Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges into History
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MOST HAREM SCARUM: Okay so maybe a harem isn’t adultery per se. But rather than exclude some fine competitors, let’s hold a side event. Abdul Aziz (1830–1876) stands out for speed and number. He started off his rule as sultan of the Ottoman Empire by immediately ordering an eight-foot bed and increasing his harem to 900. (He also had 5,000 house servants, including one delegated to watch his fingernails and clip them as soon as they got too long.) Mutesa I (1837–1884) was a diplomatic champion of polygamy. When finger-wagging Christian missionaries told the ruler of Buganda (now a part of Uganda) he would have to abandon his 7,000 wives, he told them, “Give me Queen Victoria’s daughter for my wife, and I will put away all my wives.”
In Switzerland, women did not get the right to vote until 1971.
DON’T HOLD THE MAYO!
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A couple of egg yolks, some olive oil, lemon juice, and voila! A gloppy goo that’s somehow managed to nudge its way into our food supply.
Americans love their ketchup, but would they if they knew that it was originally made from fish brine? Enjoy that on your fries. These days in America, ketchup refers exclusively to the tomato variety (thus the lame “Isn’t ‘tomato ketchup’ redundant?” crack from your unwashed neighbors), but in the rest of the world, you’ll find ketchups made from mushrooms, oysters, and unripened walnuts. Ugh! Ketchup is surely vile, plebeian stuff beside the gentle glow of the estimably refined (emulsified even!) sauce known as mayonnaise.
BORN TO THE NOBILITY
There was a moment, not entirely shrouded in the mists of time, when mayonnaise was a celebrated—even noble—sauce, and not just some glop designed to ease sandwiches down people’s gullets. The time was 1756. The place: Mahon, a city on the Spanish island of Minorca. The occasion: the capture of the city by the forces of Louis-François-Armad de Vignerot du Plessis, duc de Richelieu and the expulsion of the hated English from that place (what were the English doing on a Spanish island? Hey, it’s Europe). After a hard day fighting the English, Louis decided it was time to celebrate and ordered his chef to whip up a feast.
SAUCE CÉLÈBRE
The chef decided to make a cream sauce for the meats he was making, but then discovered, to his horror, that there was no cream to be found. Sacre bleu! Showing the improvisatory spirit that can only be brought on by sheer panic, the chef grabbed some eggs, some olive oil, and a whisk, and began to pray. The result: Mayonnaise, named for the captured city. Let your palate decide whether God truly answered that prayer. The French love the sauce so much that they’ve invented over 50 variations on it—from mayonnaise verte (with puréed green herbs) to sauce rémoulade (with anchovies, pickles, and caper).
Vive la mayonnaise!
In 1739, Britain and Spain fought the War of Jenkins’ Ear.
THESE BOOTS AREN’T MADE FOR WALKING
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When marching through the faux pas of footwear history—watch where you step.
SOMETHING FISHY
People in the far North made imaginative use of whatever materials were available to them. It seemed logical that fish skins would make good foul-weather boots. They worked fine in the snow, but tended to disintegrate in the rain. These boots were ideal for famines, however, when they could supplement a scanty diet.
SLIPPERS OF DEATH
The Roman emperors were fussy about footwear. Only royalty could wear tzangas, a purple sandal decorated with gold thread and an eagle, while plain purple sandals were allowed for the nobility, and then only on special occasions. Later on the Emperor Aurelian made red the forbidden color. The Emperor Nero, however, took a shine to shoes made from silver, while those of his wife Poppaea were gold. Nero’s taste for heavy metal proved unfortunate for Poppaea, however—her husband apparently used his shiny footwear to kick her to death.
SHOES THAT MADE A POINT
Named after the Polish city of Krakow, the crackow (or “poulaine” for Polish in France) started out in the 14th century as a fashion for pointed shoes that soon grew to absurd lengths. The point extended, curled up, and eventually got so long it had to be fastened to the knee, preferably with small silver bells and a thin chain. Of course only the wealthy—i.e., those who didn’t have to do any manual labor—could wear these shoes, so every inch of the crackow became a measure of the wearer’s status. Even suits of armor sported these long floppy feet. The Pope tried to ban crackows, considering them “lewd,” and eventually, Edward III of England felt obliged to set some rules. Noblemen were allowed 24 inches, gentlemen 12 inches, and commoners a mere six inches. (The king of course could wear them as long as he liked.)
In the 1880s, the British used a travel agency to get their troops to Khartoum, Sudan.
MARY’S BROAD BAN
In the 16th century, toes went in the other direction. The trend may have been started, or at least encouraged, by Henry VIII, who had arthritic tootsies and needed the room. But these duckbill shoes eventually got as wide as ten inches across the toes. Queen Mary (or Bloody Mary as she is known to her many non-fans) took time out from burning Protestants to institute a rule that shoes could be no wider than six inches.
SHOES THAT MAKE YOU HIGH
The remaining direction for shoes was up. It started out innocently enough. Turkish women in the 16th century protected the hems of their dresses from muddy, slushy, or dirty streets by wearing chopines, a wooden slab about eight inches high. The temptation to be taller was impossible for women elsewhere to resist. Soon visitors to Venice were complaining that the city seemed to be full of “walking maypoles,” accompanied by servants to keep them from toppling over. In France and England chopines reached two feet.
BLAME IT ON THE ITALIANS
When the Italian princess Catherine de Medici (1519–1589) came to France to marry the future Henri II, she brought a more realistic version, with cork wedges under the heels. By being the first to make high-heeled shoes fashionable, Catherine not only confirmed her reputation for cruelty (ask any woman who’s stood in high heels for hours), but she necessitated the introduction of separate left and right shoes. Unlike previous shoes, a high-heeled shoe could not be made to fit either foot. (Separate shoes for left and right feet did not appear in the U.S. until 1822, but these “crooked shoes” were not widely accepted for another 40 years.)
LOUIS LIVES THE HIGH LIFE
Louis XIV was sure he had the brains and beauty to be a great king, but not the height. He compensated for his 5 feet, 3 inches with towering wigs and high heels. Louis’s dress-up shoes had five-inch heels, painted red or decorated with miniature paintings, launching a fashion that endured for more than a century, until the French Revolution made putting yourself above others a dangerous no-no.
When Hitler won the Iron Cross during World War I, a Jew pinned the medal on him.
THIS POLITICIAN WAS A SHOE-IN
Thomas Jefferson thought he was making a political statement when he wore shoelaces to a public event. He’d picked up the style when he was ambassador to France, where shoelaces were considered more “democratic” than the usual silver buckles. However, the local media missed the point and accused him of being “foppish.”
ENGLAND BUCKLES UNDER
Meanwhile, these democratic shoelaces had distinctly ill effects for the masses. In Birmingham, the buckle capital of England, 20,000 buckle makers were laid off. The Prince of Wales, usually a slave to fashion, took a brave stand, continuing to wear buckles, but he was powerless to stem the lace tide.
SOLDIERS GET THE BOOT
The Napoleonic Wars (1792–1815) started a battle in men’s footwear. Napoleon fired the first shot by popularizing the Hessian boot, which covered the knee but was cut away in the back for comfortable bending at the knee. The Duke of Wellington countered with the more straightforward Wellington, a tight boot that came to just below the knee. Meanwhile, valets all over Europe acquired a new duty, spending hours polishing their masters’ boots with special oils and wax mixtures whose secret ingredients included champagne. (Anoth
er common duty for servants at that time was wearing their masters’ shoes for the first few months until they became more comfortable.)
SHOES GET HOLY
Women’s shoes of the early 19th century were the opposite of these sturdy boots. They were flimsy cloth slippers, which cost 4–5 shillings a pair (about $10-15 U.S.) and might last the equivalent number of weeks. When the Empress Josephine returned a shoe because it had a hole in it, her shoemaker said, “I see your problem. You have walked in them.” Fortunately, in 1852 another imperial woman, Queen Victoria, bought a home in the Scottish highlands and needed suitable boots to tramp about in, setting a fashion for more substantial footwear.
The Hundred Years’ War actually lasted 116 years.
A BINDING PASSION
The Chinese passion for tiny feet may have started with a desire to prevent embarrassment for a princess with deformed feet. Or, it may have been inspired by the tiny tootsies of court dancers. Wherever the idea came from, by the 1800s it was de rigueur to have feet only a few inches long. Girls had to start binding their feet by the age of seven. A wide bandage ten feet long pressed the four smaller toes under the sole of the foot, and eventually stopped the foot from growing at all.
THESE BOOTS AREN’T MADE FOR WALKING
Which also stopped these women from walking. The tiny steps they were able to take were called the “willow walk,” and it made them trophy wives. A man who could maintain a wife that couldn’t work (or walk) must be prosperous. Tiny feet supposedly raised a woman’s class and beauty; those with unbound, healthy feet were considered mere peasants. The one thing these women could do was make elaborate and fragile silk slippers to fit their little stumps. The practice of binding wasn’t completely eradicated until the Communists shooed it from the country in the 1940s.
MOVE OVER IMELDA
Over 1,500 pairs at Imelda’s Malacanang Palace? Ha! Empress Elizabeth of Russia (1709–1762) had more than 15,000 pairs of shoes and slippers to match an equal number of dresses. Charles X of France simply donned a new pair of shoes every day of his reign. Marie Antoinette was a distant third, with only 500 pairs, but she had her own servant to look after them. Actress Polly Bergen discovered a good solution to her shoe obsession. She married the president of a shoe company, allowing her to add endlessly to her collection of 300 pairs, some of which she had had for 30 years, buying half a dozen or more pairs at a time. Catherine Parr, the last wife of Henry VIII, couldn’t compete in quantity, but she acquired quickly, buying 47 pairs of shoes as soon as she married the king. (Maybe since she was marrying the notorious wife-killer, she decided to shop till she dropped.)
FANCY FOOT WORDS
For centuries, wooden clogs provided cheap protection for the feet of workers. During the Industrial Revolution they found a new use: French and Belgian workers threw their clogs or “sabots” into the machinery that was taking away their jobs, creating disarray and a new word—” sabotage.”
Tamerlane once piled 70,000 heads in a pyramid outside a city he was attacking.
GIVING BUCCANEERS THE BOOT
Those great, wide boots worn by pirates were handy for carrying contraband, a practice that produced the modern word “bootlegging.” (The women of Greenland had a more innocent use for their big boots: they carried their babies inside them.) Fashionable young women of the 1920s wore large galoshes unbuckled, hence the term “flappers.”
COPPERS AND GUMSHOES
Policemen are still known by their footwear. The word “cop” comes from the 1700 English slang verb, cop, meaning “to get ahold of, catch, or capture.” By 1844, cop was recorded in print as being used to refer to what police do to criminals. Shortly thereafter, the “er” suffix was added, and a policeman became a copper—one who cops, catches, or arrests criminals. Their gum rubber soles live on in the term “gumshoe,” although it’s now mainly applied to detectives.
DO YOU HAVE THAT IN RED?
Some of the most famous shoes in legend and literature have been revised over time. Altogether, the costume department made eight pairs of ruby slippers for Judy Garland in the 1939 Wizard of Oz. (One pair sold for $165,000 U.S. at an auction in 1988.) But in L. Frank Baum’s original book, Dorothy’s famous magical shoes were silver. MGM changed the shade because it wanted to show off a new development—Technicolor film.
BIPPITY BOPPITY BOOT
Cinderella changed her shoes over the millenium. Versions of the fairy tale can be found in many different cultures, dating back at least to a Greek version around 600 B.C. But it wasn’t until 1697 that the scullery maid acquired her breakable footwear. Translators, working on Charles Perrault’s version of the tale, apparently mistook the French word for fur, “vair,” making it “verre,” the word for glass.
“You cannot put the same shoe on every foot.”
Publius Syrus (42 B.C.)
The world powers outlawed war under the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact. It didn’t work.
HISTORY’S HANNIBAL LECTER
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He was brilliant with a knife. He mutilated his victims and may have eaten their vital organs—even if he didn’t wash them down with a nice Chianti.
His murders were bold, and even though the police called him insane, he outsmarted them at every turn. This serial killer could easily have inspired Hannibal Lecter, but he was just Jack—Jack the Ripper. And he succeeded where Hannibal failed. After more than one hundred years, his identity has never been determined. . .
POOR POLLY
On August 31, 1888, in the Whitechapel district of Victorian London, Police Constable John Neil found a dead woman, her skirt pulled up to her waist. The constable’s lantern light revealed that the woman’s throat had been slashed. In the mortuary, doctors discovered that her abdomen was mutilated, probably with a long-bladed knife. The victim was 44-year-old Mary Ann Nichols, known around the neighborhood as Polly. Polly had a sad history of alcohol problems, a failed marriage, and terrible poverty. Experts could find no clues to Polly’s brutal killing.
DOCTOR DEATH
Then another body was found on September 8, in a neighborhood backyard. Annie Chapman, known to her friends as “Dark Annie,” was discovered, like Polly, with her skirts raised. Shocked doctors guessed that the murderer was a skilled surgeon. How else could he have removed the victim’s pelvic organs so cleanly?
The legend of Jack the Ripper portrays him striking at night under the cover of London fog. But Annie’s murder probably occurred between 5:30 and 6 in morning—daylight—when a market was open for business across the street. How had the killer managed it? The police found the bodies of Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes on September 29. And Jack the Ripper became the terror of London.
The Aztecs sacrificed up to 15,000 people a year to their sun god.
BEAUTY AND THE BEAST
The fifth and final murder usually attributed to Jack (though there may have been as many as eight) took place on November 9. Pretty Mary Kelly, behind in her rent, brought a “john” to her room who turned out to be Jack. A landlord’s assistant came to collect the rent the next morning and found the murdered Mary.
JACK THE AUTHOR
The police received two letters, supposedly from Jack. In the first, he promised to send them a pair of ears. (He never did.) The second letter convinced the police that they were dealing with, not Jack, but a journalist looking to set up a story.
A third letter, sent to a Mr. Lusk, who had formed a kind of neighborhood watch, was accompanied by half a human kidney. The doctor who analyzed the kidney said it belonged to someone who had suffered from Bright’s disease. It might have belonged to Catherine Eddowes, whose kidney had been taken, and who suffered from the disease. The letter read in part, “I send you half the Kidne I took from one women prasarved it for you tother piece I fried and ate it was very nise.” No one knows if the letter was really from Jack the Ripper.
CLUES
Jack’s victims were sometime-prostitutes, plying their trade when very broke or very
drunk. Police collected eyewitness testimony about a man seen with some of the victims before they died. Most descriptions put the stranger’s height at 5’5”, and his age at anywhere from 25 to over 40. He dressed “shabby genteel” and was said to be foreign-looking.
Since the murders all took place within a mile of each other, police believed that Jack lived in the East End. They also thought he had a weekday job because he killed on the weekends.
NOT SO CRAZY?
They were searching for a lunatic, but modern pathologists think Jack had a plan. While his victims were busy lifting their skirts, Jack strangled them into unconsciousness, laid them on the ground and killed them so that the blood flowed away from him as he took “trophy organs” with amazing surgical skill. Jack was an insane serial killer, but there was a careful method to his madness.