Evening star. [volume], August 25, 1929, Page 14, Image 96

About Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972

Image provided by: Library of Congress, Washington, DC

                
14
Poet Swinburne ’s Fumed American Sweetheart
Here Is the Romantic Biography of the
Forgotten Circus Rider Who, After Her
Fourth Husband Had Shot Himself \
Inspired England's Most Sensuous Genius ,
Became the Friend of Mark Twain ,
Charles Dickens , Walt Whitman,
Alexandre Dumas and Many Other
Celebrities.
BY FLLTON OVRSLER.
ONE afternoon I sat with a friend on
the chilly terrasse of a case in the
Rue Royale, in Paris.
I did not know it, but my new
novel, 'The World’s Delight,” was
about to begin.
My friend is a poet and after devouring a
brioche he began to recite verses. With a fine
young eloquence, he was quoting some of the
famous “Delores’’ stanzas of Algernon Charles
Swinburne, until he reached the lines—
•• The beautiful passionate body
That never has ached with a heart.”
Suddenly I stopped him with a question.
“Wasn’t there really a girl named Dolores
in the life of Swinburne?” I inquired. “She
was not just a creature of his imagination?”
“I know very little of her, except that she
was an American girl," he answered, as he
beckoned the waiter.
“Swinburne had an American sweetheart!"
X exclaimed.
“Come with me." my friend said msgnifleent
ly, rising while I paid the bill.
"Where are we going?” I inquired, when we
had reached tne Place de la Concorde.
“To see a picture of this American Dolores,”
he answered absently.
Crossing the bridge, we soon arrived at a
second-hand shap in the Rue des Sts. Peres.
At a word from my friend, the pert little old
woman who owns the place dusted off a photo
graph and handed it to me.
Fascinated, I studied the portrait of a charm
ing girl with a strange, tragic, beautiful spirit
shining in her wide dark eyes.
“This then is Dolores!” I exclaimed. “How
could Swinburne say that this girl had never
ached with a heart? Perhaps he was deaf—
and could not hear it beating."
“I seem to remember that is what Charles
Dickens thought.” my friend said, with a
strange glance at me. “And old Alexandre
Dumas. And Satan knows who else. You
should inform yourself about her, before you
say she had a heart.”
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r J'HAT was all my friend knew about Dolores.
except that her name was Adah Isaacs
Menken. But he had told me enough to start
me on a most fascinating adventure in the
past of a great and misunderstood beauty. The
mire I learned of her. the more she enrap
tured me; her spirit charmed my imagination
from the misty beyond; what a woman, to sway
the hearts of men, even from the tomb in Mont
parnasse! Months passed, while I sought
among old letters, old books and sat at the feet
of old men and women who still remembered
her.
That is how I wrote “The Wot Id’s Delight.”
which is, in novel form, the story of Adah
Menken, the strange career of that Dolores of
whom Swinburne sang so wildly well.
And what a strange life it was—so full of
love and thrills, danger and wild, piercing
beauty. From her earliest days, on a little
farm in Louisiana. Dolores Adios McCord seem
ed marked for a strange destiny. Fancy a well
developed and startingly pretty child of 12 who
translated whole fragments of the Iliad from
Greek into French!
Her mother was a Creole from Bordeaux and
her father a Scotch-Irish draper—what a com
bination of passion and reserve! At 13, Dolores
was placed by her mother in the ballet corps
of the old French Opera House in New Orleans,
where she danced in “Robert le Diable” and
other famous old pieces, while a young critic sat
out front and admired her—the young critic's
name was Walt Whitman, then all unknown to
fame, and one day he was to be her friend.
But that was years later. As a dancer,
Dolores appeared in Havana, where they called
her "the Plaza's little queen.” and afterward
in Mexico and all over the Southwest, until
she grew tired of dancing and yearned for an
even more vigorous and exciting life. So she
learned bare-back riding and joined the
Frinconi circus.
Between performances, she wrote poetry, for
that was the grand passion of her life, to be
come a poet and a tragi? actress; some day
she would abandon her vagabond circus life
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Poet Swinburne and 4merican Actress Adah Isaacs Menken.
and make a great place for herself in the
world.
Then, with that bewildering and tragic caprice
which, all her life, seemed to sway her acts,
Dolores flung herself headlong. into a foolish,
almost incredible marriage. I have often won
dered why pretty and sensible girls accept the
men some of them marry.
Here was this lovely girl, a linguist, a poet,
with talent that promised much, who suddenly
married a poor little music teacher—an ex
cellent man but utterly incapable of under
standing this bird of paradise he had snared.
Apparently she folded away all her am
bitions. never expecting to look at them again,
to be the wife of Alexander Isaac Menken. For
him she changed her name to Adah Isaacs
Menken, adopted the Jewish faith, in which she
thereafter remained an enthusiastic devotee,
and settled down to keep house, scrub floors and
raise babies.
But the babies did not come and the drudgery
drove her mad! In his divorce popers. Menken
even accused Adah of smoking cigarettes in his
house —a fantastically disgraceful charge against
an American girl in 1858.
From Menken and all his stem poverty. Adah
fled to her mother's home in New Orleans.
Now she resolved to become an actress. She
had never spoken on the stage, but her beauty
and sincerity so impressed the manager of the
Varieties Theater that he gave her a chance
In a leading part, and her success was in
stantaneous.
ALL New Orleans went to see this young.
vital and beautiful girl in such famous
plays as ‘Fazio,’’ “Rob Roy” and “Robert
Macaire.” After that she toured in support of
such great stars as James Murdoch and Edwin
Booth.
But soon her wild and rebellious spirit tore
her away into a different path. During a per
formance of "Macbeth” in Nashville, she quar
reled with Murdoch and ran away—to write
poetry, practice with pistols and foils and study
sculpture with the artist W. D. Jones, in Co
lumbus, Ohio.
She was supporting herself by occasional ap
pearances and evenings of dramattc readings,
and exhibitions of riding. In Dayton. Ohio, the
militia made her an officer of the horse guards
for her surpassing drillwork and all-around
horsemanship.
Suddenly tired of the Middle West, she en
tered New York, full of hope and penniless.
No theatrical manager seemed willing to en
gage her, and the only friend she found was
J. C. Heenan, known as "The Benicia Boy.”
the heavy-weight champion of America. Again
—sheer madness! Adah Menken, recently di
vorced, with beautiful poetic dreams in her
head, took the kiss of this Goliath, this man
inauler, and one dark night they were married.
It was just at the time when Heenan was
preparing to fight the English champion Sayers
for the prize-ring title of the world, and not
long after the marriage. Heenan sailed for
London, leaving Adah alone in New York.
In the midst of an engagement at the historic
Old Bowery Theater, which burned a few
months ago. Adah made a thrilling discovery.
She who had been divorced by Menken largely
because she had brought him no children, was
now to have a child whose father was Heenan,
the prize-fighter. At once she left the stage
and gave hers’lf up to beautiful dreams ot
approaching motherhood.
No sooner was she off the stage than an
extraordinary opportunity was offered to her—
the star part in a revival of a sensational
melodrama, made from Lord Byron's poem
called "Mazcppa.”
The thrilling feature of this play is its climax
when the hero is lashed to tlte back of a wild
horse and set loos? on the open plains to die.
A dummy, of course, was tied to the animal’s
back, but the new producers had a sensational
idea. Adah had ridden a horse in the circus.
Would she permit herself really to be tied
to the wild horse, and by this startling piece
of realism stampede the country with melo
drama, and make her name and fortune?
Adah loftily refused. It was not art; It
was vulgar melodrama. She would play only
Shakespeare. Besides, she was through with
the stage.
Hat a year later, her baby was dead, her
he* it was broken and in tragic despair, she
left Heenan and begged only for the part of
"Mazcppa” In which every night she must
toy with death.
CHE appeared in fleshings, and her hair was
cut In a boyish bob, the first ever awn
in the United States. At every performance
she was lashed to the back of the horse in
the climax of the play and carried on a run
way, only 18 inches wide, back and forth,
and ever up, higher and still higher, above the
proscenium arch until dizzily lost to view in
the vaulted heights above the stage.
Soon she was the most feted woman in
New Yorlf, reigning as queen over tables where
Walt Whitman and Fitzjames O’Brien and
Orpheus C. Kerr, the humorist, and others of
that brilliant group wined and dined.
Here a new romance sprang up, when Kerr,
whose real name was R. H Newell, began
to publish Adah's poems in his weekly literary
paper, the New York Mercury. Soon Menken
became Mrs. Kerr, and promised her third
husband to leave th? stage. Vain promise!
The road beckoned, and all the United States
eagerly beheld her in ‘ Mazcppa.”
In one city her horse went wild and nearly
killed her, but she laughed and nearly killed
the horse, her little white hands cutching its
windpipe while it reared and plunged and
tried to leap into the audience.
Fortunes came and went through her care
less hands. At her first performance in San
Francisco they took in SI,G40 —two nights later
she won $25,000 at faro. When she and Kerr
finally set sail from the Golden Gate for
England she had managed to save $30,000 -in
those days a fortune on which she could have
lived comfortably thereafter.
Their ship stopped at Panama and there
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