Femme Fatale

by Pat Shipman

  Early in 1914 she decided to prepare a new dance, based on ancient Egyptian culture. Whether to research her dance at the outstanding German museums, which had unparalleled collections of Egyptian antiquities, or for financial and romantic reasons, she returned to Berlin. Although she was the mistress of Constant Bazet, director of a prominent banking firm, she also took up again with Alfred Kiepert. A gossip columnist noticed the couple “talking animatedly and confidentially in a booth in one of the most fashionable restaurants in town” and concluded, coyly, that France (Mata Hari) had vanquished Austro-Hungary (Kiepert’s wife was Hungarian). The writer wondered if she had returned because she had spent the “several hundred thousand [marks] which she had received from Mr. K. as a farewell present”—apparently this arrangement was publicly known—or whether she had returned out of affection. The use of the pseudonym, Mr. K., spawned a rumor that her lover was in fact the Crown Prince Wilhelm—the Kronprinz, in German—himself. In May, Mata Hari signed a contract to dance for six months at the Metropol in Berlin, starting in September of 1914 with a very respectable salary of 48,000 marks (nearly $220,000 in modern currency).

  In Berlin, Mata Hari began to feel more acutely the change that was coming over Europe. The Belle Époque—golden era of art, science, and culture in France that began in about 1890 and lasted until the beginning of the First World War—was an era of lavish spending and open luxury; successful men had beautiful mistresses who were paraded openly and received in society, sometimes even holding intellectual salons. In 1914 a darker, more puritanical mood was sweeping across Europe and the days of exuberant living were drawing to a close. When she told Kiepert of her upcoming engagement at the Metropol in the autumn, he remarked cryptically, “You will be there before then and so will I.” Another lover, Captain Lieutenant Runtze, who was chief of the seaplane station at Pützig, made similar vague but ominous predictions. Something great was happening that would transform the world in a process that would be anything but pleasant.

  In late July, shortly after the invasion of Serbia by the Austrians, Mata Hari was dining one evening in a private room—the sort reserved by wealthy men for intimate adventures—of a fashionable restaurant with one of her lovers, a chief of police, Herr Griebel.

  We heard the noise of a great disturbance. This demonstration was certainly spontaneous and Griebel, who had not any warning of it, took me in his car to the place where it was held. I saw an enormous mob that was giving way to a frenetic demonstration in front of the Emperor’s palace and shouting, “Deutschland über Alles!” [Germany over all!] Several days later war was declared. At that time, the police were treating foreigners like animals. Several times, I was stopped in the street and transported to the station, because they were absolutely convinced I was Russian.

  She was anxious to return to Paris and her lovely house at Neuilly, lest it and her possessions be seized—she was not a French citizen. She attempted to break her contract at the theater, arguing that war was an act of God. Her costumier, who had not yet been paid, seized her furs and her jewelry and refused to hand them over without payment. Her German agent held on to her money and the bank froze her accounts, as she was a longtime resident of France and Germany was at war with France.

  On August 6, with hardly any money, she boarded a train for Switzerland but the German guards would not let her past the border without a passport certifying her neutral Dutch citizenship, especially as she made the mistake of telling them she was headed for France, Germany’s enemy in the war. She was put off the train without her extensive luggage. She had to return to Berlin, now deprived of both money and a change of clothes. She called Griebel, but he could not risk being seen to help a foreigner. Suspicion of foreigners and open hostility toward them was growing daily as patriotic fervor reached a jingoistic frenzy.

  Friendless and short on cash, Mata Hari fell back on her greatest talent. Before very many days had passed, she had charmed a Dutch businessman who listened to her tale of unfair treatment and worry. She would not have anything left after settling her hotel bill, she told him. He agreed to pay her fare back to Amsterdam. He left Berlin immediately but bought a ticket for her to use a few days later, after she had traveled to Frankfurt to obtain a Dutch passport.

  In handwritten ink, the passport gave her age correctly as thirty-eight, but at some point someone (probably Mata Hari herself ) wrote over the 8 with a 0, to produce a more flattering age of thirty. The change was made without changing the date of birth, so that anyone could calculate her true age. She was described as five feet eleven inches tall, with a big nose, brown eyes, and blond hair. A blond Mata Hari is difficult to imagine. If she was a bleached blonde, it was purely temporary.

  A remarkable anecdote suggests that what was needed at the time of her leaving Berlin was the attention of a skilled hairdresser to help conceal her age. Mata Hari eventually took the train from Berlin to Amsterdam. After descending from the train in Amsterdam, she unexpectedly saw a familiar face. It was Maurice van Staen, her former hairdresser from Paris, in uniform. Van Staen had made a good career in Paris out of his secret technique for putting henna in women’s hair.

  Astonished and delighted to see him, she called out across the crowded platform, “Maurice! You must immediately do my hair!” She asked him to come to the Hotel Victoria and added, “And I did not even know that you were an officer in your own land!”

  Van Staen must have cringed at the attention she was drawing to him. Mere weeks before, he had enlisted in the Belgian army to fight the Germans; then, as the Germans invaded Belgium in August of 1914, he had fled across the border into Holland as a military refugee. He had been interned in a camp in Harderwijk, which he had found so distasteful that he had decided to break out. He had stolen an officer’s uniform and escaped—an act he himself described as “reckless youthfulness”—reasoning that people in a neutral country would be less likely to question an officer than they would a simple enlisted man. His plan had worked remarkably well until, to his “inexpressible stupefaction,” he was hailed by Mata Hari in Amsterdam. He assumed officials were looking for him; drawing attention to himself was the last thing he wanted to do. But Mata Hari drew attention wherever she went, whatever she did.

  He took her aside and explained his precarious situation to her, while she listened carefully. He did, of course, come to the hotel and do her hair not long afterward. When he wrote about his experiences many years later, he expressed the opinion that she had used her connections to prevent a serious search being made for him and had thus saved his life.

  After settling in at the hotel, Mata Hari again made contact with the generous businessman who had paid her train fare to Amsterdam. When she met his wife, Mata Hari reassured her that her husband’s kind gesture had not been based on a sexual relationship. Asked by the curious wife why she had not attempted to seduce him, Mata Hari replied frankly, “Because I had only one chemise left, as everything else had been taken away from me—and really, I didn’t feel clean enough.” She was promiscuous, but she had her inviolable standards nonetheless.

  Once again Mata Hari used her talents to survive. For a month or two, she entertained a Dutch banker who laughably mistook her for a Russian lady and proudly showed his exotic “foreign” mistress around Holland. By the time someone recognized Mata Hari in his company, and enlightened him as to his embarrassing mistake, Mata Hari had lived well for a month, refurbished her wardrobe at his expense, and resettled herself in Holland. She wrote to Rudolf asking to see her daughter but was of course refused.

  Two months after returning to Holland, Mata Hari had reestablished relations with a former lover, Baron Edouard Willem van der Capellan. He was more than ten years her senior, wealthy, married, and a colonel in the Dutch cavalry. He was only too happy to welcome back his mistress. He visited her when he could and took care of her bills, including the salary of her maidservant, Anna.

  She rented a house in The Hague, at 16 Nieuwe Uitleg, and ordered extensive and expe
nsive renovations and redecoration. She persuaded the contractor to give her two years from the day she moved in to pay; he also agreed that she might make payments of whatever amount she chose. Soon he was tired of trying to meet Mata Hari’s exacting standards; she threw temper tantrums and once pushed an armoire down the stairs when he told her it would not fit through a doorway. He wanted to end the job and get his pay immediately. After a visit or letter from Mata Hari’s attorney, the job was finished; she moved in on August 11, 1915. Despite van der Capellan’s support, she had not paid her hotel bill and was hounded for some time by her creditors.

  She was soon bored with life in a quiet house on a quiet canal in The Hague while she waited for van der Capellan to visit. Life in Holland during the war was restricted and a little grim, even though the country remained neutral. The very atmosphere filled Mata Hari with ennui. Since the war, life everywhere seemed to be dull and gray and penny-pinching; there was no life, no glamour anymore.

  Then in the autumn of 1915 she was visited by Karl Kroemer, the honorary German consul in Amsterdam, whose name has been misspelled as Craemer, Cremer, Kramer, and Krämer in various contemporary accounts.

  Kroemer recruited espionage agents for Germany, and he hoped to convince her to join his organization. He offered her 20,000 francs—a very substantial sum roughly equivalent to $61,000 today—but she demurred, saying it was not enough. He indicated that this was a test or trial period and if she was successful, she could earn more for later assignments. Kroemer asked her to write him in invisible ink and gave her three bottles. She disliked the very idea of invisible ink—it seemed complicated and incriminating and undignified—and she did not want to sign her name. He instructed her to sign her communications with a code name, H21.

  The H of H21 indicated her communications were to be handled by Captain Hoffman; all his agents had the prefix H. The numbers following the H were assigned sequentially; later analysis has shown she must have been recruited in the autumn of 1915, not in May 1916 as she later remembered.

  What Mata Hari remembered perfectly accurately was that, at the time Kroemer approached her, she was living in The Hague and bored because van der Capellan was rarely with her. She was suffering from wartime shortages of food and coal, not to mention luxury and amusement. Her furs and monies would have been very welcome, but instead they had been unfairly seized by the Germans after the war broke out. She felt distinctly resentful against the Germans. As she later said, “My 20,000 francs in my pocket, I bowed Kroemer out the door, but I assure you that I never wrote him anything during my time in Paris. I add that once I was on the canal between Amsterdam and the sea, I threw away my three bottles [of invisible ink] after emptying them.”

  As she never had the slightest intention of spying for Germany, she felt no guilt or obligation to do anything for the twenty thousand francs she had accepted. She always had taken money from men because she needed money and they had it; she always felt she deserved it. The matter was over and done with as soon as she got the money, at least as far as she was concerned.

  In early December, she had an engagement with a troupe known as the French Opéra at the Royal Theater. To music by François Couperin, she portrayed through her dance a series of eight moods, including virginity, passion, chastity, and fidelity. The Hague newspapers were complimentary, although she did not drop her veils as she had previously, and the show moved to Arnhem. Though Arnhem was very close to where they lived, neither Rudolf nor Non attended.

  Later in December she could not bear The Hague any longer and returned to Paris. Her stated intent was to collect her household belongings from Neuilly and to sell those she did not wish to keep. But she could not resist the allure of Paris and stayed longer to enjoy herself and perform. She renewed her love affair with Henri de Marguérie, then the second secretary to the French legation in The Hague. He later testified:

  A certain time after the declaration of war, I encountered her near the Opera, she was staying then at the Grand Hotel, I invited her to dinner, and during the meal she began to tell me that she was in Paris with a residence permit, that she had come to look for furniture and that she found herself indecisive about a return to Holland.

  During those days, I saw her again several times, she was always undecided, but appeared to me to long for her life in Paris. One beautiful day she was leaving for Spain and I accompanied her to the station.

  She also wrote to her agent, Astruc, from the Grand Hotel in Paris on December 24, suggesting that her new and strange dances might fit nicely into Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes performances, but he was unable to arrange anything. She was still very beautiful, though nearing forty. On March 13, exactly ten years after her debut performance at the Musée Guimet, Mata Hari appeared on the cover of a Dutch magazine. She was no longer in her first youth, but she was breathtakingly beautiful. She was shown in a scandalously low-cut white dress, a large picture hat decorated with plumes, and a string of pearls. Ten years was a long run for a dancer, especially one who made her fame through novelty and nudity. It is the last photograph pasted in Mata Hari’s scrapbooks.

  When she departed from Paris with her ten crates of silver, linens, and furniture, she was headed home to the baron, traveling via Spain and Portugal. She left behind an enamored Belgian officer, the marquis de Beaufort, with whom she had begun a relationship while she was at the Grand Hotel.

  She had left behind something else, something that was to prove far more indelible than another lover, however exciting: a record of her travels was made by the British counterintelligence and espionage unit. On her way to Paris, she had stopped at the port of Folkestone, England, where officials questioned her along with the other passengers. The notation from December 4, 1915, read in part: “I beg to report that Madame Marguerite Gertrude Zelle, age 39, a Dancer and a Dutch subject, arrived here by the Dieppe boat-train at 11.15 am yesterday.”

  The last photograph in Mata Hari’s scrapbook was this stunning portrait, published March 13, 1915, ten years after her debut at the Musée Guimet. (The Mata Hari Foundation/Fries Museum)

  She told the police that she was en route to Paris in order to sell her effects from the house at Neuilly and to sign some contracts for performances. When questioned further by Captain Dillon of MO5 (the organization that was the precursor of MI5), she told a slightly different story, emphasizing that she was moving from Neuilly to The Hague, where her lover Baron van der Capellan, the colonel commandant, Second Regiment of Hussars, Eindhoven, of the Dutch Army, could visit her more conveniently. The notes on her questioning continued: “Although she was thoroughly searched and nothing incriminating found, she is regarded by Police and Military to be not above suspicion, and her subsequent movements should be watched.”

  The report was signed by Frank Bickers, PC sergeant, and P. Quinn, superintendent. A copy of the report was duly sent to Paris, the French being British allies. A notice was also sent to all the British ports informing them that Madame Zelle MacLeod seemed “most unsatisfactory and should be refused permission to return to the U.K.”

  “Not above suspicion,” “most unsatisfactory,” and “should be refused permission to return to the U.K.” proved to be damning phrases. On what was this harsh assessment based? She was searched and questioned without anything incriminating being found. One possibility is the minor discrepancies in her account of why she was going to Paris, though surely such inconsistencies are typical of those questioned by the police. Another entry in her British security file—information obtained from Folkestone—hints at another problem:

  Summary and description “Height 5 feet 5 ins [sic]—build, medium stout; hair, black; face, oval; complexion, olive; forehead low; eyes, grey brown; eyebrows, dark; nose, straight; mouth small; teeth good; chin, pointed; hands, well kept; feet small; age, 39. Speaks French, English, Italian, Dutch, and probably German. Handsome, bold type of woman. Well and fashionably dressed in brown costume with raccoon fur trimming and hat to match.”

  The
real problem was probably not what Mata Hari said but who she was. She was a woman, traveling alone, obviously wealthy and obviously an excellent linguist—too educated and too foreign to make a British officer comfortable. Worse yet, she was a “hand-some, bold type of woman,” one who admitted to having a lover. Women like that were immoral and not to be trusted. This was wartime and women were expected to be dutiful, brave, home-loving, and patriotic. Nothing about Mata Hari ever convinced anyone she had those traits. She was, indeed, to be suspected.

  11

  In Time of War

  IN EARLY 1916, Mata Hari returned to The Hague via Portugal and Spain, where she left satisfied lovers behind her as usual, including the Spanish senator Emilio Junoy. Unfortunately, life in The Hague was no more amusing in 1916 than it had been in 1915. A few months after getting back to the Netherlands, she was longing to return to Paris again. Traveling through Europe was made more difficult and cumbersome by the war, but it was by no means impossible.

  She was completely unaware that she was being investigated by the British counterespionage unit, which in a few months’ time would be renamed MI5. On February 3 a report was filed by Richard Tinsley, a British intelligence agent working in Holland, that contained information from an unnamed source about Mata Hari. The most crucial notation was that, although she was said to be in financial difficulty, there were rumors that she had received “15,000 francs [about $45,700 in today’s currency] from the German Embassy via a certain Hans Sagace (?).”