Unearthing the truth about a compulsive liar, a notorious Spanish dancer who couldn’t dance and wasn’t Spanish, who fibbed, fought and fornicated her way around the world, must present a considerable challenge to a biographer. Happily, it is one to which James Morton rises with verve and style. In doing so, he acknowledges his debt to Bruce Seymour, a Californian lawyer who used his winnings from the American game show Jeopardy! to finance his own research into the subject. Lola Montez would have approved of the game show, if not of the desire to unmask her.

Montez was baptised Elizabeth Rosanna Gilbert in Liverpool in 1823, having been born two years earlier in County Sligo. Her mother was the illegitimate daughter of a former High Sheriff of Cork, “a pillar of Ireland’s ruling Protestant class”, while her father was Edward Gilbert, of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers.

Before Elizabeth was three years old, her father had died of cholera in India. Less than a year later, her mother remarried and in 1826 the child was sent to live with her stepfather’s relatives in Scotland. After five years she was sent to school in Durham. She seems to have been treated rather like a parcel, a year later being moved on yet again, this time to live near Reading with the family of Sir Jasper Nicolls, who was not particularly pleased at the imposition.

At the age of 15, Elizabeth ran off with a man twice her age, Lieutenant Thomas James from the East India Company, thereby forestalling parental plans to marry her off. The elopement was also something of a poke in the eye to her mother, as the latter had herself conceived a tendresse for Lieutenant James. The young couple celebrated their wedding in Ireland in July 1837. Marital bliss was short-lived.

When the marriage collapsed, both parties claimed the other was at fault. Whatever had gone wrong, Elizabeth left her husband in October 1840, and immediately embarked on an affair with a Captain Lennox. He was soon reclaimed by his family, while his disappointed lover, ever resourceful, worked her way through a series of protectors before looking round for a new career to supplement her earnings as a courtesan.

It was at this stage that Elizabeth James, née Gibson, metamorphosed into Lola Montez, Spanish dancer. It was largely pragmatism that determined this course. Our heroine had neither the voice nor the acting ability to succeed in the conventional theatre; neither were her dancing abilities of the highest order. But so-called “Spanish” dancing required flamboyance, exoticism and physical beauty rather than technique, and here she could excel. Four months of lessons and a short trip to Spain sufficed to complete the transformation into Donna Maria Dolores de Porris y Montez — Lola for short.

Her list of conquests over the next decade makes for staggering reading. As with other grandes horizontales, one wonders how on earth she found the time. They included Franz Liszt, Marius Petipa, King Ludwig I of Bavaria and Prince Heinrich Reuss- Lobenstein-Ebersdorff the Seventy-Second (sic), to name just four. She turned up at the latter’s palace in the summer of 1843, but was thrown out a few weeks later after she had frightened the local children and threatened to stab her host. Most of the men who encountered her came off the worse for wear. She terrified Liszt; it was rumoured that he paid a hotel manager to lock her up for a day so that he could make his escape.

It was her liaison with Ludwig I of Bavaria that gave Lola the most notoriety in her lifetime. She arrived in Munich in October 1846 and proceeded to acquire an extraordinary ascendancy over the elderly king. For a while, she seemed virtually to be ruling his kingdom, as he could do nothing without her. But less than two years later, in the year of revolutions, it all came toppling down — Lola was expelled and Ludwig lost his throne. This was largely, opines Morton, Lola’s fault. But she was not repentant, self-examination not being her strong suit. And even at the height of her influence and Ludwig’s infatuation, she had taken other lovers, all the while protesting her fidelity to each and every one.

On her exit from Bavaria, she was rescued by Robert Peel, the son of the former prime minister. There are unproven rumours that he was her spymaster; so, it was said, was Lord Palmerston . . . or perhaps the tsar . . . or maybe the freemasons . . .

Having exhausted her opportunities in Europe, Lola took off for America, where she kept pet bears and titillated audiences of Californian miners with such numbers as her famous “spider dance” (an invention of her own in which she imitated a fly-eating spider and then proceeded to hunt for creepy-crawlies concealed beneath her petticoats).

She went on a tour of Australia, too. When her health began to fail — partly as a result of smoking upwards of 20 cigars a day, as well as suffering from consumption and possibly syphilis, not to mention sheer fatigue — she turned to lecturing, on such subjects as Heroines of History and Strong-minded Women (among whom she naturally included herself). She died in New York on January 17, 1861, having suffered a stroke several months earlier.

Throughout his book, Morton approaches his subject with a gentle irony; he is clearly fond of the redoubtable lady, but is under no illusions. Lola was a phenomenon — in many ways a disgraceful one and a danger to know — but one can’t help being glad she existed. She is buried in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery, and Morton, alluding to the title she acquired in Bavaria, relates that “It was not until Bruce Seymour used some of the royalties from his biography of her that a new headstone was inaugurated on April 25, 1998. One side maintains the inscription ‘Mrs Eliza Gilbert’, the other reads ‘Lola Montez, Countess of Landsfelt’.” She now has another fitting monument in this full, judicious and endlessly entertaining biography.

Available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £18 (including p&p) on 0870 165 8585 and timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

Read on... websites:
www.zpub.com/sf/history/lola.html
Biography of Lola Montez plus a selection of portraits, links and further reading material

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