Enter to win a copy of the book Gilded Girls: Women Entertainers of the Old West.
Adah Menken in a scene from Mazzepa
Enter to win a copy of Gilded Girls: Women Entertainers of the Old West: It was hard to guess who was more nervous – Beauty or the Beast, as portrayed respectively by Adah Menken and the black mare, Belle Beauty. Adah Menken was jittery because she was about to make theatrical history by being the first woman to appear on stage wearing nothing but flesh colored tights. Belle Beauty, the mare, was skittish because she had fallen off the incline runway during rehearsal, with Adah strapped to her back, causing the manager to exclaim, “There goes $2,000 worth of horse!” The mare was unhurt, but the actress somebody noticed later had been severely gashed in the shoulder and it was suggested to call off the stunt. “And have them call me a coward?” she snorted. “Certainly not. Fix the straps.” Her lights and her ride rode up the painted stage mountain that night of June 7, 1861, at the climax of Byron’s play “Mazeppa”, made Adah Menken world famous, the toast of princes and poets on two continents, and climaxed a career that would be sensational even today, but was always incredible in the straight-laced early Victorian days. In her brief lifespan of thirty-three years she managed to pack fortune and poverty, talent and tawdriness. She was married four times and had romantic attachments with such a notable as Algernon Charles Swinburne, the poet. Adah Menken set an example for glamour girls of the future by cloaking her birth and her youth in mystery. She gave the year of her birth as 1835 and the place as New Orleans. Some of those who professed to know her well insisted that her parents were named McCord. Adah never agreed with them.
