Wayang dancers demonstrate the traditional movements and costumes of this Javanese form of the dance. Mata Hari must have seen similar performances in the Dutch East Indies. (Author’s collection)
She chose to become Mata Hari. Guimet is sometimes credited with inventing the name, but that is most unlikely. The Malay phrase mata hari was often used in the Dutch East Indies to mean “sunrise,” or, more literally, “the eye of the day.” One of her childhood friends in Leeuwarden recalled reading a letter in 1897 or 1898—the first year or two of the MacLeods’ residence in the Dutch East Indies—in which she spoke of becoming a dancer and using the name Mata Hari. In Padang, Sumatra, there was a Masonic lodge known as the Loge Mata Hari. Rudolf MacLeod may have visited the Loge Mata Hari because the brother of his old friend de Balbian Verster was a member.
There was more to becoming Mata Hari than simply changing her name; Gresha had to re-create herself in a new persona. She later told G. H. Priem:
In the beginning, [my career was] less in the artistic domain, but from the moment that I introduced my Javanese dances my fate was quickly decided. I liked life there, I received protection of the richest strangers and I did not lack the skill to profit from that.
At the time that I appeared onstage in Paris, I chose an Indian name for the theater and in daily life I used the name of my husband. People who thought that I was English or Scottish, I left them under that impression….
At this moment, I enjoy my passion for theater with full rein. More than I could ever think, I see now, that all success depends on attendant circumstances. I was pretty—why may I not say it now also one time?—and the people, the men, they love a pretty woman. They like to see much of a pretty woman until the border of the indiscreet. I have never been afraid to catch a cold, remember my décolletés, which my husband tried to forbid. Well then, I started to use décolletés, and to use décolletés more and more. With every veil I threw off, my success rose. Pretending to consider my dances very artistic and full of character, thus praising my art, they came to see nudity, and that is still the case.
Later, she continued: “I act as thousands do; I speculate on sensuality; I behave coquettishly, and flirt now and again with a full house, that comes easily to me, that came always easily to me.”
Here, Priem reported that Mata Hari laughed. “The artistic cachet to which I connect everything, that protects me against banality.”
The artistic cachet, in any case, protected her against charges of indecency.
Guimet invited a carefully selected six hundred of Paris’s most chic and fashionable to attend Mata Hari’s debut at his museum on March 13, 1905. There were artists, musicians, writers, aristocrats, intellectuals, officers, diplomats, ministers, and bankers—hundreds of powerful men with their well-dressed wives or bejeweled mistresses on their arms, all crowding into the museum to see this extraordinary new dancer of whom everyone was speaking. Those who had already seen her at Madame Kiréevsky’s were anxious to establish their credentials as among the first to have seen her; those who had not yet experienced one of her performances were eager to know if she was as mesmerizing and beautiful as gossip claimed.
Guimet had transformed the domed library into a semblance of an Indian temple, with flowers and vines wrapped around the stately columns that supported the dome. The room was dimly lit by dozens of candles that provided enough illumination for the audience to see a rare eleventh-century bronze of a dancing Siva, his four arms extended in strange and sinuous postures, with a circle of flames surrounding his body like a bizarre halo. A hidden orchestra played music with an Asian flavor, said to be inspired by melodies from Java and India. Monsieur Guimet gave a brief introd
uction, and then the performance began.
Mata Hari entered the spotlight wearing a costume of the type that would become her signature: an elaborate, golden, jeweled headdress of vaguely Javanese design; a beaded metallic bra; a set of diaphanous lengths of cloth, or slendangs, that were wrapped around her shoulders, torso, and waist, with others that hung to the floor. She wore large, dangling earrings, a necklace, bracelets of exotic design, and armlets that clasped around her upper arms. Her feet were bare and her flimsy garments did little to conceal her naked body. Her dances were emotional, voluptuous, erotic, and utterly novel. The symbolism was obvious enough for the audience to understand, subtle enough to support her claim that these were ancient, sacred dances of the Orient. Above all, she was a consummate and captivating performer.
Margaretha’s first performance as Mata Hari took place at the Musée Guimet, a museum of Oriental art in Paris. A journalist wrote, “Wearing a casque on her head like a peacock’s, the mark of a god, the sharp sword in her fist, the kris between her teeth, she coils around her waist an opaque and gleaming belt, throws around her hips transparent material marked with the emblem of the divine bird…. She cries for vengeance….” (Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resources NY—Musée Guimet des Arts Asiatiques-Guimet, Paris, France)
One source reported that Mata Hari gave a brief explanation—repeated in French, English, Dutch, German, and Malay—between dances:
My dance is a sacred poem in which each movement is a word and whose every word is underlined by music.
The temple in which I dance can be vague or faithfully reproduced, as here today. For I am the temple.
All true temple dances are religious in nature and all explain, in gestures and poses, the rules of the sacred texts.
One must always translate the three stages which correspond to the divine attributes of Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva—creation, fecundity, destruction…. By means of destruction toward creation through incarnation, that is what I am dancing—that is what my dance is about.
If this account is correct, the simple exposition was a brilliant element in Mata Hari’s performance, designed to demonstrate her refinement and to evoke the mysteries of Eastern religions.
The day after her debut at the musée, newspaper reporters and attendees vied to find lavish enough praise for what they had seen. For an audience who had been used to the set pieces of formal ballet, or even Isadora Duncan’s looser interpretations of classical themes, Mata Hari’s type of dance was thrilling, daring, and exotic.
The Gallic thanked Monsieur Guimet for bringing such a talent to the public, praising Mata Hari as “so feline, extremely feminine, majestically tragic, the thousand curves and movements of her body trembling in a thousand rhythms…far from the conventional entrechats of our classic dancers.” Parisian Life wrote coyly about “Lady MacLeod, that is to say Mata Hari, the Indian dancer, voluptuous and tragic, who dances naked in the latest salons. She wears the costume of the bayadère [female Javanese court dancer], as much simplified as possible, and toward the end, she simplifies it even a little more.”
The Flash referred to the evening’s performance as “an exotic spectacle yet deeply austere”; the latter adjective hardly sounds like a realistic description of a dance performed in a set dressed with vegetation and hung lavishly with flowers, performed by a dancer clothed in colorful, diaphanous garments to the strains of haunting music. Of Mata Hari herself, the reviewer wrote: “She is tall and slender and supple like the sacred serpents balanced erect by snake charmers; her flexible body takes the shape of the undulations of the flames, and then suddenly she freezes in her contortions, like the wavy edge of a kris.”
The Press’s reviewer, Henri Ferrare, gives an account of a passionate performance that shows why Mata Hari was so immediately successful:
Mata Hari does not perform only with her feet, her eyes, her arms, her mouth, her red lips; Mata Hari…dances with her muscles, with her entire body, thus surpassing ordinary methods. Wearing a casque on her head like a peacock’s, the mark of a god, the sharp sword in her fist, the kris between her teeth, she coils around her waist an opaque and gleaming belt, throws around her hips transparent material marked with the emblem of the divine bird. This time she penetrates alone into the sanctuary, she goes to implore Soubramayen, god of the stars, to deliver an unfaithful lover; she cries for vengeance, asks how to grasp the traitor; slowly, skillfully, she poisons the two blades, then she watches, like a spy, perceives her victim…. Then the purple belt unrolls, slowly, imitating the flowing blood, the weapon trembles until the hand of the priestess plunges it at last into the heart of the cursed lover. Savagely, she brandishes her victorious blade.
Although several newspapers mention that she was assisted by four young women dressed in black as nautch girls—erotic Indian dancers—their main function was to chant when required or to cover her nearly naked body with veils when she collapsed at the close of the first dance.
Without doubt, it was Mata Hari’s unparalleled ability to dramatize herself and to convey emotion in a convincing fashion that earned her success. As she had been since childhood, the woman who now faced the world as Mata Hari was exotic, hyperbolic, emotional, and fascinating: a star. Her frequent changes of identity were over; she had found the one that fit. She would never again be anyone except Mata Hari.
9
The Toast of Europe
MATA HARI’S PERFORMANCES were hugely popular. During 1905, she danced more than thirty times in theaters like the Trocadéro and in exclusive salons at the homes of those such as the banker Baron Henri de Rothschild, the chocolate king Gaston de Menier, the actress Cecil Sorel, and soprano Emma Calvé of the Metropolitan Opera in New York. From the performance at Menier’s came a series of photographs that show her dancing completely nude in his conservatory, which was filled with tropical plants, and a letter from her smitten host extolling the “Oriental dream” she had created and praising “the lines of your beautiful body.”
The French novelist Colette was present at the performance at Menier’s and remarked cattily, after Mata Hari was dead, “She did not actually dance, but with graceful movements shed her clothes. She arrived fairly naked at her recitals, danced ‘vaguely’ with downcast eyes, and would disappear enveloped in her veils.”
Colette may not have regarded Mata Hari’s performances as dance or art, but a wide and enraptured audience did. Even Colette’s cutting criticisms did not prevent her friend Natalie Barney from having Mata Hari dance not once but three times at her notorious lesbian garden parties in Neuilly. Once Mata Hari made her entrance as Lady Godiva naked on a white horse.
Another journalist described her dance: “Her movements became more and more intense, more feverish, more eager. She first threw flowers and then divested herself, one by one, of the veils, implying that, as a sacrifice, she gave beauty, youth, love, etc.; and finally worked to a state of frenzy, unclasped her belt and fell in a swoon at Siva’s feet.” (The Mata Hari Museum/Fries Museum)
Mata Hari kept a scrapbook and pasted into it every newspaper review, every photograph, and many letters, and she kept notes about the size of the audiences. She was in her element and elated by her success. There were many reporters anxious to interview her, and she told them varied and clever stories of her past, none of which corresponded closely with the truth. She was the daughter of a temple dancer in India, or perhaps the Indies, who had died giving birth to her…she was taken as a child to become a sacred temple dancer…she had been rescued by a Scottish lord, George MacLeod, who married her and then tragically died…he was a colonel, not a lord…she was European but born in Java…she was half-caste…she was purely Indian…The point was not to tell the truth about her ancestry but to tell a story that helped create the public persona of Mata Hari. Her life became an unending performance, both onstage and off.
Despite or perhaps because of the smokescreen of stories about her origins in the Dutch East Indies, Mata Hari soon became a subject of interest in
Holland. Might she be Dutch? On April 19, The News of the Day repeated portions of some of the French reviews of her dancing and posed the apt question: “Who can Mata Hari be?”
The answer, given in an article in the monthly publication Today’s Woman, was this:
Mata Hari’s real name is Mrs. MacLeod. She was born on Java and married an English officer. Being a passionate lover of the dance, she studied its movements with never ending patience. Through a cunning ruse which, had it been detected, might have cost her her life, she managed to be admitted to the secret temples of India, where far beyond the reach of profane eyes the bayadères, nautches and vadashis dance before the altar of Vishnu. Her sense of postures and poses was so amazingly innate that even the fanatical priests who guard the golden altar regarded her as a holy dancer.
Both the question and the answer echo faithfully the stories that Mata Hari had spun for eager journalists, raising the issue of whether or not she somehow contrived both the original article and the letter to the editor.
Another Dutch journalist followed up on the sensational story, writing in the New Rotterdam Daily on May 31:
Mata Hari! Strange, well-modulated name, which suddenly resounded throughout Paris, through the smart and political Paris—a name that floats on the lips of the common man like something secret, unbelievable, far out of reach.
Priestess, dancer, lady? People ask—and guess. It is said that four ministers of State invited her to supper and that in the intimacy of their dining room she regaled them with her art.