Beauties in the Field

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 230, 17 December 1927, Page 10

Beauties in the Field

FAMOUS SPORTSWOMEN Empress of Tragic Memory A REMARKABLE story of famous beauties who have excelled in the field of sport is told in the “Weekly Dispatch” by Henry S. Doig. He writes of the hard-riding Austrian Empress of tragic memory and her happy hunting days in Ireland, of a famous jockey’s duchess friend and patron, and of how lovely Adah Isaacs Menken, adventuress, actress and poet, won fame by her horsemanship.

The element of surprise, so far as women are concerned in matters of daring and of sportsmanship, appears almost to have disappeared. Astonishing records are set up day after day, and the ovy is “still to come.”

Sometimes it is a flight across the Atlantic, with a plucky and beautiful airwoman rescued in mid-ocean, thus putting paid, as the bookmakers say, to the account of the famous Mr. H. G. Hawker. Sometimes it is a woman Jockey winning a dashing race at Newmarket, or again—and perhaps too much of this—a young woman who calmly swims the Channel and makes the reputation of the great Captain Webb pal© its ineffectual fires. Favoured by Nature There are churlish fellow’s indeed who tell us assiduously and acldulously that women deserve no .special credit for swimming the Channel, that Nature has loaded the dice in their favour and given them an extra layer of adipose tissue under the skin, that not only makes them more buoyant in the water, but less disposed to suffer from the cold that is the enemy of the long-distance swimmer “in these so-called latitudes.” These are the camel school of critics and deprecators and theirs is certainly not a very handsome attitude. But the truth is that the sportswoman is not an exclusive product of this age: sh© has been with us at all times, and in all ranks of society, from Hero, who sought to swim the Hellespont with Leander, to the Empress of Austria, who was in her day one of the most noted riders in the Irish hunting-fields and witched the world with feats of noble horsemanship. Hers truly was a tragic career, ar-d surely the standing proof that the Victorian age was not as dull, trite and rommonplace as many people would have us believe. Implacable Fates Her son Rudolph was found dead in tragic circumstances that to-day are still a mystery; her cousin, Leopold of Bavaria, committed suicide, and her sister, the Duchess of Alencon, was killed at' a fire in a charity bazaar in Paris. This was not enough to placate the insatiable Fates, and she herself was mortally stabbed by an Italian anarchist at Geneva, before that place had become the Mecca of the builders of international peace. The Empress of Austria learned her horsemanship—should on© call it horsewomanship?—in the Imperial riding school of the Hofburg, and she learned to career around the Prater like a rough-riding corporal. As a matter of fact, when she came to England Queen Victoria was rather perturbed at the idea of her imperial visitor careering across country after hounds. It was so heavy a responsibility. Possibly Queen Victoria did not realise how great a relief it was to this sportswoman Empress to get away from Austria, with its anxieties and tragic potentialities, and to live the free life of a hunting woman in Ireland.

Coming as she did from a rather simple home, she found some difficulty in accommodating herself to the stricter formalities of the Hapsburg Court. She and her father, in her girlhood, used sometimes to go about the Bavarian Highlands incognito and mix freely with farmers and peasants. Treasured Tips

They both played the zither rather well and on more than one occasion played dance music at rural fairs. Sometimes, where they were quite unknown. they were given a few silver coins to buy themselves a drink, a

moment of sheer joy to the relaxed royalties. They did not spend the money on drink; they treasured it as a precious possession. Years afterwards this royal sportswoman, saddened by her tragic sorrow’s, showed some of these coins to an intimate friend. “It is the only money,” she said proudly, "that I ever earned” —a notable contribution to the strange annals of the great.

Is a sporting Empress quite out of place in the formal dignities of a Royal Court? Elizabeth, though she became ultimately extremely popular, was at one time what it was the fashion to call “rather a handful.” On one of the first days at the Hofburg she horrified the staid state officials. A banquet had been prepared, which was regarded by the Imperial chef as a masterpiece of luxury, originality, and costliness. Elizabeth would have none of it. She ordered some Frankfurt sausages and a glass of lager beer. “Mr. Manton” It would be quite wrong, however, to suppose that because she had simple tastes she had also a commonplace mind. In addition to speaking half-a-dozen languages, and being a lirst-rate musician, she was deeply interested in art and literature. At one time she amused herself by translating Shakespeare from English into modern Greek. It would be interesting to know how many of our young women athletes, who win horse-races or swim the Channel, could tackle a task like this, or in any way corresponding to it? No doubt had women, a generation ago, been given the opportunity to ride in races there would have been no lack of volunteers. One would un? doubtedly have been the Duchess of Montrose, who raced under the name of Mr. Manton, and was on terms of real affection with Fred Archer, the most famous and ill-fated jockey of his day. Another might have been Mrs. Lillie Langtry, the most beautiful woman of her age, who was also a lover of the Turf. It is a curious thing that the woman on horseback has always mad an appeal to the artist or to the intellectual. One could scarcely find any more striking example of this than the career of Adah Isaacs Menken, the famous circus-rider and beauty. Though Adah was an American equestrienne, her descent traces her back to English or rather Irish ancestry. Her father, one James McCord, left his native Ulster, the home of the linen industry, to follow the prosaic career -of a linen draper’s assistant in one of those tortuous old London streets which were swept away a generation ago to make room for the noble thoroughfare of Kingsway. He found life not quite exciting enough for his excitable and mercurial temperament. He was a better horseman than John Gilpin, but adventure did not so easily come his way. So he packed liis trunk and emigrated to America, where he married a beautiful Creole lady. His daughter Adah inherited her mother’s beauty and her father’s spirit of adventure. Like the Empress of Austria, sue divided her love between horses and literature, and at the age of twelve she translated portions of Homer’s Iliad into French. Could any of our Channel swimmers have done that before they reached their teens? I think it unlikely, though I might find it hard to rebut the suggestion that it was probably not a very good translation. Adventures are to the adventurous, and Adah soon made that discovery. When quite a girl wandering in the forests

near her home she was captured by a raiding band of Indians on the warpath. They took her by forced marches over the mountains far beyond the reach of rescue parties. Eagle-Eye, the chief of the band, resolved to claim the palc-face girl in marriage. He was already engaged to a dusky maiden of his own race, one Laulerack. This wild creature, naturally enough, conceived an almost insane jealousy of Adah.

But Adah Menken had inherited from her Irish father what the Irish people call “a way with her.” Her situation was desperate. She resolved to make friends with her bitter and envious rival Laulerack. They could speak only a few words of each other’s language. Yet Adah, in almost dumb show, succeeded in explaining to the Indian maid that she hated Eagle-Eye. who was away foraging on a hunting expedition, for the food that was to make the bridal feast. By the camp-fire, surrounded by suspicious and vigilant Indian squaws told off to watch over her, Adah succeeded in getting Laulerack to realise that her escape would be the best thing for both of them. At last the Indian girl understood. She had only to cut the bonds of her hated rival, to set her free, and Eagle-Eye would be hers alone. Made Bold by Love But this was not enough for Adah. She succeeded in getting Laulerack to understand that if she escaped by herself, a mere pale-face in the woods, she would easily be tracked by the Indian braves, and possibly both would pay, at the burning stake, the penalty of their defiance. The love-sick Indian maiden understood, and with the courage of her race faced the dangerous task. Under cover of night they fled together, twisting and turning through tlie woods, subsisting on roots and berries, torn, tired and bleeding. Finally they were rescued by a party of white men. though not before Laulerack had been shot in error by the rescuing party. Adah came back to civilisation after this stirring adventure and resumed her study of literature. Her beauty had already brought many suitors to her feet. She amused herself by writing poems about them. Here is her own account of what she did with one of the rejected addresses: —* “Milton wrote a letter to his ladylove Filled with warm and keen desire. He sought to raise a flame —and so he did. - The lady cast hi* nonsense in the fire.” When she was twenty, arid the most -dashing horsewoman in her county, she fell in love with a Jewish teacher of music. The bond between them was apparently music rather than love. The marriage did not last long. Adah divorced him on the ground that, although she was 22, he objected to and rebuked her for smoking cigarettes in the drawing-room. Perhaps it was unreasonable to expect a young woman who liad escaped from a murderous Indian chief in his war paint to regard cigarette smoking as a dangerous habit. Adah was perhaps a pioneer of the modern girl, though this was at the very beginning of the Early Victorian era. It was a bad start matrimonially, but worse remained behind. Altogether she was married four times, but in no case with conspicuous success from the matrimonial point of view. One of her husbands was the famous pugilist Keenan, known to fame as the Benicia Boy. He was not by any means of the modern Eugene Tunney type, devoted in the intervals of handing out the sleep-wallop in a sixteenfoot ring to the study of Shakespeare. He was what was called in the local dialect a roughneck. Adah divorced him too, and married in a rather surprising declension in the social scale a humorist, who was also a journalist. Apparently he did not object very strenuously to her smoking in the drawing-room, even though she smoked most of his cigarettes in the search for poetic inspiration. Unhappily he did not think as highly of her poems as she did herself. lie may have been biased by his jaundiced task of writing reviews for the papers. In any case, Adah pleaded incompatability of temperament, and he joined the Jewish music teacher and the Benicia Boy in the ranks of the discarded. He had his revenge in an epigram.

“Good wives,” he wrote, “are rarely clever. Clever wives are rarely good.” Adah’s revenge was to pretend that

she wrote the epigram herself and that he stole it. She quoted Swift on the habits of writers: “Libertas et natale solum. Fine words—l wonder where he stole j ’em.’’ “M azeppa” She came to England and she played Lady Macbeth to the Macbeth of James I Murdoch. She forgot her lines. Did that trouble her? Not a bit. A young woman who had escaped from Red In- , dians on the warpath was not to be i daunted by any contretempts of that kind. She leaned on the bosom of Mac- j beth, whispered that she had forgotten her lines, and the obliging Macbeth ; whispered them into her ear, and. as the ! modern cant phrase goes, she “got away with it.” But her real triumph was her heroic horsemanship. She played Mazeppa, and in that romantic character had to be strapped—without much superfluity of attire —on the bare back of a fiery, snorting stallion, which, without "a saddle or bridle, had to be sent out into the wildnerness. Other actresses had essayed the part. They usually, played the first scene. Then the wild steed was seen trampling its way from platform to platform, higher and higher, but with only a dummy on its back. Several actresses were killed in the part. But Adah insisted on going right through with it, and became an heroic figure in most of the capitals of Europe. She went to Paris, and the French capital fell, as it were, at her feet. Dumas the elder, the most famous Frenchman of his age, became desperately enamoured of her. She inflamed him as in her fascinating youth she had inflamed Eagle Eye. Wooed by Swinburne That was but one of her triumphs over men of letters. She came to England, and almost immediately had at her feet England’s foremost poet, Algernon Charles Swinburne. They fell desperately in love and were photographed together and went everywhere togther. Swinburne wrote poems to her, sometimes in English and sometimes in French. One of the latter poems was translated into English by George Moore, happily still with us. Charles Dickens also worshipped at the shrine of the ex-circus girl and admired her poems. But was not hers an extraordinary career—the daughter of an Irish shopassistant, the runaway from an Indian camp, the wife of a pugilist, the circusrider and poetess, who fascinated Dumas and Dickens and Swinburne? Is romance local? Is the monopoly of any one generation? It would be a bold man that would lightly answer these questions.