Otero—The “Talk of Europe” Writes Memoirs

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 80, 25 June 1927, Page 24

Otero —The “Talk of Europe” Writes Memoirs

■HE ex-Kaiser, who was “quite affable,” very aptly described La Belle Otero, the famous Spanish dancer and beauty whose jewels and love affairs were the talk of Europe, when he spoke of her as “the little savage.” She does not quarrel with the description, in her outspoken memoirs (“My Story”—Philpot), which have just been published and which read like a delirious blend of Ouida and Phillips Oppenheim.

Grand dukes loaded her with diamonds. She wore jewels which had belonged to queens. When jewels and flattery failed to win her she was calmly abducted. For love of her, men shot themselves' or were ruined by the presents they lavished upon her. She wore her jewels, like her lovers, lightly, and they came in equal profusion.

The Baron was very kind the other day (she writes in her diary). Was it against the grain, I wonder? I had found thirty-six pearls in a little casket at his place. It amused me to thread them and put them on, and then to show the Baron how admirably they suited me. He fully agreed on that point. But when he saw that I showed no alacrity in taking oft my new parure, he told me plainly that he would lend them to me, but I must give them back to him. Don’t count on that, my poor Baron! . . . Goodness knows where they will finish up. Comment made later: As a matter of fact, being at Monte Carlo some years later, and having lost heavily, I sold them to a jeweller at Nice, who gave me a hundred thousand francs for them. The hundred thousand francs at once went the way of all the others, across the green cloth.

Caroline Otero was the child of a beautiful Andalusian gipsy and a Spanish officer. She ran away from school and began her career by dancing her gipsy steps in the little cafe of a small town for two pesetas a night. At an age when most girls are in the schoolroom Otero had a European reputation, and had blazed a trail of adventures, for none of which she shows a moments’ regret. As well attempt to fit a butterfly into a cage as to judge La Belle Otero by ordinary standards.

"Better the life of passion, with all its sufferings, than to any tepid backwater.” She was certainly loyal to her creed. She married. Guglielmo was “a rather dilapidated Italian count” and a famous baritone. It was love at first sight-:

I loved to see him on the stage in one of his becoming costumes; his warm, deep voice had an extraordinary sweetness for me, and I passed my evenings in a state of ecstasy.

If only the parts, as in olden days, could have been filled entirely by male actors, I should have been so happy! As it was, each time he had to take a woman into his embrace, I nearly died of jealousy. Causes for jealousy were to increase, and before long Otero left her handsome singer, to plunge headlong into more adventures. One winters’ night in Russia she was abducted from the theatre at which

she was playing. She found herself after a long drive in a closed carriage in the home of a Grand Duke, who, finding her deaf to his entreaties, locked her in a room: I thought of dear Prince Peter, waiting for me, with his gentle ways and tender words. . . . The room in which I was locked up was on the first floor. With unheard-of efforts and: a strength doubled by terror, I managed to open the double windows. I looked round for my furs. . . . The Grand Duke had carried them away. . . . My shoulders were bare, and the air from the open windows was cold enough to cut my breath in two. It was snowing. But none of this a.ffected me. I was determined to get away at any cost. And she did. She dropped from the window, and in scanty evening dress made her way by sledge to the home of Prince Peter. But that love, too, endured but for a time. • Her adventures followed each other with bewildering rapidity. One she thus sums up: Pirievski had a revolver that never left his side. . . . Our lives passed in a sort of agitated dream. It was terrible and it was divine! Never in my life have I seen such a mixture of jealousy with love, and death with jealousy. So it went on. Now at the Folies Bergere in Paris, now in London, Madrid or New York, she made her dazzling triumphal progress, interspersed with seasons of consistent illiuck at the tables at Monte Carlo. She knew almost unexampled wealth and luxury, and she krCew, too, extremes of poverty.

In this extraordinarily vivid and entertaining book she must certainly have concealed little or nothing of her life history.

William’s Curse And the Revival of Old Controversy ■F there is one name that commands veneration through the world it is that of William ShakesIf there is a curse which most men would fear, it is one pronounced by Shakespeare. And now scholars and scientists, spurred by curiosity and the desire to know everything possible about this extraordinary man, are about to brave the curse that Shakespeare pronounced on anybody who should disturb his bones. Most people know that in the chancel of the parish church of Stratford-on-Avon there is a memorial to Shakespeare above his grave. Hundreds of thousands of persons go there every year to gaze on that memorial. Upon the gravestone itself on the floor of the church are engraved the lines: “Good frend, for Jesus sake forbeare , To digs the dust encloased here Blese be ye man tyt these 3tones, And curst be he tv moves my bones.” These lines have been called doggerel, and certainly they lack the beauty and art of many of Shakespeare’s own phrases, but the truth is they have considerable force and dignity. They were considered worthy of being set to a great musical composition by Beethoven. They have had the power, probably, for over three hundred years of preventing people from desecrating the supposed grave of Shakespeare. During that time the graves of some of England’s greatest kings and rulers have been opened from curiosity or other motives, but nobody has dared to defy the solemn curse which Shakespeare pronounced on anybody who should disturb “his bones.” The demand by literary investigators that the grave should be opened to settle the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy has now become so strong that there is little doubt it will be complied with (wrote the London correspondent of an American newspaper recently). The Baconians, whose theories were first presented by Ignatius Donnelly, of America, have presented a strong case to prove that Francis Bacon wrote the works attributed to Shakespeare. The ignorance and obscurity of Shakespeare, they say, his "disreputable life” as an actor in London, the absence of any contemporary reference to his literary labours, are facts that indicate the Stratford-on-Avon yokel could not have written them.

In favour of Baconfs authorship is his well-known greatness of intellect, his published writings, the occurrence of hundreds of identical phrases in his books and Shakespeare’s plays, the expression in the plays of a political policy known to be his, of principles of equity jurisprudence in which he was a specialist, allusions to the classics and foreign languages, which Shakespeare could not have understood, and the beginning of the plays at a time he returned from abroad and took office in England. Every possible source of information except the tomb has been delved into, but without deciding the controversy. Undoubtedly some of the highest authorities in England, like Sir Sidney Lee, have taken the ground that Shakespeare must have written his own plays, but they have started with the idea of supporting the old, traditional view. On the other hand, many scholars continue to support the Baconian theory, and within a few years two distinguished English members of Parliament have published books on the Baconian side. In the opinion of nearly all scholars there are unsolved mysteries about Shakespeare’s life. Then why not open his grave? It would then be possible to examine his skull, and if this were found to be of exceptionally fine shape and development it would go far to explain why the obscure Stratford tradesman’s son might have written the immortal plays. If the skull is commonplace and with small brain cavity, it will strengthen the Baconian theory. Then again, there may be no bones at all in the grave, and that will only add one to the many mysteries of Shakespeare’s existence. Professor C. R. Haines, a wellknown English antiquary, writes that the grave in Stratford church should be opened “to satisfy a legitimate curiosity about the shape and size of his skull, and to settle once for all the question whether his bones actually rest there.” “It was considered no desecration,” writes Professor Haines, “to open the grave of our great Plantagenet King, Endward 1., in order to gaze upon his features 500 years after his death. Why is not interest in our greatest poet’s bones equally legitimate

“I have learned nothing to change my belief that Shakespeare’s bones still lie undisturbed in the grave, but it is a fact that there have been stories in circulation for many years that the tomb has been secretly rifled and the skull removed. It would be an excellent thing to set these reports at rest.”

“If the tomb of Shakespeare is to be opened to throw light on his life,” concludes the writer, “it is only reasonable that Bacon’s tomb should be similarly treated. The benefit to science of examining the skull of a man of his intellectual eminence would certainly be very considerable.”