by Pat Shipman
On a visit to Mata Hari’s hotel room, the writer found her “a tall and slender, chic young woman, beautiful, with dark complexion, gay, dressed in a smart suit, straw hat with dark-red flowers, who smiles, talks, who moves gracefully and with ease through the room—Mata Hari! Yes, she says, she is Dutch, she is Mrs. MacLeod.”
As the journalist questioned her, she alluded vaguely—cleverly—to her deep knowledge of Oriental dance and art, and to a most unpleasant and difficult time when she first arrived in Paris and was forced into modeling and circus riding. In the midst of a sentimental and novelistic account, the journalist abruptly perceived and revealed the essence of Mata Hari’s story:
Suddenly she is no longer the plain young woman, suddenly she becomes a strange, energetic, proud human being—proud indeed, too proud to accept defeat, too proud to be ugly, or small or helpless, too proud to be without talent. She laughs about herself and talks about a thousand things, about all the people she has met so suddenly in the very center of that high society, among the fabulously glittering crowd that constitutes Parisian life.
This newspaper publicity was invaluable for building the mystique that surrounded the name of Mata Hari. She was fast becoming an icon, a symbol of all that was deeply female, mysterious, exotic, and wildly erotic.
Unfortunately, the publicity also drew Rudolf MacLeod’s attention to his estranged wife’s successes and caused him real embarrassment. Who would want to be the man who had been deserted by a sex symbol like Mata Hari? In rural, conservative Velp, Rudolf struggled to hold on to his own respectability by blackening Mata Hari’s reputation. He was afraid he would hear cruel whispers about the Dutch woman from Java who danced nude in Paris, the woman who was once married to the retired major with the dark-haired daughter, Non.
The biggest problem was that in 1906 Rudolf wished to marry again. His intended was Elisabetha Martina Christina van der Mast, a woman twenty-eight years his junior. He could no longer deny his connection to Mata Hari, and so he chose the only option left to him, seeking to divorce her, citing as grounds her immoral behavior, indecency, and adultery. His attorney went to Paris to persuade Mata Hari not to fight for custody of her daughter. She deferred the matter for weeks, with charm, with diversions, and with claims that she so enjoyed speaking Dutch again that it was a pity to discuss unpleasant matters. At last he produced a photograph of her dancing nude and threatened to produce the photo in court if she contested the divorce or fought for custody. Both he and she knew full well that any Dutch judge would regard her as depraved if this item was entered as evidence. With supporting testimony from the retired general MacLeod in Nijmegen, “Aunt Sweerts,” and Vice Admiral MacLeod, Rudolf was readily awarded custody of Nonnie, despite protests from Adam Zelle on his daughter’s behalf. The divorce was granted on April 26, 1906.
The grounds for the divorce were
A photograph of Mata Hari wearing her striking headdress was featured on the cover of the magazine Monsieur et Madame in October 1905. (The Mata Hari Foundation/Fries Museum)
—that she had carnal knowledge of other men and by consequence rendered herself a culpable adulteress, which is the motive for divorce;
—that the defendant who lives actually in Paris produces in the aforesaid city in the cafés, concerts, and the circuses and there executes the so-called brahmanique dances and presents herself almost entirely nude;
—that she also posed entirely nude as a model for a sculptor and this work of sculpture was offered to public view;
—that these facts must qualify as indecent extravagances….
The claim of adultery was judged to be supported by this evidence.
In the meantime, Mata Hari had achieved a new level of professional success. Working through a civil lawyer, Edouard Clunet, who was many years her senior and besotted with her, Mata Hari acquired a manager-cum-agent, Gabriel Astruc. Astruc was a top impresario who handled great artists such as the singer Chaliapin, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, the dancer Nijinsky, the composer Igor Stravinsky, and many others; he later founded the Théâtre de Champs-Elysées in Paris to provide a venue for more innovative and daring musical performances. Astruc booked her into the Olympia Theater in Paris—a high-class music hall—for a performance of “Le Rêve” (The Dream), with music by George Bing, in the autumn of 1905. For the first time, a large audience could watch Mata Hari perform, and the public was eager to do so. She gave an advance performance on August 18 and opened on August 20, earning the magnificent sum of 10,000 francs, which had a buying power equivalent to about $42,000 in today’s currency.
Once again, the reviewers struggled to find superlative adjectives with which to describe Mata Hari’s dancing. The reviewer for The Journal wrote glowingly: “Mata Hari personifies all the poetry of India, its mysticism, its voluptuousness, its languor, its hypnotizing charm. To see Mata Hari in a rhythm and with attitudes that are poems of wild voluptuous grace is an unforgettable spectacle, a really paradise-like dream.” The review in The Press sounds rather like a love letter, exclaiming, “One would need special words, new words to explain the tender and charming art of Mata Hari! Maybe one could simply say that this woman is rhythm, thus to indicate, as closely as possible, the poetry which emanates from this magnificently supple and beautiful body.”
Mata Hari was such a popular performer that a series of postcards showing her dancing was issued in 1905–1906. Her costume resembled that of true Wayang dancers but was much more transparent—a move calculated to appeal to her audience. (Author’s collection)
I longed to live as a colorful butterfly in the sun….” Mata Hari to journalist G. H. Priem. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Other newspapers and magazines were similarly entranced with Mata Hari, and the performances at the Olympia continued to fill the house.
On October 8, 1905, Mata Hari wrote to her father again, telling him of her joy in her success at the Olympia Theater, and adding:
You ask me, Dad, if I want to know what is happening in Holland. No, Dad, I don’t want to know anything. It would hurt me and make me sad. I have overcome everything. At the moment I have my own carriage and within a month I go to Russia where I can enjoy myself. I am still very beautiful, healthy, and full of life. I don’t fall in love with anyone and I like this kind of life. Never ever will I go back to the brute MacLeod—and I don’t have to depend on the hospitality of his family [any longer]. I thank God that I took the train to Paris. Now I am compensating for all the abuse I suffered from MacLeod and I am happy. I know MacLeod and his sister live in Velp; that [Non] of course has no clothes and will be polluted by a woman like [Tante Frida], who doesn’t ever clean herself, but my dear God, I cannot do anything about it! I know that nobody gave me anything when I was poor and I know that everybody is wonderful when I have money.
In the meantime, typically, Mata Hari was spending more than her generous income. In October she was sued by a Paris jeweler to whom she owed 12,000 francs—about $57,000 in today’s currency—and who agreed, after the effective intervention of Edouard Clunet, to allow her to keep her jewels if she paid him 2,000 francs a month. The debts were of little concern to her; success continued to follow success.
On November 1, Astruc arranged for her to sign a contract to dance in the opera Le Roi de Lahore (The King of Lahore), the premiere of which had established Jules Massenet as the most popular composer of the day. A new production was being mounted in Monte Carlo in February 1906. Obtaining a role in a serious and much-loved opera signaled Mata Hari’s acceptance as a professional artist.
After her enormous theatrical success, Mata Hari was considered the most desirable woman in Paris. She was photographed at social events and fashionable spas. (The Mata Hari Foundation/Fries Museum)
Before she left for the opera engagement, she danced for two weeks in Madrid, where her dances were pronounced “discreetly voluptuous” by reviewers. Not only did she enchant her Spanish audiences, but she also began a romantic relationship with Jules Cam
bon, the French ambassador in Madrid. Cambon was an important diplomat, who had been ambassador to the United States and negotiated the settlement of the Spanish-American War. Enamored of his new mistress, Cambon hosted a reception for her at which he pronounced her “a true ambassadress of France.” Another prominent romantic conquest was the diplomat Henri de Marguérie. Both Cambon and de Marguérie figured importantly during Mata Hari’s espionage trial.
Her next engagement after Madrid was Monte Carlo, where the new production of Massenet’s opera opened to considerable acclaim. Both Massenet and Giacomo Puccini were in the audience and sent her notes of admiration afterward. Massenet was enamored of the much younger dancer, and after visiting her in Berlin, where her next performances were, he wrote her a passionate note: “How happy I have been to see you again! Mata, Mata,—I am leaving for Paris within a few minutes! Thank you, thank you—and my fervent admiration.”
She left a trail of smitten admirers behind her wherever she went in Europe.
In Berlin, she captured the German imagination and became the mistress of Lieutenant Alfred Kiepert of the Eleventh Westphalian Hussars, Crefeld. Like many other celebrated beauties in the theater, she found no conflict in being both a well-known performer and a much-admired courtesan. Kiepert established her in an apartment in the western part of Berlin, on the Nachodstrasse, to keep her well away from his beautiful and jealous Hungarian wife. Having a mistress was hardly shocking in those times, and Kiepert made no particular attempt to keep Mata Hari out of sight, only to keep her away from his wife. Mata Hari tried to forget the unpleasantness of Rudolf’s suit for divorce in the luxury of being loved and kept by a powerful man. According to Mata Hari’s own later testimony, “I remained three years with him. He set me up in Berlin, we traveled a great deal and because he was very rich, he kept me sumptuously. In December 1906 and January 1907, I danced in Vienna where he accompanied me.”
Mata Hari’s appearance in Vienna provoked what was later called the “war of tights” as she competed with two other well-known dancers who performed in scanty costumes: Isadora Duncan and Maud Allan. Duncan had shocked the world by dancing corsetless, with naked legs, in loosely draped garments that vaguely resembled togas, but was well established as a dancer years before Mata Hari made her debut in Paris. Maud Allan was a rising young dancer who was achieving considerable fame for playing the seductive Salome, who demanded the head of John the Baptist on a platter. She wore breastplates, jewelry, and a headdress not unlike the one worn by Mata Hari, who regarded her as little more than a cheap imitator. Underplaying Allan’s talents, Mata Hari referred to her as one of a group of “ladies who style themselves ‘Eastern dancers’ [who] have sprung out of the ground and honor me with imitation.” She scorned the dancers who now crowded the music halls, dancing in pseudo-Eastern costumes and performing with snakes, remarking, “Born in Java, in the midst of tropical vegetation, I have been taught from my earliest childhood the deep meaning of these dances which constitute a cult, a religion. Only those born and bred there become impregnated with their religious significance, and can impart to them that solemn note to which they can lay claim.”
Such pronouncements are astonishing in the extent that they boldly contradict the truth of Mata Hari’s life. That she could and did, repeatedly, express such sentiments with heartfelt seriousness shows her remarkable ability to convince herself of new versions of reality. She believed her own lies, which was the key to her sincerity.
Mata Hari apparently won the rivalry with Isadora Duncan, with Maud Allan coming in a poor third. The New Vienna Journal shouted, “Isadora Duncan is dead! Long live Mata Hari!” Her fluency in the German language, not matched by either Allan or Duncan, was a major advantage. Critics and reviewers who were native German-speakers commented on both her charm—an attribute that does not always come across when a translator is at work—and beauty. An interviewer for Foreign News described her as “slender and tall, with the flexible grace of a wild animal and blue-black hair…a small face that makes a strange foreign impression. Forehead and nose are of classical shape—as if copied from antiquity. Black long lashes throw a shadow on her eyes, and the eyebrows are so finely and so gracefully bent that it seems as if they were drawn by an artist.”
She enchanted interviewer after interviewer, telling each a slightly new version of her life story and ancestry; to one she claimed her Friesian grandmother was the daughter of a Javanese prince.
She appeared, at least briefly, onstage completely nude in the Secession Hall after dropping the proverbial seven veils. At the Apollo Theater, she continued to persuade audiences that her dances were art, not pornography. The theater was packed every night, even if a few critics suggested her dances might not be authentically Indian. The public adored her.
Vienna was not a complete triumph for Mata Hari. Kiepert’s wife and family, tired of his spending large amounts of money on such a notorious woman, issued an ultimatum, and he was forced to break off with her. As Mata Hari later explained the situation, “His family having given him an order to abandon me under penalty of a judiciary council, he separated from me and gave me 300,000 marks.” It was an enormous sum of money, equivalent to well over one million dollars in today’s currency.
Adam Zelle was proud of his daughter’s success and—being as ever short of money—thought he might profit from her fame. He contacted a publisher with some material for a potential biography of his daughter, but when the publisher consulted Rudolf MacLeod and learned more of the truth, he withdrew from the deal. Undaunted, Zelle was able to publish his work, which was highly critical of Rudolf and blamed most of the marital problems on him, with C. J. G. Veldt. Revealingly, the book was called The Novel of Mata Hari, Mrs. M. G. MacLeod Zelle: The Biography of My Daughter and My Grievances Against Her Former Husband.
The second word of the title in the original Dutch, roman, can be translated into English as either “romance” or “novel.” It was apparently a concession to those who might object to a few loose interpretations of the truth. The book was supposedly written by Mata Hari herself on a ship en route to America and contained numerous highly sentimental internal dialogues and musings on her feelings and fate that Zelle invented entirely. Mata Hari never went to America and wrote nothing in the book save a premarital letter to Rudolf and a series of letters to her father from the Indies, which Zelle presented in their entirety. Zelle’s intent in writing the book, other than making money, was to air his grievances against MacLeod especially because he had attacked Mata Hari’s reputation during the divorce proceedings. Zelle’s version of Mata Hari’s life was blatantly slanted, designed to emphasize her youth and innocence when they married and his gambling, jealousy, and violent temper. The Mata Hari of Zelle’s book was a thoroughly romanticized and sentimental young woman treated badly by a dreadful older husband.
Mata Hari performed in Vienna in 1906–1907, vanquishing her dance rivals, Isadora Duncan and Maud Allan. Her German lover at the time, Alfred Kiepert, provided a parting gift of 300,000 marks, the equivalent of more than $1,000,000 in today’s currency. (The Mata Hari Foundation/Fries Museum)
It was not long before a lawyer, G. H. Priem, undertook to investigate the truth of Zelle’s claims for himself. He wrote up his interviews with Mata Hari, which contradicted some of the “facts” Zelle had presented. His seventy-two-page book was entitled The Naked Truth about Mata Hari.
Despite his initial bias against her, Mata Hari managed to disarm Priem with her candor and charisma. They spoke in Dutch, but he recorded their conversation as being sprinkled with French and German words, writing:
A charming woman, indeed; slender, pretty, in the eyes something cool, beautiful eyes…. She had spirit, she was truly a woman to turn somebody’s head, especially now as she fell at the sofa at full length and took a cigarette out of the case that lay before her on a small table. She said “It doesn’t annoy you, if I smoke?” With the nonchalance of an amusing friend she offered me the case: “Please!”<
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I followed her example and we spiraled the blue smoke upward for a moment, without saying anything. “And may I now know?” she asked then. I took out of my inside pocket The Novel of Mata-Hari, “that you were so kind to send to me directly.” “Je sais!” [I know!] She laughed. “What a joke, eh? Exquisite! Did you read it? But of course. How can I ask something like that? And what do you say of it?’
“Pardon, Madam, but I thought, that I came for an interview and not you!”
“That is true!” she laughed. “Please yourself!”
“What do you say about this book?”
“I? I do not say anything about it! Do you think that they make money out of it?”
“I think so.”
“Well, that is the Hauptsache [main point]! What do I care, what they say about me in Holland! I am happy that I am out of it and I do not wish to go back.”
“But why do you ask if I think that they make money out of it?”
“Well, everything started of course in the first place because of that!”
“And your father says that he does this for the honor of his daughter….”
She burst out laughing. “I read it too! Heavenly! Heavenly!”
“You read it too? But of course, you have written the book yourself?”
“I? Writing a book? For God’s sake! With my legs, yes!”
In his interviews, Priem obtained greater frankness from Mata Hari and a clearer perspective on her character than almost anyone else.
She spoke so calmly, so pleasantly, that I got the idea that her brains were excellent and that she even possessed a somewhat philosophical talent. Apparently, she had thought a lot about her own life in connection with the world as she lived it, and she possessed an honesty and open-heartedness which one finds more often in such natures, but in this case carried by a great measure of wise insight.