Tales of the legendary lover and adventurer Lola Montez have inspired many artists, including film-maker Max Ophüls - but it is Lola herself, an Irish woman on the run from scandal, who should take the creative credit, writes Fiona McCann
L.O.L.A. Lola: a name that bears the kind of sexual connotations usually reserved for other four-letter words. It was bestowed by Humbert Humbert on his "nymphet" in Nabokov's classic novel, Lolita, lent itself to the catchy refrain in the eponymous Kinks song about a one-night stand, and features in the famous opening line of Barry Manilow's Copacabana: "Her name was Lola, she was a showgirl."
Nymphet, transvestite, showgirl - wherever the name Lola is mentioned, the transgressively sexual is implied. Behind this connotation is Lola Montez, exotic dancer, lover to kings, a Victorian beauty who defied the cultural mores of her time to become famous the world over for her scandalous dalliances and legendary looks. Although she only lived until the age of 42 (or 39, depending on which date of birth you accept), her life inspired writers, film-makers and biographers, her death finally depriving her of copyright on a personal history that was, until then, her own great fictional creation.
Because Spanish dancer Lola Montez was herself an invention of the Sligo-born beauty, Eliza Gilbert, a woman whose life of sexual conquest, world travel, ripped bodices and reinvention reads like Madame Bovary meets Mills and Boon. It's the story of a woman making her way in a man's world, who used the tools at her disposal - beauty, intelligence and a magnetic sexuality - to infiltrate the corridors of power.
Gilbert, as wayward as she was beautiful, was born in Grange, Co Sligo, but spent her formative years in India before being sent to Britain for her education. She eloped with a Wexford landowner, Thomas James, when she was barely 17, but the short-lived marriage ended in scandal and speculation about affairs. Rather than live out her life in shame and attempts at atonement, Gilbert fled to the continent, reinvented herself as a Spanish dancer. Lola Montez, a name thereafter synonymous with seduction and sensuality, was born.
However, the first appearance by the now legendary Lola Montez on the London stage, in 1843, only served to exacerbate the scandal around her marriage when the dancer's true identity as Mrs James was revealed and all of London was aghast. Exposed as an imposter, Lola turned tail and brought her fake accent and bad dancing to a more receptive European audience.
Although the true details of the life of Lola Montez may never be rescued from the rumours that surrounded her on her travels, most re-tellings of her remarkable story agree that it involved a number of affairs with high-profile men, among them composer Franz Liszt and writer Alexander Dumas, and that she whipped, smacked and even shot at countless others who dared stand in her way.
She lived for a while in Paris with one of her many lovers, newspaper editor Alexandre Dujarier, but upped sticks again after his death in a duel, finding her way to Munich, where her powers of seduction found a political target. With impressive alacrity, she stole the heart of the king, Ludwig I of Bavaria, by allegedly ripping off her clothes at their first meeting to prove to him that her assets did not require the artifice of corsetry to set them off.
Her control of the monarch proved too much for his subjects, however, and after mass unrest at the growing influence of Lola (who had been given the title Countess of Landsfield by her smitten paramour), Ludwig was forced to send his lover away and abdicate his crown. Differing versions of the end of this affair leave it unclear who was spurned and who was spurning, yet Lola managed to repair any heartache quick enough to marry an English cavalry officer, George Trafford Heald, within a year. When that didn't work out, she high-tailed it to America, touring successfully, marrying again, leaving husband number three and heading onwards to Australia, where she spent some years entertaining gold-diggers with her trademark tarantella dance.
On her way back to the States, she lost another lover - an actor named Noel Follin, who had been managing her Antipodean tour - overboard en route to San Francisco. She settled in America, abandoned her dancing career, and became instead a lecturer on fashion, beauty and whatever else took her fancy, including slavery and the women's rights movements in America.
Her lecturing eventually even brought her back to her homeland, with Lola returning to the Rotunda Rooms in Dublin on one particular lecture tour, shortly before a stroke followed by pneumonia took their fatal toll.
LOLA MONTEZ/ELIZA GILBERT died in New York in 1861, but interest in her didn't. Her story has ignited the imaginations of novelists, biographers, playwrights and directors ever since. Among the retellings is a 2005 RTÉ documentary, Her Name Was Lola, produced and directed by Anne Roper.
"I had always heard the name Lola Montez. It was a bit like Mata Hari," says Roper, whose interest was piqued by a woman who was in many ways ahead of her time and yet, in her reliance on men for power, hardly a feminist icon. "The reason that I was interested in her is that I always try to make documentaries about things that have parallels in contemporary society . . . We have examples in Irish politics of women who may not have gone for power themselves but have been behind a man who was in power, and I found that quite intriguing."
Roper is not the only one to draw parallels between Lola and contemporary women. American film critic Andrew Sarris recently likened the Irish-born seducer to Alaska governor Sarah Palin, describing the latter's rise to prominence as proof "that mere mediocrity is no obstacle to gaining a frightening degree of power", a theme he finds echoed in a 1955 film about Lola.
His musings on the enduring legacy of Montez were occasioned by the release of a newly restored version of the Max Ophüls film, Lola Montès, which premiered at Cannes this year, and which will be shown on Saturday at the Irish Film Institute as part of its French Film Festival.
Telling the story of Lola's life through a circus show, with Peter Ustinov as ringmaster, the film was hailed by Sarris in 1963 as "the greatest film of all time" but was unfavourably received on its initial release, despite praise from François Truffaut.
"There was a lot of controversy about the film at the time, firstly because it was so expensive to make and secondly because of the casting of Martine Carol as Lola," explains Peter Walsh of the Irish Film Institute, adding that Carol, while a recognised sex symbol at the time, was not known for her acting skills. Despite its initially bad reception, Ophüls's work has since found critical acclaim. The restored version offers a new generation of viewers the chance to decide whether Lola's story, and Ophüls's cinematic treatment of it, retains its imaginative hold almost 150 years after its subject's death.
FOR ROPER, THOUGH, the success of the feminist movement in the years since the film was first released has allowed the protagonist to reclaim her story.
"I had seen the Max Ophüls movie when I was a child," she says. "The interesting thing is that Lola doesn't speak in it. She's almost like a bird in a cage, she's very exotic, and everyone talks around her. Whereas I, from the very beginning, put words into Lola's mouth."
Given the fact that Lola left behind letters, diaries, lectures and an autobiography of sorts, her own words are accessible for those who seek them out. "In that 50 years , women have given themselves a voice," says Roper.
When it comes to Lola Montez, whose own telling of her story is as suspect as the versions offered by those she invented it for, it's a voice that, though not to be trusted, still holds the power to seduce.
The restored version of Lola Montèsis at the Irish Film Institute, Dublin, on Sat, Nov 15, at 4pm. The French Film Festival runs at the IFI, Dublin, until Nov 20. www.irishfilm.ie
